The Effects of Information Layout, Display Mode, and Gender Difference on the User Interface Design of Mobile Shopping Applications

Online shopping has revolutionized our daily lives in the modern era. We can purchase needed goods on mobile shopping applications (apps) anytime and anywhere without leaving home. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have become increasingly dependent on various mobile shopping activities. However, the visual design of the shopping app interface often affects the user's interactive experience and the efficiency of browsing product information. In addition, gender differences are also worth being considered in the shopping interface design process. To achieve the goal, the research conducted a user study (N=40) of a 2× 2 x 2 mixed factorial design (i.e., information layout x display mode x gender difference). Each participant performed four tasks during the experiment. The authors measured the task completion time, collected the subjective responses from the SUS and the 7-point Likert scale questionnaire, and interviewed participants. The results revealed that: (1) females perform faster in lighter mode when searching for information location, while males perform faster in darker mode. (2) The information layout affects the user's visual search performance and subjective evaluation;females prefer the list style, but men prefer the matrix style. (3) Participants (both males and females) perceived matrix style as more popular than list style in dark mode;however, the result was reversed in light mode. The findings generated from the research can serve as a good reference for the development of user experience in the user interface design of mobile shopping apps. © 2013 IEEE.

The knowledge map of gender equality in cross-cultural communication: A bibliometric approach.

It is urgent to solve the gender issues in global cross-cultural communication. Countries worldwide should responsible for achieving gender equality (SDG5). Hence, the study aims to portray the knowledge map of the gender issue in intercultural communication to explore the research status and future potential. The study used CiteSpace to conduct a bibliometric method within 2728 English articles on cross-cultural communication and gender equality topics from the Web of Science (WoS). After cluster analysis and time series analysis, this study emphasis the continued attention and increasing trend of publications and elaborates on the critical authors, institutions, and countries of research on this issue. The results introduced Putnick as the dominant author contributed to the topic. The University of Oxford ranked the top1 in the institution cooperation relationship. Europe countries and the United States have made major contributions and influenced Asian and African countries, such as Burkina Faso, North Macedonia, and Kosovo. Gender issues in Asia and Africa are getting much attention. The keyword clusters formed by the authors' cooperation include gender equality, life satisfaction, network analysis, and alcohol use. In addition, childbirth technology, patient safety competition, life satisfaction, capital safety, and sex difference are the key word clustering results of institutional cooperation. At the level of national cooperation, internet addition, risk sexual behavior, covid-19 pandemic and suicidal idea have become the main keywords The results of keyword cluster analysis show that gender role attribute, psychological properties, dating policy, professional fulfillment, and entrepreneurial intention have become the main topics in the current research. The research frontier analysis reflects the importance of gender, women and health. The research on self-efficacy, diversity, image, life satisfaction and choice has become the trend of cross-cultural communication and gender issues. Furthermore, abundant achievement emerged in the subjects of Psychology, Education, Sociology, and Business economics. Geography, Language and Literature, Medicine, and Health industries also have been highly influential in recent years. Therefore, the conclusion suggests the studies of gender issues can be further deepened into more authors, areas, subject and other multiple cooperation sectors.

Navigating Political Tensions over Schooling: Findings from the Fall 2022 American School District Panel Survey

Public schooling has always been politically fraught, but current disagreements over issues related to race, sexuality, gender, and COVID-19 have reached a tipping point. According to this report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education and RAND, half of school system leaders say that these disagreements are disrupting schooling. Almost one in three district leaders also said their educators had received verbal or written threats about politically controversial topics since fall 2021. The findings come from surveys issued to 300 district and charter network leaders and interviews with superintendents. Their responses shed light on how political polarization has affected classrooms and how districts are responding. This report presents results from the fall 2022 survey of the American School District Panel (ASDP). The ASDP is a research partnership between RAND and CRPE. The panel also collaborates with several other education organizations, including the Council of the Great City Schools and Kitamba, to help improve outcomes for students throughout the United States.

Designing "Virtual Social Europe Days" -- An International Collaborative Seminar across Closed Borders

"Social Europe Days" is a collaborative four-day international seminar held yearly near Brussels, Belgium, by a network of ten European universities from eight different countries. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the seminar had to be offered virtually and redesigned. The final design included synchronous and asynchronous activities, informal and formal interactions, and a focus on empathy for the existential problems faced by participating students and faculty during the pandemic. This article describes the design challenges, the design choices and decisions that led to the virtual seminar design, and reflections based on lead faculty notes, member checking, and student evaluations.

Parenthood in a Crisis 2.0: Motherhood in the Tension between Homeschooling and Home Office--A Comparison after 1 Year of the Pandemic

The contact restrictions and closures of schools and childcare facilities in Germany in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic have presented families and parents with new challenges that have been accompanied by different (health) burdens and reinforce already existing gender differences in the division of tasks in families, especially with regard to care work. Women and mothers show themselves to be more burdened in the various dimensions of health in the course of the pandemic than men and fathers. In particular, the psychosocial dimensions of subjective health, especially the general experience of strain, stress, exhaustion and anxiety, increased again among women and mothers in the second lockdown. Reasons can be seen in a reinforcement of the unequal distribution of care work that already existed before the pandemic, as well as in a stronger mental load among women and mothers.

