Seven years after actor Alyssa Milano’s tweet launched the #MeToo movement into the global consciousness, attitudes towards sexual harassment and assault have shifted in many countries. A new study shows that the movement’s impact doesn’t stop there. The findings are published in the journal Management Science.
INSEAD professors Frédéric Godart and David Dubois, alongside Clément Bellet of Erasmus University Rotterdam, found that #MeToo triggered far-reaching changes in consumer behavior. Sales of stereotypically feminine shoes like high heels dropped significantly weeks after the #MeToo movement swept the media in October 2017.
The researchers analyzed data from a leading fashion retailer across 32 OECD countries, focusing on women’s footwear purchases between January 2017 and December 2018. They observed a 14.4% decrease in stockouts for stereotypically feminine shoes, such as pink high-heeled pumps or red platforms, compared to more neutral styles.
This average effect is driven by markets more exposed to the #MeToo movement—in particular the Nordic countries and France—where stockouts of such products fell by 25%.
That’s not all. The team also found consistent declines in stockouts for pink or red items for three women’s product categories: lingerie, dresses and handbags.
To explore the underlying reasons for this shift in preferences, the researchers surveyed approximately 1,000 women in the United States. Their results indicate that exposure to #MeToo-related content led to a significant decrease in demand for high-heeled shoes. This finding suggests a rebellion against traditional gender stereotypes, rather than a response to feelings of threat or empowerment, that turned women off starkly feminine products.
Marketing in the post-MeToo world
The study’s implications extend far beyond the fashion industry, highlighting the potential for social movements to impact consumer markets in unexpected ways.
The researchers recommend that brands that rely heavily on gender-based marketing strategies—”pink it or shrink it” in industry speak—reassess their approach. Brands need to be more attuned to shifts in social norms and values, as these can quickly influence consumer preferences.
The authors also recommend that companies conduct brand audits to assess how their products intersect with consumer identities and stereotypes, and how social movements may affect their brand value.
The research provides valuable insights for businesses operating in an era where consumer identity is a major driver of purchasing decisions. As social movements continue to shape public discourse and consumer preferences, firms that adapt quickly to these changes may find themselves better positioned for long-term success.
More information:
Clément S. Bellet et al, Do Consumers Respond to Social Movements? Evidence from Gender-Stereotypical Purchases After #MeToo, Management Science (2024). DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2022.02352
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Seven years on, study reveals #MeToo’s unexpected impact on consumer behavior (2024, October 1)
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Symbiotic relationships between plants and fungi have been described as a kind of economic market, with plants trading carbon for nutrients—but that analogy is flawed according to new research that suggests we need to rethink how these environmentally important systems work. Credit: Rebecca Bunn
Every year, plants move 3.58 gigatons of carbon to mycorrhizal fungi, their underground partners—enough, in fact, that if it were ice, it would cover 112 million NHL hockey rinks. However, a dominant scientific theory explaining that huge transfer as an economic market of sorts is likely incorrect, according to a new paper by a group of experts including a University of Alberta researcher.
According to the market perspective, carbon is traded for nutrients delivered by the fungi—an exchange of resources between partners, governed by economic principles.
However, the new research suggests rethinking how these environmentally important systems work.
“There’s an assumption among many researchers that the exchange of carbon for nutrients is directly coupled, and that the amounts transferred are based on market economics. Markets are human constructs that don’t seem to apply here,” says Justine Karst, associate professor in the U of A’s Faculty of Agricultural, Life & Environmental Sciences and a co-author on the paper. “We found no evidence of trade.”
The work is published in the journal New Phytologist.
Misapplying economic models hampers understanding of mycorrhizas—mutual relationships between plants and underground fungi—which in turn can lessen our ability to fully understand how the fungi function, including their roles in plant growth and carbon sequestration, she warns.
“This economic analogy may have closed our eyes to other possibilities for the function of mycorrhizas,” says Karst.
In mycorrhizas, resources travel in opposite directions; mycorrhizal fungi receive carbon, in the form of lipids and sugars, while plants receive nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen.
This flow of resources has commonly been framed through what are known as biological market models, as a way to understand how mycorrhizas maintain this mutual relationship over eons, Karst says.
At the other extreme is a recent alternative theory, called the “Surplus C” hypothesis, that suggests plants often produce more sugars than can be used for growth and that mycorrhizal fungi are a sink that receives this surplus carbon.
“This means that how much carbon is transferred to a fungus is independent of nutrient delivery to the plant,” Karst explains.
After reviewing and analyzing evidence from an extensive range of scientific studies, Karst and her co-authors did not find strong support for biological market models.
“We found no empirical evidence of direct regulation, and reject the idea that ‘prices’— the number of units of carbon per unit of nutrient—regulate carbon transfer to fungi. Instead, we found more support for the theory that carbon is drawn to the strongest sink—namely mycorrhizal fungi,” she says.
Along with that, their review indicated that mycorrhizal plant growth was linked to nutrient uptake rather than carbon transfer, meaning that it is not the amount of carbon transferred to mycorrhizal fungi that reduces plant growth, but it is the amount of nutrients delivered—or not delivered—by the fungus. In this sense, the carbon transferred to mycorrhizal fungi is not costly to the plant.
