Joining the Center's Behavioral Policy Works in Process lunch series in February will be Hannah Riley Bowles, the Roy E. Larsen Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Management at the Harvard Kennedy School and co-director of the Center for Public Leadership and the Women and Public Policy Program.

She will speak on Thursday, February 16 at 12:00 noon, with new work on the theme " 'When' vs. 'Whether' Gender/Sex Differences Matter: A Framework of Contextual and Situational Moderators of Gender/Sex-Linked Behavior."

Motivated by advances in psychological research on gender/sex-linked behaviors and by the unprecedented level of attention to gender inequality, Hannah Riley Bowles and colleagues argue for a renewal of Deaux and Major’s (1987) classic call to “put gender in context.”They offer a conceptual framework of proximal situational, as well as distal contextual, moderators of gender-sex-linked behaviors. They illuminate proximal situational features (viz., relevance and salience of gender/sex and the degree of ambiguity in the behavioral script) that influence the likelihood, magnitude, and often the direction of gender/sex-linked behavior. They then explore more broadly the distal contextual factors that shape gender/sex-linked behaviors (e.g., environmental exigencies and resources, culturally defined gender roles, etc.). In conclusion, they propose directions for future research and scholarly discussion of gender/sex-related behavior that is more attentive to the macro-contextual and micro-situational spaces in which psychological evidence on is produced and applied.

All members of the Princeton community—undergraduates, graduate students, fellows, staff, and faculty—are invited. Lunch will be served at noon with a 30-40 minute presentation beginning at 12:15, with time afterward for discussion. Please RSVP for lunch by Monday, February 13.