Flexible work arrangements and gender differences in research during the COVID-19 period in Zimbabwean higher learning institutions

This study sought to investigate the impact of COVID-19-induced flexible work arrangements (FWAs) on gender differences in research outputs during COVID-19. A mixed research methodology was used, focusing on higher learning institutions in Zimbabwe. Purposive sampling was applied to select 250 researchers from the 21 registered universities in Zimbabwe. The study's findings revealed that institutions of higher learning in Zimbabwe did not provide the necessary affordances to enable both male and female academics to work from home effectively. The study also established that FWAs were preferred and appreciated by both male and female academics. However, whilst both male and female academics performed their teaching responsibilities without incident, unlike males, females struggled to find time for research, thus affecting professional growth and development negatively for female academics. Cultural traditions were found to subordinate females to domestic and caregiving responsibilities unrelated to their professions. The findings raise questions on the feasibility of the much-recommended FWAs for future work on female academics' research careers. Thus, without the necessary systems and processes to support female researchers, FWAs can only widen the gender gap in research outputs. This study contributes to the Zimbabwean higher learning institutions' perspective on how FWAs' policies and practices could be re-configured to assist female researchers in enhancing their research outputs as well as their career growth.

Characterizing the Entities in Harmful Memes: Who is the Hero, the Villain, the Victim?

Memes can sway people's opinions over social media as they combine visual and textual information in an easy-to-consume manner. Since memes instantly turn viral, it becomes crucial to infer their intent and potentially associated harmfulness to take timely measures as needed. A common problem associated with meme comprehension lies in detecting the entities referenced and characterizing the role of each of these entities. Here, we aim to understand whether the meme glorifies, vilifies, or victimizes each entity it refers to. To this end, we address the task of role identification of entities in harmful memes, i.e., detecting who is the 'hero', the 'villain', and the 'victim' in the meme, if any. We utilize HVVMemes - a memes dataset on US Politics and Covid-19 memes, released recently as part of the CONSTRAINT@ACL-2022 shared-task. It contains memes, entities referenced, and their associated roles: hero, villain, victim, and other. We further design VECTOR (Visual-semantic role dEteCToR), a robust multi-modal framework for the task, which integrates entity-based contextual information in the multi-modal representation and compare it to several standard unimodal (text-only or image-only) or multi-modal (image+text) models. Our experimental results show that our proposed model achieves an improvement of 4% over the best baseline and 1% over the best competing stand-alone submission from the shared-task. Besides divulging an extensive experimental setup with comparative analyses, we finally highlight the challenges encountered in addressing the complex task of semantic role labeling within memes. © 2023 Association for Computational Linguistics.

Converging Crises and the Cost of Exclusion: Unveiling the Invisible Women of Sri Lanka's Economy

In Sri Lanka, womens labor force participation has never exceeded 35% in over three decades. As of 2022, the country was ranked 110 out of 146 countries in the World Economic Forums Gender Gap Index. The gaps in womens participation in the formal economy alongside womens limited political empowerment are two leading causes for the country to be lagging in such global gender equality indicators. At a large cost to the economy, the existence of archaic gender norms that promulgate womens unpaid care work often exclude women from the formal labor force. This paper dissects the socio-economic and socio-political factors that lead to the invisibility of women in Sri Lankas economy, while seeking to understand how such underlying causes have been aggravated within the precarity of the post-pandemic context. It is important, now more than ever, to recognize the invisibility of women in Sri Lankas formal economy, while bringing about a transformative vision with a multi-pronged approach to address existing gaps and challenges. With reference to key principles of feminist economics, including the theoretical foundations of Claudia Goldin, Nancy Folbre, and Diane Elson, among others, the paper will make a case for inclusivity and intersectionality in policy recommendations aimed at encouraging womens entry, active engagement, contribution, and retention in Sri Lankas economy. The paper reaches a conclusion that when women lead, participate, and benefit equally in all aspects of life, societies and economies will thrive, thereby contributing to sustainable development and inclusive economic growth.