Gendered Effects of COVID-19 School Closures: Pakistan Case Study. GIRL Center Research Brief No. 12

This brief summarizes a case study conducted to assess the gendered impacts of COVID-19 school closures on adolescent girls and boys in three districts in the province of Punjab in Pakistan. Data as well as discussions and interviews with adolescents, teachers, and parents shed light on difficulties in accessing and adjusting to remote learning, learning loss, deterioration of behaviors and health, and other effects. Based on these findings and further reflections by stakeholders on the successes and gaps of mitigation measures, the case study proposes recommendations for improved teacher training, digital access, alternative learning options, and a gendered focus in interventions. [This brief was prepared with the support of Iram Kamran, Tahira Parveen, Rehan Niazi, Maqsood Sadiq, Fatima Azeem, Emily EunYoung Cho, and Karen Austrian.]

Gendered Effects of COVID-19 School Closures: Bangladesh Case Study. GIRL Center Research Brief No. 9

This brief summarizes a case study conducted to assess the gendered impacts of COVID-19 school closures on adolescent girls and boys in three districts in the province of Punjab in Pakistan. Data as well as discussions and interviews with adolescents, teachers, and parents shed light on difficulties in accessing and adjusting to remote learning, learning loss, deterioration of behaviors and health, and other effects. Based on these findings and further reflections by stakeholders on the successes and gaps of mitigation measures, the case study proposes recommendations for improved teacher training, digital access, alternative learning options, and a gendered focus in interventions. [This brief was prepared with the support of Eashita Farzana Haque, Natalie Wyss, Emily EunYoung Cho, and Karen Austrian.]

Pandemic Resurrection: Making Gendered Citizenship Visible in a "Postfeminist" Era

The pandemic resurrected gender as a central categorization of citizenship. COVID-19 reminds us that gender oppression continues in its traditional, materialist formulations to structure our economic, civic, and political lives. Postfeminism has diversified feminist discourses, and at times been used as a temporal claim -- the "post" signifying the diminishing need for feminist theory or activism in light of advancements in gender equality. We use postfeminism in a genealogical and critical sense which encompasses the changes in feminisms and enunciates various contradictions that apply to generations of people. The conditions of COVID-19 prompt us to analyze what Stéphanie Genz aptly names boom and bust postfeminism. This analysis generates two implications for philosophers of education working in areas of gender and political identity.

Gender and Intersectionality in Business and Human Rights Scholarship

In this article, we explore what intersectionality, as an analytic tool, can contribute to business and human rights (BHR) scholarship. To date, few BHR scholars have explicitly engaged in intersectional analysis. While gender analysis of BHR issues remains crucial to expose inequality in business activity, we argue that engagement with intersectionality can enrich and support this and other BHR scholarship. Intersectional approaches allow us to move beyond single-axis analysis, contest simplistic representations about gender issues and expose the complexity of human relations. It draws our attention to structures that sustain disadvantage such as racism, colonialism, social and economic marginalization and systematic discrimination. Moreover, intersectionality emphasizes the need to centre the contributions of those who have been marginalized. It can be used to challenge the legitimacy of the state and support subaltern, decolonized or postcolonial, including indigenous, perspectives. Adopting an intersectional approach can help problematize the neoliberal capitalist system and its constructs, in which the BHR normative framework is embedded, calling into question the reification of economic growth and its impact on individuals, communities and the planet. We must, however, remain cautious of attempts to co-opt intersectionality in the service of neoliberalism and remain conscious of our own privilege and discursive practices.

Border Management and Gender Issues in sub-Saharan Africa’s Cross-Border Trade under COVID-19

The study is an analysis of border management in relation to the gender structure of cross-border trade in sub-Saharan Africa. It is partly a response to recent policy briefs of the United Nations on gender issues under COVID-19. The study adopted a historical approach and combined data from personal fieldwork with those from both published and unpublished works. It posits that there still exists gross gender imbalance in the region’s cross-border trade and that the agencies in charge of border control can do more to minimise the imbalance. One of its key findings is that policies protecting small-scale cross-border commerce constitute one means of increasing the participation of women and therefore reducing gender imbalance in the system. Among its recommendations is the adoption of relevant initiatives of regional organisations and international agencies that have given gender issues in cross-border trade a priority and embarked on relevant fieldwork on the way forward.

