In the USA women currently gain about 44% of doctoral degrees and a similar share of initial academic appointments. However, overall women hold about 33% of faculty positions and are slower to earn tenure and be promoted to full professor. Academic achievements have lower salary payoff for women, and they earn less than men with comparable qualifications and accomplishments. In the micropolitics of academic life, women remain on the margin trying to prove they have the skills to 'play the game at all' while men realistically presume support and focus on strategizing reputation (Gersick et al., 2000). The gendered nature of academic life in the USA is interpreted in terms of Glick and Fiske's 'ambivalent sexism'. In this view, gender stereotypes are ideological and prescriptive rather than simply descriptive; their influence on academic employment processes is unlikely to diminish simply with the passage of time or accumulating evidence on women's capabilities. While insightful, alone this framing leads to the pessimistic view that ambivalent attitudes toward women are intractable. Adding a feminist perspective on discourse allows a somewhat more optimistic view: intertwined discourses of gender and merit are sufficiently complex and heterogeneous to provide openings for resistance, renegotiation, and rewriting.Keywords: gender in academic employment, discourse and academic merit, discourse and gender, ambivalent sexism.

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Perceived compatibility between requirements of managerial work and attributes of women is believed important to the advancement and success of women, and research demonstrates continued ambivalence about women executives. The question of how images of women executives are disseminated, reproducing or contesting negative characterizations, has received little attention. The research reported here focuses on US business press as a cultural carrier disseminating images of women executives. Critical discourse analysis examined 27 front page Wall Street Journal accounts of 22 women executives in the year following Carly Fiorina’s appointment to head Hewlett‐Packard; 20 front page accounts of 24 men executives were used as comparison. Prominently featured articles on women executives provide fractured images of women as executives: while some accounts are positive, other portrayals reinforce negative perceptions of women’s competence and likeability as executives and concerns about the social order. Similar issues are not raised in coverage of male executives. Author gender does not seem to affect the portrayal.

PAY INCREASES ARE IMPORTANT organizational rewards. Indeed, it is generally assumed that most employees see pay increases, rather than current level of pay, as the organization's reward for performance. To be effective as rewards, they should be large enough to be meaningful. But how large is large enough? There are likely to be individual differences in this reward threshold. Compensation policies could be more efficiently designed and administered if the factors affecting these thresholds were understood and pay increases were geared to individual thresholds.Although there is a great deal of research on pay-related topics, much of it dealing with pay increases or differences in pay levels, most studies ignore the psychological meaning of pay or the question of pay increase thresholds. The few studies that have focused directly on this threshold, that is, on the smallest meaningful pay increase (hereafter referred to as SMPI), indicate that some pay differences or pay increases seem too small to be meaningful to employees and that this threshold varies among individuals in a manner that may be related to their current pay levels.Although these initial studies provide interesting insights into SMPI, they leave several issues unresolved: (z) SMPI has been viewed as a relatively constant percentage of pay, but the research estimates of this constant percentage vary greatly, from 3.3 to :LI.5 percent. (2) The SMPIpay relationship has only been tested indirectly by comparing SMPI to pay ratios. A much stronger test would be a direct measure of association between SMPI and pay. (3) Research efforts have concentrated on the single factor of pay as an influence on SMPI; other factors might also be feasibly considered. Because of the lack of theoretical work related to SMPI, previous researchers borrowed from the psychophysical and adaptation-level literature, which suggests that a subject evaluates an increase in the amount of some variable by comparing it with a base level. SMPI researchers have assumed that employees evaluate pay at WESTERN OREGON UNIVERSITY on May 30, 2015 cbr.sagepub.com Downloaded from