(Press-News.org) WASHINGTON, DC, March 12, 2015 -- Actresses need to be pickier than men about with whom they work if they want to survive in the movie industry, suggests a new study.
"My research indicates that women in the film industry suffer a lack of access to future career opportunities when they tend to work with people who have collaborated frequently in the past," said Mark Lutter, lead author of the study and head of the "Transnational Diffusion of Innovation" Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG) in Germany.
Titled, "Do Women Suffer from Network Closure? The Moderating Effect of Social Capital on Gender Inequality in a Project-Based Labor Market, 1929 to 2010," the study will appear in the April print issue of the American Sociological Review and was published online today.
For the purposes of his study, Lutter analyzed the career data, including more than a million performances in almost 400,000 movies, of about 100,000 actors and actresses in the American film industry. The data originated from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), which contains details on all films produced since the advent of cinematography, as well as information on all of the actors and actresses involved and the networks within which they operated -- in other words, with whom they worked.
Lutter found that when actresses work more often with less connected, more diverse groups featuring people from different social and cultural backgrounds, their career prospects become indistinguishable from those of actors.
"The career opportunities for actresses are more likely to dwindle if they work in homogeneous teams," Lutter said.
If the groups they tend to work with also feature a large proportion of men in senior positions -- directors and producers, for instance -- or if the actresses work in male-dominated film genres, the risk of career decline is even greater. The effect is further amplified for actresses still in the early stages of their careers.
"I suspect that women suffer when they are frequently part of homogeneous teams because they might enjoy a much lower degree of active support from mentors than men, and their professional friendship networks might also give them access to fewer contacts in positions of power," Lutter said. "This would mean that they are likely excluded from important sources of information about future projects."
This is particularly problematic in project-based labor markets, such the film industry, in which jobs tend to be obtained through informal channels and personal networks.
"So rather than relying on close circles and personal friendships, women should focus on developing diverse networks of relationships outside their own circle," Lutter said. "By and large, they should take a more strategic, considered approach to their decisions concerning future projects if they want their careers to benefit."
While the study focuses on the film industry, the findings have implications for people in other industries as well.
"In this day and age, work very often takes place in project teams, the film industry being a prime example," Lutter said. "Those involved in filmmaking move along from project to project -- working together for a limited period of time and then going their separate ways -- like many freelancers in the creative professions, but also not unlike many people working for larger corporations. My research highlights strategies women can use to increase their visibility in these job markets, as well as steps employers interested in advancing women's careers can take when creating project teams."
INFORMATION:
About the American Sociological Association and the American Sociological Review
The American Sociological Association , founded in 1905, is a non-profit membership association dedicated to serving sociologists in their work, advancing sociology as a science and profession, and promoting the contributions to and use of sociology by society. The American Sociological Review is the ASA's flagship journal.
The research article described above is available by request for members of the media. For a copy of the full study, contact Daniel Fowler, ASA Media Relations Manager, at (202) 527-7885 or pubinfo@asanet.org.
Christel Schommertz, Press and Public Relations, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, wrote this press release. For more information about the study, members of the media can also contact Schommertz at +49 221 2767-130 or schommertz@mpifg.de.
Contact: Daniel Fowler, American Sociological Association, (202) 527-7885, pubinfo@asanet.org
WASHINGTON, D.C., March 12, 2015 - The American Educational Research Association has published a special edition of its peer-reviewed journal Educational Researcher (ER) devoted to examining value-added measures (VAM).
Since 2009, President Barack Obama's Race to the Top initiative has brought on a wave of value-added-based accountability measures, with value-added now embedded in policy in more than 30 states. AERA's journals have examined the validity and reliability of value-added measures over the past six years. This special issue of ER considers the key questions, ...
Materials resulting from chemical bonding of glucosamine, a type of sugar, with fullerenes, kind of nanoparticles known as buckyballs, might help to reduce cell damage and inflammation occurring after stroke. A team from the Max Planck Institute in Germany has tested this on mice, opening the door to potential new drugs for the cerebrovascular accident.