Mapping the riskscape of using privately-owned short-term lets for specialist family violence crisis accommodation

COVID-19 has generated many problems and some opportunities in the housing market. The potential role of privately-owned short-term lets meeting specialist family violence crisis accommodation demand is one such opportunity. This paper engages with an important and increasing practice in the Australian context, of the utilisation of private housing stock as a component part of a public housing crisis response system, in this case explored in relation to domestic and family violence. In seeking to gain insights into the feasibility of this practice, this article will first frame mixed public/private accommodation provision as potentially overlapping relations between a thin territory of insufficient crisis infrastructure and a thick territory of commodified short-term let infrastructure. Second, this paper situates the potential of this intersection of mixed private/public responses in terms of riskscapes by unpacking how risk is perceived within these contested territories. The findings highlight tensions between both real and perceived understandings of safety, housing, wellbeing, economic and political risks. While there was some support for utilising short-term lets for crisis accommodation, barriers were revealed to adding thickness to the crisis accommodation space. Given increasing homelessness in Australia, diversifying crisis models could offer increased violence-prevention infrastructure to support women.

Research on the 6XS6 of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein

The 6XS6 is the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. The physiological role of the spike protein is relative to the respiratory syndrome coronavirus and has a stronger infect on the human body than the ancestor virus. The purification of the 6XS6 is in the homo sapiens cell by the affinity chromatography, PBS supplemented and Size Exclusion chromatography. At last, using the Cryo-Electron Microscopy to see the structure. This paper is using the D614G mutation to illustrate the structure of the 6XS6. The N-terminal domain and C-terminal domain of the 6XS6 protein are ALA27 and VAL1137. Furthermore, the mutation doesn't have the hydrogen bond because the Asp614 is substituted by the Gly614, and the molecule that interacts with the Ala 647 may occur. While the 6XS6 structure has lots of non-covalent and disulfide bonds. Comparing the structure of the 6XS6 and 6VXX, both are glycoproteins, have three monomers, have two subunits, and have the same category of expression and classification. The different conformations of the two structures can affect the binding ability with the ACE2. This paper can help the researchers to further understand the structure and function of the 6XS6 which can be used in future experiments. © 2023 SPIE.

Virtual team performance: E-leadership roles in the era of COVID-19

Purpose: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) situation has led to the emergence of virtual teams in all organizations, and the role of leadership has become more pertinent. The current research focuses on understanding the factors for better team performance in virtual teams. Based on the contingency perspective, the behavioral complexity in leadership (BCL) theory is the most appropriate as BCL requires the leader to demonstrate multiple contrasting leadership behaviors according to the situation. Both internal as well external roles were explored, which could facilitate better communication quality and role clarity to increase interpersonal trust and leadership effectiveness in the current crisis. Design/methodology/approach: Data were collected from employees who have worked in virtual teams during the crisis and who have experience of working in a virtual team environment. A total of 200 questionnaires were distributed, and 175 were received. A path model was built applying partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Findings: Communication quality has come as a partial mediator for the relationship between internal and external leadership roles and trust. Role clarity fully mediated the relationship between external leadership roles and conflict. Internal and external leadership roles showed a significant effect on leadership effectiveness, which were further related to team performance in virtual teams. Additionally, synchronous technology was used more by virtual teams. Research limitations/implications: The study did not examine cultural differences or cultural adaptation in virtual teams. Instead of the BCL theory, future research may apply attribute-based or relational-based theory to examine leadership roles in virtual team performance. Originality/value: Using the BCL theory, the current study contributes to an understanding of virtual team performance and the internal as well as external role of leaders. This is relevant in an environment of extreme ambiguity such as COVID-19. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

The Women's Role in the Resilience of Farmers' Households during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Gubugklakah Village, Poncokusumo District, Malang Regency

The cause of rural changes, in terms of demographic, technological developments, climate changes, and the Covid-19 pandemic potential to cause vulnerabilities, especially for women as individuals in household members. These must be responded with livelihood resilience by involving the women's role to contribute in the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. This study aims to (1) describe the vulnerabilities of farmers' households and (2) analyze women's role in household resilience through the use of livelihood assets during the Covid-19 pandemic. This research was conducted in Gubugklakah village, Malang regency as a tourist village affected by the closure of TNBTS tourist visits due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This research used the simple random sampling technique, with total sample of 64 women farmers. Data were analyzed using WarpPLS software. The results showed that farmers' households experienced several vulnerabilities by that the households' livelihood assets: natural, physic, human, social and financial capital can be optimized to achieve a degree of resilience. The women's role in resilience efforts is as the core of the household, because all financial cycles involve housewives' role, such as reducing consumption expenditures, selling jewelry assets, taking savings, involving in farm worker, and others.

