The main aim of this study, which presents the Slovenian adaptation of the Macarthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory CDI–III, was to investigate the characteristics of language development in monolingual Slovenian-speaking children aged 30–48 months. In addition, we examined the relationships between different measures of child language assessed by the CDI–III, namely vocabulary, grammar and metalanguage. The sample comprised 301 children whose language was assessed by their parents using the Slovenian version of the CDI–III. The results indicate that language development at this age continues to progress relatively quickly, particularly in terms of children’s metalinguistic abilities, although there are large individual differences in language ability between children of the same age. The findings also indicate that some of the pre-existing relationships established between the different domains of infant and toddler language ability persist into early childhood, with vocabulary emerging as an important predictor of children’s grammar.

There is substantial evidence that women tend to support different policies and political candidates than men. Many studies also document gender differences in a variety of important preference dimensions, such as risk-taking, competition and pro-sociality. However, the degree to which differential voting by men and women is related to these gaps in more basic preferences requires an improved understanding. We conduct an experiment in which individuals in small laboratory “societies” repeatedly vote for redistribution policies and engage in production. We find that women vote for more egalitarian redistribution and that this difference persists with experience and in environments with varying degrees of risk. This gender voting gap is accounted for partly by both gender gaps in preferences and by expectations regarding economic circumstances. However, including both these controls in a regression analysis indicates that the latter is the primary driving force. We also observe policy differences between male- and female-controlled groups, though these are substantially smaller than the mean individual differences—a natural consequence of the aggregation of individual preferences into collective outcomes.

We look at gender differences among adolescents in Sweden in preferences for competition, altruism and risk. For competitiveness, we explore two different tasks that differ in associated stereotypes. We find no gender difference in competitiveness when comparing performance under competition to that without competition. We further find that boys and girls are equally likely to self-select into competition in a verbal task, but that boys are significantly more likely to choose to compete in a mathematical task. This gender gap diminishes and becomes non-significant when we control for actual performance, beliefs about relative performance, and risk preferences, or for beliefs only. Girls are also more altruistic and less risk taking than boys.

Experiments have demonstrated that men are more willing to compete than women. We develop a new instrument to “price” willingness to compete. We find that men value a $2.00 winner-take-all payment significantly more (about $0.28 more) than women; and that women require a premium (about 40 %) to compete. Our new instrument is more sensitive than the traditional binary-choice instrument, and thus, enables us to identify relationships that are not identifiable using the traditional binary-choice instrument. We find that subjects who are the most willing to compete have high ability, higher GPA’s (men), and take more STEM courses (women).

Recent studies find that women are less competitive than men. This gender difference in competitiveness has been suggested as one possible explanation for why men occupy the majority of top positions in many sectors. In this study we explore competitiveness in children, with the premise that both context and gendered stereotypes regarding the task at hand may influence competitive behavior. A related field experiment on Israeli children shows that only boys react to competition by running faster when competing in a race. We here test if there is a gender gap in running among 7-10 year old Swedish children. We also introduce two female sports, skipping rope and dancing, to see if competitiveness is task dependent. We find no gender difference in reaction to competition in any task; boys and girls compete equally. Studies in different environments with different types of tasks are thus important in order to make generalizable claims about gender differences in competitiveness.

A laboratory study was carried out to analyze the relationship between ambiguity regarding the sharing norms in structured alternating-offer bargaining and gender differences in bargaining. Symmetric environments, where a 50:50 split emerges as the unique sensible norm, showed the lowest ambiguity and gender differences are absent. We increased ambiguity by introducing asymmetries into the bargaining environment by making one bargaining party get a higher share than the other (due to empowerment, entitlement or informational asymmetries), but without imposing new sharing norms. In these situations, men are less likely to reach an agreement, but, when they do, they obtain a larger share of the pie. As a result, men and women show similar overall earnings but earnings are lower when bargaining with men. We find suggestive evidence that gender differences diminish when we reduce ambiguity regarding the sharing norms by providing information about other participants’ agreements in asymmetric environments.