Collectively, the findings are more consistent with the Surplus C theory than with market models, the researchers conclude.
The observations highlight the importance of looking past the limitations of economic models to learn more about key interactions between plants and mycorrhizal fungi that could, for example, potentially benefit the environment, Karst adds. “A substantial amount of carbon flows from plants to fungi and fungi are a large pool of soil carbon, so there’s a need to understand how this flow works to leverage it in sequestering that carbon.”
Their review revealed a need for further research to more closely explore foundational questions about what determines the transfer of carbon from plants to mycorrhizal fungi, and how to fully measure its carbon sink strength, Karst notes.
And while a mechanism that directly links carbon and nutrient transfer could one day be uncovered, until then, the researchers “urge caution” in characterizing the relationship in economic terms, she adds.
“The idea of markets is familiar to us, but the inner workings of mycorrhizas are not, so we need to stay open to other ways of understanding how these systems work.”
More information:
Rebecca A. Bunn et al, What determines transfer of carbon from plants to mycorrhizal fungi?, New Phytologist (2024). DOI: 10.1111/nph.20145
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Are plants and fungi trading carbon for nutrients? Not likely, say researchers (2024, October 1)
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U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who sponsored the bill in the Senate, described free AM radio as “an essential tool in emergencies, a crucial part of our diverse media ecosystem, and an irreplaceable source for news, weather, sports, and entertainment for tens of millions of listeners.”
As a media historian, I welcome hearing AM radio described as a public utility, particularly after decades of free-market orthodoxy dominating discussions of its fate.
The story of a new medium
When AM—short for “amplitude modulation“—arrived at the turn of the 20th century, it was championed as a revolutionary technology that could bring a nation together in time and space. Over the next decade, engineers developed new technologies such as uniwave arc transmitters to send the signal and vacuum tubes to help amplify it upon reception, so that first voices and then music could be heard over AM broadcasts.
While early radio amateurs harnessed its potential to connect and inform, the era of unlicensed amateur broadcasting ended during World War I due to fears that the new medium might be misused to spread foreign propaganda or divisive content.
After KDKA went on the air in Pittsburgh as the first licensed commercial station in November 1920, AM radio stations popped up across the nation, serving local audiences a wide variety of formats. Houses were now filled with the sounds of news, baseball games, radio dramas or crooners singing popular music. Radios flew off the shelves to meet the demand.
Because listening stokes the imagination in unique ways, broadcasters—and the advertisers that paid to access audiences—found new ways of using radio to capture listeners’ attention.
By the 1930s, AM radio was a dominant form of mass media in America, served by networks of stations—NBC, CBS and Mutual—with both local and syndicated programming. While commercial interests saw radio as a means to generate profit, a growing chorus of advocates viewed radio as a public utility that should be made to serve the public interest.
That public conversation inspired the Communications Act of 1934 and the creation of the Federal Communications Commission, which was charged with ensuring that licensed stations abide by certain standards.
These standards flowed from an ongoing debate at the FCC about the public interest obligations of radio broadcasters. In the late 1930s, the agency started requiring licensed stations to remain neutral in matters of news and politics. The “no-editorializing spirit” of the Mayflower decision compelled the FCC in 1949 to establish its fairness doctrine later that year.
The emerging regulatory oversight helped check America’s first radio demagogue, Father Coughlin, whose conspiratorial tirades were heard by some 30 million listeners. Over the course of several years, Coughlin’s refusal to comply with regulatory guidelines—combined with fear of sponsor backlash—caused him to be dropped by radio networks.
Radio comes along for the ride
The sounds of AM radio started accompanying drivers in their cars in the late 1920s.
The vehicles of that era featured closed cabins that protected drivers and passengers from weather and noise. People who listened to music on their home radios embraced the idea of listening while driving. Companies such as the Automobile Radio Corporation promoted expensive Transitone radios that ran on a 6-volt battery with the tagline, “You’re never alone with a Transitone.”
In 1930, General Motors began installing radios in its new Cadillacs. Chrysler advertised luxury cars factory-wired for owners to install Transitones. Now, drivers traveling on America’s vast and growing national highway systems could do so while listening to the radio.
As the decade progressed, factory-installed radios—mounted on the floor, with controls on the dash and speakers above the windshield—were touted as a way to enhance the driving experience. As a Philco radio commercial from 1934 put it, “You wouldn’t be without a radio at home—why be without one in your car?”
But now, drivers had a different technology they could tune into: FM radio.
Short for “frequency modulation,” this spectrum—though it required more power—was less prone to static and offered better sound quality. The early days of FM were characterized by innovation and vibrant local programming. But that gradually ceded to commercial pressures as big media companies consolidated their power. Slowly but surely, music programming shifted away from AM to FM.
By the mid-1980s, the once robust conversation about radio serving the public interest was muted by lobbyists and politicians who pushed for deregulation that would boost profits. One by one, rules requiring broadcasters to devote set amounts of time to public affairs programming, rules that limited the number of stations in a media market that a company could own to seven, and news and public affairs programming guidelines such as the fairness doctrine all fell like pawns to an industry fixated on profit.
