Holbein's Social Science Roundup (Feb. 28, 2022)

In many ways, social science is very Americentric. We here at the Roundup are working to do something about that. Last week’s Roundup—see below—focused on 8 papers in international contexts.

This week, we have 5 more studies from outside the United States. They cover the long-term effects of teaching gender roles in Japan, the political effects of female representation in the UK, and more!

1. Can you guess what happened when a 1990 Japanese educational reform eliminated gender-segregated and gender-stereotyped industrial arts and home economics classes in junior high schools?

   No cheating! See if you can guess the result before scrolling down!

   

   “Women [spent] more time in traditionally male tasks … and husbands [spent] more time in traditionally female tasks.”

   

2. Want to encourage people to take more steps? Link their steps to charitable donations.

   “In a field experiment with more than 40 million users on a giant social platform in Asia, we remind users to interact with a “step donation” feature that associates users’ step counts with third party donations to charities; we estimate that interacting with this feature causes users to take over 1,000 additional steps in the short run.”

3. What happens to kids who are assigned to classrooms where they are with high-achieving peers?

   

   Their test scores increase, their performance on college entrance exams increase, and they are more likely to attend elite universities as a direct result.

4. When a female MP wins office in the UK, does it make more women run?

   Not really.

   “I find that the election of a female MP has no effect on the number of female local candidates, but has an effect on women's political attitudes”

5. Trump’s election made Europeans more favorable to globalization and international migration.

See you next week! And take a second to share the Roundup with your friends!