"Doing and Viewing Gender" : a lens-model approach to the communicative construction of gender in task-oriented groups

Within the framework of the current gender research this dissertation focuses on applying a joint model and a corresponding method suited for integrating the many dispersed empirical studies on doing and viewing aspects of gender. An application of Brunswik’s lens-model (Brunswik, 1956) to communication research provides the basis for the development of a "performance and perception"-method that allows for an assessment of gender construction on a concrete and observation-based cue level. Additionally, this research contributes to the investigation of one of the most important applied questions of high societal relevance in gender research: why are there such few women in organizational leadership positions despite their high amount of professional qualification? A communication perspective to approach this question was chosen, focusing on verbal and nonverbal communication in task-oriented small groups. The research provides an overview of theoretical approaches within social psychology, a review of empirical literature, and a description of a series of six studies (N=391), conducted to approach the applied question and to test the new method of assessing gender construction processes. The research demonstrates the power of expectations over behavioral evidence of identical performance information (constructive effects). Results depended on the gender hypothesis and on real gender but also on the sex of the participant, sympathy, and other factors. In fact, gender hypothesis explained but a small amount of the variance of the overall findings and the magnitude of gender effects was generally small. Results of verbal and nonverbal cue analyses indicated that participants used semiotic cues differently, depending on their own gender, their gender-hypothesis and the concept in question. For example, in Study 1 women used more syntactic cues and men more pragmatic cues, while both used the same amount of semantic cues to infer gender of their chat mates. However, syntactic cues had the highest predictive value, followed by pragmatic cues, whereas semantic cues left participants at chance level of guessing gender correctly. In sum, cue analysis shed more light on communicative processes than the mere use of rating scales. Taken together, the research provides a useful framework and theory-based methodology for current empirical work, applying Brunswik’s lens model to gender communication research. The novelty of the empirical work lies in (a) the application of the performance and perception method in a CMC context, (b) the outline of and investigation into the new concept of "evaluative affect display" as a general indicator of approval or disapproval, and a specific indicator of prejudice toward female leaders, in small task-oriented groups, and (c) the use of dynamic interactional material within the Goldberg-paradigm, making the perceptual situation more realistic than by just using the previously employed written text materials. Both, gender-assumption and real gender of leaders had cognitive, expectational, and behavioral implications, but were not the only factors influencing performance and perception processes. Thus, gender construction processes are a highly context-sensitive phenomenon dependent on attributes of the perceiver, the target, and the respective degree of gender salience in a given situation. Applying Brunswik's lens-model to gender communication research generated a new method which allows to more specifically assess behavioral cues implied in gender communication.