Abstract

In an attempt to add to cross-cultural research on sex­differentiation in language use, this study replicates, in an Egyptian setting, American experiments designed to determine whether or not stereotypes and prejudices exist that work against the success of women writers.

The specific hypothesis tested was that female and male raters would consistently rate female authors lower than their male counterparts for identical work. Subjects were 195 students from 12 English classes at four different Egyptian educational institutions--three universities and one adult continuing-education program. A written form of the matched-guise technique was employed as the main experiment instrument. To supplement it postexperimental debriefing sessions were conducted. Each subject in the experiment was given six article excerpts of approximately 100 words in length to rate. These excerpts were taken from the literature of six different fields such that there were two excerpts for each of three possible sex-orientations for topic: (1) female, (2) male, and (3) neutral. For each article, half of the subjects saw a female author's name and half of the subjects saw a male author's name. ANOVAs and t-tests were run on the resulting data to assess the effects of sex of author, sex of subject, sexorientation of topic, individual articles, educational institution and order of article presentation.

The results broadly stated are that the experiment hypo-thesis was soundly contradicted. Rather than finding a consistent bias favoring male authors, no bias was found in 88% of the subpopulation cases examined. Furthermore, in the limited number of cases where biases were found, these biases quite often favored female authors consistent with a pattern of favoring authors who were writing on a topic not usually associated with their sex.

School

School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Date of Award

1-1-1986

Online Submission Date

1-1-1986

Document Type

Thesis

Extent

1 v. :

Library of Congress Subject Heading 1

Women authors

Library of Congress Subject Heading 2

Women authors

Rights

The author retains all rights with regard to copyright. The author certifies that written permission from the owner(s) of third-party copyrighted matter included in the thesis, dissertation, paper, or record of study has been obtained. The author further certifies that IRB approval has been obtained for this thesis, or that IRB approval is not necessary for this thesis. Insofar as this thesis, dissertation, paper, or record of study is an educational record as defined in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) (20 USC 1232g), the author has granted consent to disclosure of it to anyone who requests a copy.

Call Number

Thesis 1986/680

Location

mgfth

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