Individual willingness to enter competitive environments predicts career choices and labor market outcomes. Meanwhile, many people experience competitive contexts as stressful. We use two laboratory experiments to investigate whether factors related to stress can help explain individual differences in tournament entry. Experiment 1 studies whether stress responses (measured as salivary cortisol) to taking part in a mandatory tournament predict individual willingness to participate in a voluntary tournament. We find that competing increases stress levels. This cortisol response does not predict tournament entry for men but is positively and significantly correlated with choosing to enter the tournament for women. In Experiment 2, we exogenously induce physiological stress using the cold-pressor task. We find a positive causal effect of stress on tournament entry for women but no effect for men. Finally, we show that although the effect of stress on tournament entry differs between the genders, stress reactions cannot explain the well-documented gender difference in willingness to compete.

When do survey respondents choose to withhold feelings on questions related to polarizing and democratically important events such as the January 6th insurrection? While extant research has shown that “don’t know” responses or skipped questions in survey research function as a way to avoid expressing a socially undesirable opinion or feeling, no work has explored how nonresponses may be impacting our understanding of the American public’s support for the January 6th insurrection. Through analysis of the nonresponse answers within the 2022 Health of Democracy Survey, we show that a persistent pattern of item nonresponse was present among all racial groups asked to provide their feelings toward insurrectionists, and that women were significantly more likely to refuse sharing their feelings—warm or cold. Additionally, we find that although racialized feelings previously linked with support of the insurrection (racial resentment, racial affect, and white replacement theory) were not significantly related to January 6th item nonresponse, racial attitudes did hold an important relationship with January 6th item nonresponse among Non-Whites. Our results therefore highlight the importance of the intersection of race and gender in conversations about democratic norms, racial attitudes, and withholding views about highly politicized and polarizing events.

We report results from a replication of Solnick (Econ Inq 39(2):189, 2001), which finds using an ultimatum game that, in relation to males, more is demanded from female proposers and less is offered to female responders. We conduct Solnick’s (2001) game using participants from a large US university and a large Chinese university. We find little evidence of gender differences across proposer and responder decisions in both locations.

We study the effect on coordination in a minimum-effort game of a leader’s gender depending on whether the leader is democratically elected or is randomly selected. Leaders use non-binding messages to try to convince followers to coordinate on the Pareto-efficient equilibrium. We find that teams with elected leaders coordinate on higher effort levels. Initially, the benefits of being elected are captured solely by male leaders. However, this gender difference disappears with repeated interaction because unsuccessful male leaders are reelected more often than unsuccessful female leaders.

Emotion regulation, as a typical “top-down” emotional self-regulation, has been shown to play an important role in children’s oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) development. However, the association between other self-regulation subcomponents and the ODD symptom network remains unclear. Meanwhile, while there are gender differences in both self-regulation and ODD, few studies have examined whether their relation is moderated by gender. Five hundred and four children (age 6–11 years; 207 girls) were recruited from schools with parents and classroom teachers completing questionnaires and were followed up for assessment six months later. Using moderation network analysis, we analyzed the relation between self-regulation and ODD symptoms, and the moderating role of gender. Self-regulation including emotion regulation, self-control, and emotion lability/negativity had broad bidirectional relations with ODD symptoms. In particular, the bidirectional relations between emotion regulation and ODD3 (Defies) and between emotion lability/negativity and ODD4 (Annoys) were significantly weaker in girls than in boys. Considering the important role of different self-regulation subcomponents in the ODD symptom network, ODD is better conceptualized as a self-regulation disorder. Each ODD symptom is associated with different degrees of impaired “bottom-up” and “top-down” self-regulation, and several of the associations vary by gender.

