idealawg

Blog Glob: "Gender and entrepreneurship as a career choice: do self-assessments of ability matter?"

Abstract:

The gender gap in entrepreneurship has typically been understood through women's structural disadvantages in acquiring the resources relevant for successful business ownership. This study builds on resource-based approaches to investigate how cultural beliefs about gender influence the process by which individuals initially come to identify entrepreneurship as a viable labor-market option. Drawing on status characteristics theory, this study evaluates (1) how cultural beliefs about gender and entrepreneurship influence self-assessments of entrepreneurial ability, and (2) the extent to which such assessments account for the gender gap in business start-ups. Results suggest that women are significantly less likely to perceive themselves as able to be an entrepreneur and they hold themselves to a stricter standard of competence when compared to similarly situated men. This gender difference in self-assessments accounts for a significant portion of the gender gap in entrepreneurship after controlling for relevant resources. Additional analyses reveal that significant gender differences in self-assessed ability persist among established business owners.

Click to download "Gender and entrepreneurship as a career choice: do self-assessments of ability matter?" (Social Psychology Quarterly).

Blog Glob: Meditation helps San Quentin prisoners come to terms with themselves and their crimes

Excerpt:

Riots, overcrowding, death row ... there are serious challenges to navigating life behind prison bars. But at San Quentin, there are ways to turn those challenges into opportunities for personal growth.

San Quentin offers more than 70 self-help programs - far more than any other prison in the state. And the majority are run by volunteers, according to San Quentin press officer Lt. Samuel Robinson.

...

...The Zen meditation group at San Quentin began informally. A number of guys would meet on the yard to talk about Buddhism and its teachings. Then they decided they wanted an official program. So they had to write a proposal. The warden accepted it, and in September of 1999, the first meditation group at San Quentin began.

Click to read the rest of "Meditation helps San Quentin prisoners come to terms with themselves and their crimes" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Image credit: kalwnews.

Is it the responsibility of law schools to "offer their students a vision of how they can 'achieve a real sense of self-worth and fulfillment'"

Happiness is getting a lot of press recently. Just today I saw a couple of pieces on the topic. Professor Todd Kashdan penned some cautionary words about seeking happiness in his blog post The Problem with Happiness (Psychology Today). Excerpt:

...Has anyone considered what this pressure to be happy does to people?

Thankfully, a few scientists started to study this phenomena. What they found is that as people place more importance on being happy, they become more unhappy and depressed. The pressure to be happy makes people less happy. Organizing your life around trying to become happier, making happiness the primary objective of life, gets in the way of actually becoming happy.

And the Harvard Gazette carried an article "How to get happy," about a presentation given by the Boks. Wife Sissela Bok wrote Exploring Happiness; husband Derek Bok is the author of The Politics of Happiness. (Click for another article, this in The Harvard Crimson, about the Bok talk.)  From the Gazette article:

In relating happiness to the academic realm, Derek Bok said less attention should be placed on the drive to develop a competitive workforce, and more should be geared toward creating a better-rounded education.

Developing “skills in the workplace comes at the expense of things that make people happier, like art and music and civic engagement … exercise, sports, and athletic pursuits,” said Bok.

In colleges, teachers need to do a better job of informing students about “different professions, different vocations, different callings, and what we know about the effect they have on happiness.” Professional schools too should do more than just teach facts, but offer their students a vision of how they can “achieve a real sense of self-worth and fulfillment in a profession.”

Is that a role of law schools? To offer their students such a vision?

Note: Somewhat related, here are 10 careers with high rates of depression (Health.com). No, lawyer is not on the list. Unfortunately there is no information given in the article about how the list was compiled, or how depression was defined or assessed.

Note (added September 30, 2010): Another recently published article for you: "How to be happy (but not too much)" (New Scientist).

 

 

 

Of course you need my permission before you videotape me

In my standard speaker agreement, I have a provision about videotaping and always come to an agreement with clients in advance about how any video of me can (and cannot) be used. In only one situation have I had a problem and that was because, for some reason I now don't recall, I did not have my standard written agreement.

I showed up at a conference at which I was presenting and was informed nicely that I would be taped and that the tape would be sold with no portion of the sales coming to me. I said I had not been sent a release, and was then told they don't use them. The event was the conference of a bar association!

An instance of the cobbler's children needing shoes?

This odd happening was refreshed in my memory when I saw at Nolo's Patent, Copyright & Trademark Blog a post titled Need Permission to Video Educational Presentations. From that post:

Yes, you should obtain permission to [use] videos of speakers. ... The key is making sure you get permission for all the rights you need.

The speaker's rights. The speaker possesses three types of rights: (1) rights associated with copyright (the text of the speech and accompanying visual presentation); (2) rights associated with the commercial use of the speaker's name or persona; and (3) the speakers right to sue if the video defames or invades the speaker's privacy. ... If you want specific rights, then the release would say [for example] something to the effect "I grant permission to [name of association] to use my videotaped presentation [name of presentation] to be posted and publicly displayed at the [name of association's] website." That's called a limited permission/release because it is only for specific purposes. If you wanted all rights --  that is you can do anything with the video -- you would use an unlimited or blanket permission/release.

 

My roommate in law school is now the Queen of Punctuation!

This life-after-law story is one of my favorites, partly because I know its star. Moira Donohue was my roommate during the first semester of my first year of law school. After practicing law, she moved on to be a published author of children's books on punctuation. Click to read my last post about Moira.