Salary Survey: The Age of COVID

With large shift to decentralized strategies, industry roles appear set for change Our 2022 Clinical Research Industry Salary and Employee Satisfaction Survey Report, a biennial survey of clinical trials professionals, conducted with our survey partner SCORR Marketing, shows no overwhelming deviations this year from previous years. In Figure 1 on the facing page, you can see the various functional areas and, expectedly, a higher proportion of clinical operations respondents, as that is our core content focus. [...]75% of the respondents do not receive non-cash compensation such as a car, stock options, or mobile phones. In the first five to seven years, employee value increases much more quickly than 3% a year (a typical merit increase). "Because the leaving and onboarding process is time-consuming and costly for employers, why not look to increasing the base pay via merit increases for current employees?

Black women and girls: Racism and intersectional oppression

The duel systemic societal harms of the COVID-19 pandemic and violent racial injustice have reexposed centuries-long oppression and violence that affects Black people in the United States. These systemic harms, however, are not unilaterally distributed across racial lines, as Black women and girls endure intersectional oppression, including the unique amalgamation of racism and sexism. It is within these interlocking oppressions that sexual abuse flourishes. This chapter opens with critical visioning regarding how we understand inequality in social justice movements. It introduces scholarship on anti-Black racism, intersectional oppression, and Crenshaw's (1991) theories of intersectionality to frame the contextually oppressive experiences of Black women and girls. The chapter provides an application for examining intersectionality within the field of psychology. It details what such intersectional oppression can actually look like in the lives of Black women and girls. Finally, the chapter closes with summary bullet points of the main takeaway messages. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Building Strong Employer Brand via Electronics Word-of- Mouth in the New Normal

As the world comes to terms with the changes in work and workplace in the COVID-19 period and beyond, benefits offered to the employees and electronics word-of-mouth (eWOM) play a critical role in building a strong employer brand image. The global pandemic has forced us to adopt various digital practices to meet the challenge of social distancing at work. This paper argues that eWOM will play a mediating role between employment work experience (EWE) and employer brand image. This relationship is viewed through the lens of Social Exchange Theory. The paper presents a conceptual framework with stated propositions combining the resource based view with employer branding using eWOM as an influencer to achieve competitive advantage.

Masculinity and COVID-19: Symposium introduction

This article presents an introduction to the Symposium on Masculinity and COVID-19. In this symposium, the authors focus on how gender inequalities in particular have structured social life during this global pandemic. At all levels, gender is a central part of the story of COVID-19-from how people experience the disease to how national decisions have been shaped by cultures of manhood. And from the rate of disease, and how men respond to public health calls, to what homelife looks like for people during shutdown, and nationalistic political responses, masculinity has been a unique liability to the human population during this time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

THE ROLES OF SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCERS ON ONLINE FUNDRAISING IN INDONESIA

[...]this study aims to understand the roles of SMIs in fundraising activities, to identify the influencers' attributes which affect their followers' willingness to donate, and to explore the motivation of the followers to donate. [...]few studies use social media influencers and their attributes as an object. [...]the researchers are interested in using Rachel Vennya, who is an online celebrity, to engage with potential donors through her social media outlet and get them to make donations. [...]the aims of this study are to understand the roles of social media influencers in contributing to fundraising activities, to identify the influencer's attributes that affect the willingness of his/her followers to donate money and to discuss the motivation for the followers' intentions to donate. The influencers are potentially effective because they have some personal factors and content that is commonly preferred by people, proven by their large numbers of followers (Tafesse & Wood, 2021). [...]the researchers aim is to understand the roles of social media influencers in contributing to fundraising activities and to identify the influencers' attributes that affect the willingness of their followers to donate money. 2.

