This phenomenological dissertation study aimed to explore how agency is exerted beyond hegemonic masculinities in engineering and illuminated the influences of a discipline's culture on masculine thinking and being. Moreover, this study, guided by Black feminism, epistemologically and theoretically, moves Black masculinities scholarship and…

This qualitative research explores the effects of a gendered educational organization on female leaders at the district office and building leadership level. In explaining the theoretical framework of gendered organizational structures, the literature review describes how inequitable access to power within education produces excessive challenges…

This research utilizes an Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis design to investigate female senior student affairs officers (SSAOs) as they experience and implement gendered communication practices in the higher education workplace. Research regarding female SSAO interactions are absent from discourse on gendered communication and no…

The introduction of the virtual work environment has resulted in the creation of a new work structure where interaction between employees and leaders occurs through technological innovations such as teleconferencing, emails, and text messages. The absence of physical workspace has also created a diverse work environment with people from various…

For this study, empathy was defined as not only understanding and sharing another's mental state, but also responding from a perspective more closely resembling the observed rather than the observer. Based on evidence suggesting relationships between reading and empathy, between empathy and gender, and between reading and gender, the current study…

College-aged women expect to disrupt their future careers, earn less, and be responsible for more household and childcare chores than their future spouses. This unequal division of labor has been linked to inequality in the workforce between women and men with women earning less and being concentrated in low pay, low prestige occupations. The…

Informed by critical discourse analysis, this purpose of this study was to examine presidential transitions in the U.S. van Leeuwen's Social Actor Approach was used as the conceptual framework to understand how texts are used to recreate, shape and transform a social practice, such as college and university presidential leadership during times of…

This study's purpose was to compare the lived experiences of doctoral women studying Education, a prototypically female field, with women studying Engineering, a prototypically male field to illustrate the phenomenon of doctoral degree progress in the two fields. Using critical feminist theory and Valian's (1999) concept of gender schemas, this…

This narrative inquiry explored how transgender college students construct, experience, and make meaning of gender. Gender is not constructed or understood in isolation; it is therefore essential to consider how personal cognition intersects with and is influenced by an internal sense of self and relationships with others when exploring how…

This dissertation contains two studies, which are intended to expand our current knowledge about girls with ASD without intellectual disability. The first study examined sex-differences in ASD symptom endorsement and coexisting internalizing and externalizing behaviors. The second study explored the social behaviors of boys and girls with ASD at…

This study investigates adults' ability to change their phonetic systems in perception and production, specifically upon exposure to a new dialect in adulthood. It further addresses the relative importance of binary biological sex and socially constructed gender in predicting an individual's sociolinguistic variation. Perception and production…