L'univers féminin du picaresque

Les considérations sur le statut de la femme dans la littérature picaresque sont principalement limitées à la production littéraire espagnole. Nous ne pouvons que constater l’absence d’une étude comparatiste s’attachant aux personnages féminins qui peuplent le monde picaresque des pays où ce genre littéraire s’est majoritairement affirmé : l’Espagne, la France et l’Angleterre. Le but de cette analyse est de proposer une comparaison exhaustive entre les personnages féminins des romans picaresques européens de l’époque classique. Ceux-ci sont présentés selon les âges de la vie féminine : l’enfance, la jeunesse, l’âge d’épouse et de mère et la vieillesse. L’exploration de ces catégories d’âges dans lesquelles les rôles féminins se construisent met en évidence la place déterminante qu’ils occupent dans la narration. Leurs tâches, leurs comportements, leurs modes relationnels sont analysés dans les différents espaces et à l’intérieur d’un cadre temporel qui leur sont propres. Les représentations de la femme qui sont diffusées par les écrivains sont bien souvent marquées par une conduite désordonnée. Que les femmes soient victimes d’une société sexiste ou bien qu’elles fassent sciemment de mauvais choix, elles sont dans la majorité des cas, inexorablement condamnées à accepter la condition d’infériorité qui leur est imposée. Il est pourtant une catégorie d’entre elles qui ne s’en tient pas au rôle qui lui est dévolu à l’époque par la société et ses institutions et qui met en place toute une série de stratagèmes lui permettant de se frayer un chemin dans un monde dominé par la supériorité masculine

Essays in Behavioral Personnel Economics

The thesis contemplates 4 papers and its main goal is to provide evidence on the prominent impact that behavioral analysis can play into the personnel economics domain.The research tool prevalently used in the thesis is the experimental analysis.The first paper provide laboratory evidence on how the standard screening model–based on the assumption that the pecuniary dimension represents the main workers’choice variable–fails when intrinsic motivation is introduced into the analysis.The second paper explores workers’ behavioral reactions when dealing with supervisors that may incur in errors in the assessment of their job performance.In particular,deserving agents that have exerted high effort may not be rewarded(Type-I errors)and undeserving agents that have exerted low effort may be rewarded(Type-II errors).Although a standard neoclassical model predicts both errors to be equally detrimental for effort provision,this prediction fails when tested through a laboratory experiment.Findings from this study suggest how failing to reward deserving agents is significantly more detrimental than rewarding undeserving agents.The third paper investigates the performance of two antithetic non-monetary incentive schemes on schooling achievement.The study is conducted through a field experiment.Students randomized to the main treatments have been incentivized to cooperate or to compete in order to earn additional exam points.Consistently with the theoretical model proposed in the paper,the level of effort in the competitive scheme proved to be higher than in the cooperative setting.Interestingly however,this result is characterized by a strong gender effect.The fourth paper exploits a natural experiment setting generated by the credit crunch occurred in the UK in the2007.The economic turmoil has negatively influenced the private sector,while public sector employees have not been directly hit by the crisis.This shock–through the rise of the unemployment rate and the increasing labor market uncertainty–has generated an exogenous variation in the opportunity cost of maternity leave in private sector labor force.This paper identifies the different responses.

Prima Facie: four facets of gender bias in personnel selection.

Recent findings have highlighted a ‘perfection bias’, that is women being evaluated on more criteria than men in the workplace (Moscatelli et al., 2020; Prati et al., 2019). However, these studies have not considered faces as stimuli, even if facial first impressions can affect several real-world outcomes (Todorov et al., 2015). On this basis, the present research aimed to verify the presence of a perfection bias at face perception level, employing for the first time all the four facets of the fundamental dimensions of social judgments (i.e., competence, dominance, morality, sociability; Abele et al., 2016) and attractiveness (Hosoda et al., 2003) as evaluation criteria of applicants’ hireability. Four experiments were conducted (total N = 645), employing a gender-neutral position (Study 1) as well as managerial positions (Study 2, 3, 4) and recruiting Italian and British students (Study 1, 2) as well as British workers (Study 3, 4). Results of Study 1 confirmed that male applicants were evaluated only on their facial competence, while female applicants were evaluated on all the other facial traits. However, the other three studies showed a different and unexpected pattern: besides facial attractiveness and competence considered equally important for both male and female applicants, facial dominance was considered as more important in evaluating women, while facial morality and sociability were considered as more important in evaluating men. Hence, results highlighted a sort of ‘deficit bias’, so that counter stereotypic traits in which men and women are believed weak (Fiske, 1998) were more relevant for their hireability.