MASCULINIDAD HEGEMÓNICA, ROLES DE GÉNERO Y VIOLENCIA INTRAFAMILIAR EN PUEBLA-TLAXCALA, MÉXICO

El objetivo del artículo es analizar, desde la perspectiva de género, la incidencia de la masculinidad hegemónica y los roles de género estereotipados en la armonía familiar en la Zona Metropolitana de Puebla-Tlaxcala (ZMTP), donde se reporta un incremento de violencia durante el confinamiento por Covid-19 como resultado del reparto desigual en los quehaceres domésticos y el machismo en México. Es una investigación cualitativa donde se empleó el método de encuesta telefónica y descriptivo-exploratorio. Al final del trabajo, se evidencia que las tradiciones culturales y la normalización de la dominación masculina impiden la erradicación de los abusos en el hogar.Alternate :The objective of the article is to analyze, from the gender perspective, the incidence of hegemonic masculinity and stereotyped gender roles in family harmony where it refers to an increase in violence during confinement by Covid-19 in the Metropolitan Area Puebla-Tlaxcala (ZMTP) as a result of the unequal distribution of domestic chores and sexism in Mexico. It is a qualitative investigation where the method of telephone and descriptive-exploratory survey was used. At the end of the work, it shows that cultural traditions and the normalization of male domination prevent the eradication of abuse in the home.

Ear Talk Project: Participatory co-composition on YouTube and the Web

In this article, we present Ear Talk – a co-composition and live performance project that enables remote music collaboration through technologically mediated systems. The Ear Talk project currently exists in two distinct implementations, one that repurposes YouTube's live-streaming technology, and one that utilises a stand-alone website. Although Ear Talk was conceived prior to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the necessity for remote collaboration became more apparent during the lockdown, when a vast majority of live events and music concerts were cancelled. The Ear Talk project enables a socially distanced form of online musical collaboration and offers a platform through which to respond to such a crisis, and has grown to be adopted and presented by many different performing groups across the world. In addition to describing the technical implementations of these two systems, we discuss issues that arise from our participatory practice: from musical quality concerns in regard to social aesthetics and artistic ingenuity, to accessibility concerns when designing technologically mediated collaborative systems. Ear Talk embraces continuous musical loops as well as highly asynchronous (i.e., perpetual) collaborative paradigms among remote participants, which raises a conceptual inquiry as to which part of its sonic and social experience constitutes music in the end. Finally, we evaluate performer–audience relationships (i.e., hierarchical versus horizontal interactions) and the efficacy of the Ear Talk systems at enabling socially engaged co-composition.

Indirect and Direct Pedagogical Interaction of Teacher with Students in the Conditions of Electronic Learning and Their Performance of the Roles of "E-Teacher" and "E-Student"

The article presents the theoretical and empirical results of the study of the phenomenon "pedagogical interaction in e-learning". The direct pedagogical interaction of the e-teacher with e-students during e-learning was considered as mutual influence in the conditions of synchronous learning, and the indirect one - as mutual influence in the conditions of asynchronous learning. The pedagogical experiment was aimed at clarifying the attitude of various participants of the educational process, who perform the roles of e-teachers, e-students, e-teachers of elementary school, to direct and indirect pedagogical interaction during e-learning, which was organized both during the period of the spread of COVID-19 (1st period), and during the introduction of martial law on the territory of Ukraine as a result of Russian invasion (II period). According to the results of the pedagogical experiment, during the spread of COVID-19, e-students in asynchronous learning conditions felt psychological discomfort due to the lack of direct pedagogical interaction with the teacher. Also, the students had a slowdown in the pace of study material, a loss of motivation to study was observed. They constantly felt the desire to postpone the study of the educational material for later. During the introduction of martial law on the territory of Ukraine, e-students preferred synchronous learning. The presence of direct pedagogical interaction with others ('electronic teacher' and 'electronic students') had a positive effect on the psychological state of students, helped to maintain the pace of learning, learn new educational material faster and more efficiently, experience positive emotions, a sense of security, etc.

