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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Microfinance: A Tool For Financial Access, Poverty Alleviation Or Gender Empowerment ? - Empirical Findings From Pakistan, Ghazal Mir Zulfiqar Dec 2013

Microfinance: A Tool For Financial Access, Poverty Alleviation Or Gender Empowerment ? - Empirical Findings From Pakistan, Ghazal Mir Zulfiqar

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

In just 30 years microfinance has transformed from a credit-based rural development scheme that has claimed to reduce poverty and empower poor women, to a $70 billion financial industry. In the process, the traditional NGO-led model has given way to commercialized institutions, resulting in an increased emphasis on profitmaking. This has also led to confusion in the sector around its mission: is it to alleviate poverty and empower poor women or simply to provide the "unbanked" with access to formal sources of finance? This research considers the main debates in microfinance with regard to its mission and presents empirical evidence …


Gender And Marital Status Differences In Retirement Planning, Maximiliane E. Szinovacz, Gerontology Institute, University Of Massachusetts Boston Aug 2013

Gender And Marital Status Differences In Retirement Planning, Maximiliane E. Szinovacz, Gerontology Institute, University Of Massachusetts Boston

Gerontology Institute Publications

During the past decades, women have increasingly joined the labor force and worked in their later years. Yet women, especially married women, often have shorter work histories than their male counterparts due to taking time off for child care or care for ailing relatives. Are they also different in their retirement expectations? To answer this question, we explore gender and marital status differences in retirement plans.


Are Women Really More Risk-Averse Than Men? A Re-Analysis Of The Literature Using Expanded Methods, Julie Nelson Aug 2013

Are Women Really More Risk-Averse Than Men? A Re-Analysis Of The Literature Using Expanded Methods, Julie Nelson

Julie A. Nelson

While a substantial literature in economics and finance has concluded that “women are more risk averse than men,” this conclusion merits investigation. After briefly clarifying the difference between making generalizations about groups, on the one hand, and making valid inferences from samples, on the other, this essay suggests improvements to how economists communicate our research results. Supplementing findings of statistical significance with quantitative measures of both substantive difference (Cohen's d, a measure in common use in non-­‐Economics literatures) and of substantive overlap (the Index of Similarity, newly proposed here) adds important nuance to the discussion of sex differences. These measures …


Would Women Leaders Have Prevented The Global Financial Crisis? Teaching Critical Thinking By Questioning A Question, Julie Nelson Jun 2013

Would Women Leaders Have Prevented The Global Financial Crisis? Teaching Critical Thinking By Questioning A Question, Julie Nelson

Julie A. Nelson

Would having more women in leadership have prevented the financial crisis? This question, raised in the popular media, can make effective fodder for teaching critical thinking within courses such as gender and economics, money and financial institutions, pluralist economics, or behavioural economics. While the question, as posed, demands an answer of 'Yes - sex differences in traits are important' or 'No - gender is irrelevant', students can be encouraged to question the question itself. The first part of this essay briefly reviews literature on the sameness-versus-difference debate, noting that the belief in exaggerated behavioural differences between men and women is …


Love In The Time Of Sts, K. Heintzman Mar 2013

Love In The Time Of Sts, K. Heintzman

Working Papers on Science in a Changing World

I seek to read Gary Werskey’s essay “The Marxist Critique of Capitalist Science: A History in Three Movements,” (2007) as a love story, and one that can be paralleled by another such love story in Science and Technology Studies. By reading Werskey’s narrative of Bob Young beside a piece written by Dorothy Smith (1990) on Sally Hacker, I want to draw attention to what is both jarring and gripping about such deeply personal projects. I seek to locate both of these essays as projects in memory, in what it means to try to hold onto a story – to preserve …


Not-So-Strong Evidence For Gender Differences In Risk, Julie Nelson Jan 2013

Not-So-Strong Evidence For Gender Differences In Risk, Julie Nelson

Julie A. Nelson

In their article "Strong Evidence for Gender Differences in Risk Taking," Gary Charness and Uri Gneezy (2012) review a number of experimental studies regarding investments in risky assets, and claim that these yield strong evidence that females are more risk averse than males. This study replicates and extends their article, demonstrating that its methods are highly problematic. While the methods used would be appropriate for categorical, individual-­‐level differences, the data reviewed are not consistent with such a model. Instead, modest differences (at most) exist only at aggregate levels, such as group means. The evidence in favor of gender difference is …


Fearing Fear: Gender And Economic Discourse, Julie Nelson Jan 2013

Fearing Fear: Gender And Economic Discourse, Julie Nelson

Julie A. Nelson

Economic discourse—or the lack of it—about fear is gendered on at least three fronts. First, while masculine-­‐associated notions of reason and mind have historically been prioritized in mainstream economics, fear—along with other emotions and embodiment—has tended to be culturally associated with femininity. Research on cognitive "gender schema," then, may at least partly explain the near absence of discussions of fear within economic research. Second, in the rare cases where fear is discussed in the contemporary economics literature, there is a tendency to (overly-­‐)strongly associate it with women. Finally, historians and philosophers of science have suggested that the failure to consider …