Gender is a socially constructed concept influenced by social practices, norms, and expectations. The impact of gender differences on mental health has been long recognized, with consequences such as over-diagnosis and pathologization or under-diagnosis of some disorders depending on gender. This also has implications for the treatments that each gender receives. In this narrative review, we will analyze (a) the gender differences in the prevalence of mental disorders, (b) the explanations for gender differences in mental health, including biological, social constructionist, and sociocultural risk factors, and (c) the gender differences in the treatment of mental disorders, including differences in health-seeking behavior and treatment outcomes. Overall, there is a consistent pattern of differences in prevalence, with women more likely to have internalizing disorders (e.g., anxiety or depression) and men more likely to have externalizing disorders (e.g., antisocial personality or substance use). The explanations aimed at disentangling the reasons for these gender differences are complex, and several approaches should be considered to achieve a comprehensive explanation. In addition to biological factors (e.g., hormonal changes), social constructionist factors (e.g., biased diagnostic criteria and clinicians’ gender bias) and sociocultural factors (e.g., feminization of poverty, gender discrimination, violence against women, and prescriptive beauty standards) should be considered. Future studies in the field of mental health should consider gender differences and explore the bio-psycho-socio-cultural factors that may underlie these differences.

There are both negative and positive stereotypes about public sector workers. Most studies focus on negative stereotypes, like the idea that public servants are lazy. We, however, do the opposite. We focus on a positive stereotype: public sector workers are seen as caring and helpful. We test the effects of positive stereotypes on the quality of public service delivery. Using a pre-registered audit experiment in elderly care in the Netherlands and Belgium, we find that activating a pro-social stereotype does not affect the outcome of public service quality in terms of response rate and information provision. However, it does improve the bureaucratic process: public sector workers are friendlier toward citizens. They say around 12% more ‘thank you’ in their replies. Moreover, the citizens’ gender affects the response rate: female citizens receive around 10% more replies. Concluding, we show that positive stereotyping can improve parts of the quality of public service delivery but not all.

This study investigates the psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the Motives for Online Gaming Questionnaire (MOGQ). We explored the factor structure and construct validity of the MOGQ through its relationships with gaming disorder symptoms (IGD–20) and impulsivity traits. We also analyzed if sociodemographic variables and gaming habits were related to gaming motives. An online cross-sectional survey was completed by 845 college students. Structure validity was examined using a combination of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, which supported a bifactor model composed of a general motivation factor and six uncorrelated factors (a mixed factor composed of escape and coping, competition, recreation, skill, social, and fantasy). Omega-hierarchical and omega coefficients were used to determine reliability of the MOGQ. The scale presented acceptable reliability for the general factor (ωh = .79) and the specific factor scores (social ω = .79, escape/coping ω = .81, competition ω = .79, skill ω = .84, fantasy ω = .82, and recreation ω = .70). Positive associations were observed between the MOGQ and the IGD–20 symptoms, with escape/coping (r = .48) and fantasy (r =.40) showing the strongest ones. Null or low correlations were observed with impulsivity traits. Motives to play varied significantly across genders. These findings provide evidence that the Spanish version of the MOGQ is a reliable and valid tool to assess motives to play online games.

Gender is a crucial factor for creativity in design. Although the participation and recognition of successful and prominent women in the field of design seems to be increasing, many more men are still recognised and regarded as creative. This paper analyses the gender differences in design creativity. First, a summary of studies on gender differences in creativity in general is presented. It then discusses three critical aspects of gender differences in design creativity. Finally, some ways in which women's creativity can be encouraged and supported are outlined.

Healthcare workers (HCWs) were at increased risk for mental health problems during the COVID-19 pandemic, with prior data suggesting women may be particularly vulnerable. Our global mental health study aimed to examine factors associated with gender differences in psychological distress and depressive symptoms among HCWs during COVID-19. Across 22 countries in South America, Europe, Asia and Africa, 32,410 HCWs participated in the COVID-19 HEalth caRe wOrkErS (HEROES) study between March 2020 and February 2021. They completed the General Health Questionnaire-12, the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 and questions about pandemic-relevant exposures. Consistently across countries, women reported elevated mental health problems compared to men. Women also reported increased COVID-19-relevant stressors, including insufficient personal protective equipment and less support from colleagues, while men reported increased contact with COVID-19 patients. At the country level, HCWs in countries with higher gender inequality reported less mental health problems. Higher COVID-19 mortality rates were associated with increased psychological distress merely among women. Our findings suggest that among HCWs, women may have been disproportionately exposed to COVID-19-relevant stressors at the individual and country level. This highlights the importance of considering gender in emergency response efforts to safeguard women’s well-being and ensure healthcare system preparedness during future public health crises.