Unsupervised Numerical Information Extraction via Exploiting Syntactic Structures

Numerical information plays an important role in various fields such as scientific, financial, social, statistics, and news. Most prior studies adopt unsupervised methods by designing complex handcrafted pattern-matching rules to extract numerical information, which can be difficult to scale to the open domain. Other supervised methods require extra time, cost, and knowledge to design, understand, and annotate the training data. To address these limitations, we propose QuantityIE, a novel approach to extracting numerical information as structured representations by exploiting syntactic features of both constituency parsing (CP) and dependency parsing (DP). The extraction results may also serve as distant supervision for zero-shot model training. Our approach outperforms existing methods from two perspectives: (1) the rules are simple yet effective, and (2) the results are more self-contained. We further propose a numerical information retrieval approach based on QuantityIE to answer analytical queries. Experimental results on information extraction and retrieval demonstrate the effectiveness of QuantityIE in extracting numerical information with high fidelity.

A Moderated-Mediation Model of Work-Family Conflict in the COVID-19 Crisis: JMI

The COVID-19 pandemic and societal mitigation efforts (e.g., mandated quarantine and social distancing) inflicted mental and emotional strain on working parents navigating conflicting demands between the work and non-work interface. This research examines how organizational leaders can help employees cope with the additional stress of the crisis and reduce detrimental outcomes to their careers, families, and organizations. Utilizing stressor-strain theory, this study investigates the relationship between stressors (i.e., work-family conflict and role overload) and strain (i.e., turnover intentions) as a function of a relationally-influenced psychological state (i.e., trust in management) in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. Data analyzed from 393 working adults indicated that trust in management moderated (attenuated) the relationship between role overload and turnover intentions, and the interaction between role overload and trust in management mediated the relationship between work-family conflict and turnover intentions. This moderated-mediation model empirically validates how organizational leaders can help mitigate employee stress induced during crisis situations.

Blindness (review)

Before COVID, directors often deployed such elements to disrupt traditional theatre by staging site-specific pieces or having actors lip-sync recordings of absent others. Despite being forced to live in appalling conditions in an abandoned mental hospital with countless infected strangers, this resourceful woman never lost her vision or compassion. A central intercom announced that leaving the hospital would result in death.

Work-life balance satisfaction in crisis times: from luxury to necessity – The role of organization's responses during COVID-19 lockdown

PurposeThis study examines how satisfaction with work-life balance (WLB) in combination with satisfaction with organization's COVID-19 responses (SOCV19R) helps to enhance subjective well-being and performance during the lockdown due to COVID-19.Design/methodology/approachThe data of this time-lagged study were gathered through an online survey with three-waves between March and May 2020 in Spain (N = 167). Hierarchical multiple regression and PROCESS were used to test the hypotheses.FindingsDirect relationships between SOCV19R and subjective well-being and performance were not significant. Instead, SOCV19R increased employees' well-being and performance through a higher satisfaction with WLB (full mediation).Originality/valueThe novelty of this study is the evaluation of SOCV19R as a form of organizational support in times of crisis. This study suggests that a good organizational reaction to face a crisis such as the pandemic, encourages employees' WLB and helps them to boost their well-being and performance. It may be concluded that work-life balance (WLB) in Spain was seen as a luxury in good times and turned out to be a necessity in bad times. The present study recommends practical implications and provides lessons for human resource management for future crises or similar work conditions.

Overcoming the social stigma of losing a pet: Considerations for counseling professionals

During the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals found themselves spending more time with their pets and relied on them to maintain normalcy and provide security during isolation. Pets play a significant role in the lives of their caregivers, taking on different attachment roles depending on the needs of the individual. Grieving the death of a pet continues to be disenfranchised in society. Perceptions of judgment can lead individuals to grieve the loss without social support. The present review builds on research in the field of pet loss and human bereavement and factors in the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on human-animal attachment A goal of the present review is to provide counselors with perspectives to consider in their practice when working with clients who have attachments to their companion animals and to acknowledge the therapeutic benefits of working through the grief process to resolution as a way to continue the bond with a deceased pet. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)