The majority of stroke occurs when the blood vessels that reach the brain are blocked by clots or fatty deposits which decrease the flow of blood towards its cells. It is then that an ischemic attack occurs, a pathology ...
Harvesting fire-killed trees is an effective way to reduce woody fuels for up to four decades following wildfire in dry coniferous forests, a U.S. Forest Service study has found.
The retrospective analysis, among the first to measure the long-term effects of post-fire logging on forest fuels, is published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management.
"Large wildfires can leave behind thousands of acres of fire-killed trees that eventually become fuel for future fires. In the past, post-fire logging has been conducted primarily to recover economic value from those fire-killed ...
Loneliness may be a fundamental part of the human condition, but scientists have only recently begun exploring its causes, consequences, and potential interventions. A special section in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, aims to bring these strands of inquiry together, presenting a series of articles that review the current state of scientific research on loneliness.
The section, edited by psychological scientist David Sbarra of the University of Arizona, investigates loneliness across multiple levels, from ...
CHESTNUT HILL, MA (March 12, 2015) Targeting deadly, drug-resistant bacteria poses a serious challenge to researchers looking for antibiotics that can kill pathogens without causing collateral damage in human cells. A team of Boston College chemists details a new approach using a "warhead" molecule to attack bacteria -- and spare healthy human cells -- by targeting a pair of lipids found on the surface of deadly germs, according to a report today in the journal Nature Communications.
The new strategy required the researchers to develop a novel type of "warhead molecule" ...
Study links oddly shaped hippocampus to poor long-term memory in former marijuana users
The longer teens used cannabis, the more abnormal the hippocampus as adults
Former users perform 18 percent worse on long-term memory test
Cannabis affects short and long-term memory
CHICAGO --- Teens who were heavy marijuana users - smoking it daily for about three years -- had an abnormally shaped hippocampus and performed poorly on long-term memory tasks, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study.
The hippocampus is important to long-term memory (also known as ...
A team of scientists from the John Innes Centre (JIC), the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB) and The Sainsbury Laboratory (TSL) have successfully transferred a receptor that recognises bacteria from the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana - a dicot, to wheat - a monocot. They showed that the receptor can trigger a defensive response and confers increased resistance to bacterial disease. The research findings demonstrate that the signalling pathways or circuitry downstream of the receptor are conserved between evolutionary distant monocots and dicots.
Drs Henk-jan ...
Researchers from ZSL and the Shaanxi Normal University, Xi'an, surveyed 43 farms in China and worked with the Shaanxi Province Fisheries Office to investigate the Chinese giant salamander farming industry. They found that, although only a decade old, the industry houses millions of animals and is a major contributor to the Chinese rural economy. The farming industry however, poses a number of threats to the Chinese giant salamander, but also has potential to benefit the species.
Wild salamanders are illegally poached to supplement farmed populations which often do not ...
The indoor air quality in nursing homes has a serious effect on the lung health of elderly residents, according to the findings of a new study.
The study, which is published online today (12 March 2015) in the European Respiratory Journal, is the first to detail the negative effects of poor air quality in nursing homes across several countries.
Researchers from the EU-funded GERIE research project collected data on five indoor air pollutants: PM10, PM0.1, formaldehyde, NO2 and O3. These pollutants come from a range of sources including heaters, building materials, ...
A comprehensive programme providing older people at risk of dementia with healthy eating guidance, exercise, brain training, and management of metabolic and vascular risk factors appears to slow down cognitive decline, according to the first ever randomised controlled trial of its kind, published in The Lancet.
In the Finnish Geriatric Intervention Study to Prevent Cognitive Impairment and Disability (FINGER) study, researchers led by Professor Miia Kivipelto from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, National Institute for Health and Welfare in Helsinki, and ...