Relating supervisor interpersonal emotion management- and task-oriented leadership to adaptive performance: a moderated-mediation model incorporating trust and gender

Purpose>The authors incorporated leadership and gender theories with research on trust to propose a model relating interpersonal emotion management (IEM, a type of relational leadership) and task-oriented (T-O) leadership to follower adaptive performance. The authors also examine the indirect effect of IEM and T-O on adaptive performance via trust and the possible moderating role of gender on these relationships.Design/methodology/approach>The authors tested this model using a sample of 314 workers who rated their direct leaders (supervisors).Findings>Overall, results supported the model for IEM as it was directly and indirectly related (via trust) to adaptive job performance (even after controlling for transformational leadership) and these relationships were more positive for women leaders. T-O leadership was related to adaptive job performance as expected but was unrelated to trust or, via trust, to adaptive performance. Findings also suggest that women direct leaders may garner more trust and adaptive performance from followers by engaging in higher levels of IEM, while also not experiencing backlash for engaging in the more agentic T-O behaviors during a crisis.Practical implications>Despite an emphasis on women's relational leadership during a crisis, the authors findings show organizations are best served by ambidextrous leaders who can manage the emotions and tasks of their followers and that both women and men can engage in these leadership styles without penalty.Originality/value>Much research regarding women's leadership advantage during a crisis is based on political leaders or has been conducted in lab settings. Further, it has focused on attitudes toward the women leaders rather than their performance. Research has also not considered both IEM along with the possible backlash women may experience for engaging in T-O leadership.

Catalyzing action on HIV/SRH integration: lessons from Kenya, Malawi, and Zimbabwe to spur investment.

The HIV pandemic has long revealed the inequities and fault lines in societies, one of the most tenacious being the pandemic's disproportionate impact on adolescent girls and young women. In east and southern Africa, renewed global action is needed to invigorate an effective yet undervalued approach to expanding HIV prevention and improving women's health: integration of quality HIV and sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services. The urgency of advancing effective integration of these services has never been clearer or more pressing. In this piece, national health officials from Kenya, Malawi, and Zimbabwe and global health professionals have joined together in a call to catalyze actions by development partners in support of national strategies to integrate HIV and SRH information and services. This agenda is especially vital now because these adolescent girls and young women are falling through the cracks due to the cascading effects of COVID-19 and disruptions in both SRH and HIV services. In addition, the scale-up of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) has been anemic for this population. Examining the opportunities and challenges of HIV/SRH integration implemented recently in three countries - Kenya, Malawi, and Zimbabwe - provides lessons to spur integration and investments there and in other nations in the region, aimed at improving health outcomes for adolescent girls and young women and curbing the global HIV epidemic. While gaps remain between strong national integration policies and program implementation, the experiences of these countries show opportunities for expanded, quality integration. This commentary draws on a longer comparative analysis of findings from rapid landscaping analyses in Kenya, Malawi, and Zimbabwe, which highlighted cross-country trends and context-specific realities around HIV/SRH integration.

Parental Burnout and the COVID-19 Pandemic: How Portuguese Parents Experienced Lockdown Measures.

Objective: This work aimed to analyze parental burnout (PB) and establish a comparison between the times before (Wave 1) and during (Wave 2) the COVID-19 pandemic. Background: The COVID-19 pandemic brought additional stress to families. The pandemic could be particularly difficult for parents experiencing parental burnout, a condition that involves four dimensions: an overwhelming sense of exhaustion, emotional distancing from the child, saturation or a loss of fulfillment with the parental role, and a sharp contrast between how parents used to be and how they see themselves now. Method: A quasi-longitudinal research design was adopted, comparing two cross-sectional studies among Portuguese parents (N = 995), with an interval of 2 years between each wave of data collection. Participants were surveyed voluntarily through an online questionnaire located on the institutional web platform of the universities involved in the study. Multivariate analysis of covariance was used to take into account the associations among variables, alongside controlling the possible confounding effects. Results: Parents have overall higher parental burnout scores in Wave 2 than Wave 1, with increased exhaustion, emotional distancing, and contrast, but decreased saturation. Although parental burnout levels remain higher for mothers across the two Waves, the growth is greater for fathers than for mothers. Conclusion: Reconciling childcare with paid work is a stressful and new experience for many fathers. However, results suggest that even amid a crisis, some parents had the opportunity to deeply bond with their children. Implications: We expect this work to encourage stakeholders to consider proper intervention strategies to address potential parental burnout. Also, initiatives that strengthen gender equity within parenting context are needed.

Women Garment Workers Face Huge Inequities in Global Supply Chain Factories Made Worse by COVID-19.

Women make up the large majority of workers in global supply chains, especially factories in the apparel supply chain. These workers face significant inequalities in wages, workplace hazards, and a special burden of gender-based violence and harassment. These "normal" conditions have been compounded by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has exacerbated long-standing structural inequities. Decades of well-financed "corporate social responsibility" programs have failed because they do not address the underlying causes of illegal and abusive working conditions. New initiatives in the past half-decade offer promise in putting the needs and rights of workers front and center. Occupational health and safety professionals can assist in the global effort to improve working and social conditions, and respect for the rights and dignity of women workers, through advocacy and action on the job, in their professional associations, and in society at large.