She is also the Queen of Punctuation. Since National Punctuation Day falls in September, she has been extra busy. To be delighted, click to watch her perform as Queen. Then click to listen to Moira talk about practicing law and why she is attracted to punctuation; and about how to find out the answer to this question: What punctuation mark are you?

Moira will give you a new and greater appreciation for all those squiggly marks.

List of 10 most frequently challenged books of 2009 includes TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

Banned Books Week runs from September 25 to October 2. For a list of the books most frequently challenged last year, click here.

The dark side of corporate storytelling?

Julie Wheelwright is not exactly a fully-convinced fan of storytelling in the workplace. She writes in The Independent:

... What seems like an ancient and benign desire to tell a simple story has, according to Salmon, been appropriated by post-capitalism to serve its own ends. Advertising has moved on from the Kodak and Bacardi campaigns beloved of Mad Men, he argues, to inventing narratives that make the message digestible, emotional and bleached of reality. The goal of "storytelling marketing" is not just to persuade consumers to buy but to involve them in a story. Consumption has become a way of relating to the world, so that by your purchases shall you be known.

"Storytelling management" has also seeped into daily working life, silencing the corporate employees who, quite literally, don't buy the narrative. In organisations like the World Bank, Apple, Starbucks, Nokia and Google, traditional communication methods are ditched for the circulation of simple stories freighted with meaning. What's lost is

Sharon Begley says, "Surely we don't need another book to tell us how stupid we are?"

My first thoughts mirrored Begley's when I heard about a new book in the people's-brains-don't-work-so-well genre. I am somewhat skeptical of these books and have blogged about my caution here: How irrational are we? Before you answer, listen to this interview and read this article about behavioral economics.

Because this glut of books is causing me fatigue, I was happy to see what Begley has written in "Second Thoughts: Our take on a new book about ‘outsmarting your mind'" (Newsweek). I don't think I will add this one to my to-read list, saving me time and energy.

Excerpt from Begley's article:

Surely we don’t need another book to tell us how stupid we are? In 2008 alone, Predictably Irrational, by MIT behavioral scientist Dan Ariely, regaled us with examples of behavior and decisions that defy logic (the aspirin we’re told costs $1 makes our headaches go away faster than an identical one that we’re told costs a nickel), while Sway described “the irresistible pull of irrational behavior,” and Nudge explained how slightly reframing decisions—to increase employee participation in a 401(k), make opt-in the default rather than opt-out—can cause us to make better choices. In this year’s The Invisible Gorilla, psychology profs Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons describe “how our intuitions mislead us.”

On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits is the newest entrant in this overcrowded field, and it is inevitable that author Wray Herbert, a longtime psychology writer ... hacks through much the same terrain. But he brings a twist: advice on how to avoid the mental pitfalls that cause us, for example, to assume that an intense level of emotion will continue at that intensity for the foreseeable future. I’m talking about you, euphoric-in-November-2008 Obama voters: by falling into the common cognitive trap of expecting a peak emotion to persist, you become that much more disenchanted when, inevitably, it doesn’t.

...

Herbert speculates that heuristics exist

Blog Glob: "Less Pain for Learning Gain: Research offers a strategy to increase learning with less effort"

News release from Northwestern University:

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Scientists long have recognized that many perceptual skills important for language comprehension and reading can be enhanced through practice. Now research from Northwestern University suggests a new way of training that could reduce by at least half the effort previously thought necessary to make learning gains.

The research also may be the first behavioral demonstration of metaplasticity -- the idea that experiences that on their own do not generate learning can influence how effective later experiences are at generating learning.

“Prior to our work much of the research into perceptual learning could be summed up as ‘no pain, no gain,’” says Beverly Wright, first author of a study in the Sept. 22 Journal of Neuroscience and professor of communication sciences and disorders at Northwestern. “Our work suggests that you can have the same gain in learning with substantially less pain.”

The findings could lead to less effortful therapies for children who suffer from language learning impairments involving perceptual skills. And they hold potential for members of the general population with an interest in enhancing perceptual abilities -- for musicians seeking to sharpen their sensitivity to sound, people studying a second language or physicians learning to tell the difference between regular and irregular heartbeats.

Previous research showed that individuals become better at many perceptual tasks by performing them again and again, typically making the training tedious and long in length. It also showed that mere exposure to the perceptual stimuli used during practice on these tasks does not generate learning.

But the Northwestern researchers found that robust learning occurred when they combined periods of practice that alone were too brief to cause learning with periods of mere exposure to perceptual stimuli. “To our surprise, we found that two ‘wrongs’ actually can make a

Blog Glob: "Gen Y gets real: Hard times shatter young employees' sense of entitlement"

Excerpt:

Christina Totfalusi Blake, a 29-year-old attorney, feels lucky to have a job, particularly one that provides the attributes most Gen Y workers value – meaningful work, opportunities for learning, quality of life and likable colleagues.

Blake joined Kelley, Kronenberg, Gilmartin, Fichtel, Wander, Bamdas, Escalyo and Dunbrack in Miami Lakes, Fla., after working solo in Orlando for two years. She views her workplace as a social hub where collaboration has value.

"There's an open-door policy, so I can chat with other attorneys," she said. "For me, brainstorming, having senior associates to bounce ideas off, is huge. It's something I can't put a value on."

But Blake still wants the high salary and work-life balance. "Young attorneys are taking lower-paying jobs for the same long hours," she said. "But our hopes are still there – in light of our student loans and high debt – that compensation will go back up."

Click to read the rest of "Gen Y gets real: Hard times shatter young employees' sense of entitlement" (Miami Herald).