The FCC and Federal Trade Commission shrugged as big corporations bought up and consolidated radio stations, reducing local programming and replacing it with syndicated content beamed in by satellite.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 gave it all away, effectively ceding decisions about the future of AM and FM radio to corporate interests and asking almost nothing in return.
Over the next two decades, America’s radio stations would be gobbled up by a handful of conglomerates such as Clear Channel, now known as iHeartMedia. The majority of AM stations, especially those in rural areas, where people spend a lot of time listening in their cars, prioritized right-wing talk shows.
And though radio demagogues such as Rush Limbaugh and his many imitators salvaged the profitability of AM radio, there are huge swaths of rural America where the captured spectrum serves as a delivery system for monotone partisan programming that sounds a lot like Father Coughlin in the 1930s. Instead of providing farm reports, emergency information and local news to cultivate an informed citizenry, now most corporate-owned AM stations air divisive, grievance-filled infotainment that serves the needs of ownership.
On the road, again
It doesn’t have to be that way.
The FCC once asked stations to serve the public interest in exchange for their licenses, a regulatory quid pro quo that generated a broader range of programming that better served communities.
It’s possible to take that road again. Just look at Low Power FM community radio, which emerged as a nonprofit answer to industry homogenization designed to serve the public interest.
Freed from corporate control, homegrown Low Power FM community radio boosts local democracy by offering a microphone to local musicians and a diverse range of commentators, voices often denied access to commercial radio. Stations can apply for Low Power FM community radio licenses; though the reception range is very limited, the number of stations serving communities ranging from Iuka, Mississippi, to the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon, has doubled in the past decade to over 1,500.
AM radio could be used similarly.
If Congress and the FCC are going to frame AM radio as an essential public service, I believe it should once again push for public interest standards in exchange for a license. Only then will AM radio live up to the spirit animating the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act.
In other words, if the U.S. government is going to tell automakers to install AM radios as a matter of public interest, shouldn’t they also ask broadcasters to demonstrate they are worthy of the public’s trust?
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Congress is trying to force carmakers to keep AM radio—how this could be an opportunity to correct past mistakes (2024, October 1)
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Out of 225 people awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, only five have been women. This is a very small number, and certainly smaller than 50%—the percent of women in the human population.
Three of the five Nobel Prizes in physics awarded to women have been in the past decade. As a woman physicist, seeing three women join the cadre of Nobel laureates in Physics in just a handful of years is beyond exciting.
Nobel Prize-winning work
The three woman physicists receiving Nobel Prize honors in the 21st century are Donna Strickland, who won in 2018, Andrea Ghez, who won in 2020, and Anne L’Huillier, who won in 2023. All three made important contributions to science.
Ghez, an astrophysicist from UCLA, got the Nobel for her work observing stars, especially those near the center of the Milky Way.
L’Huillier, a physicist from the University of Lund, received the 2023 Nobel, also for her work with lasers.
What are some common threads in their lives?
Being a minority in a research field isn’t easy. Sticking with it long enough to have a storied career, as the three winners have, is a huge accomplishment. Since winning the prize, the three winners have recounted their research journeys and offered advice to the next generation of physicists in a variety of interviews. I’ve noticed a few common threads.
A career in academia is a long haul. All three women emphasize the timescale involved in going from first steps in their research to being recognized by the Nobel committee. L’Huillier refers to it as a long journey.
While winning a Nobel may come with some glamor and notoriety, if you are after a quick reward, this career may not be the right line of work. It now takes an average of 28 years between publishing a discovery and receiving a Nobel in physics.
You cannot predict which basic science topic is going to lead to a Nobel—nor, for that matter, which will end up having any kind of impact. The best an early-career physicist can do is to explore different topics, try new things, lean into discomfort and find something they’re passionate about.
All three women talk about how many times they ran into difficulties. Before she got the chirped pulse amplification method to work, Strickland had started to wonder whether she would ever get a Ph.D., having hit so many dead ends. The first time Ghez proposed the project that would lead to her celebrated work, she was turned down.
All three of them thought of quitting at some point. So don’t be discouraged if you are turned down or if others say you cannot do it.
Ghez recommends seeing experiments that don’t work not as failures but as opportunities.
Movies and TV shows paint a picture of the scientist as a social misfit, an individual working alone in the laboratory. But that’s not how it works. All these women work in teams.
“Science is a team sport. You need to know what you don’t know and seek help for what is missing,” says Strickland.
Seeking help often leads to collaborations with other research groups. As Ghez puts it, “Science is a very social enterprise.”
And above all else, the three medalists referred to luck as an essential ingredient for success. The world is full of physicists just as dedicated and just as smart who don’t get the Nobel.
Themes specific to women
Strickland, Ghez and L’Huillier are always asked about their experiences being a woman in science and their views on diversity and equity in physics. All of them emphasize the importance of diversity.
They also mention the importance of a support network, especially for women. Having a group of people you trust to cheer you on can help when you feel discouraged.
Strickland left the standard academic path after a postdoctoral fellowship to become a technician so she could be close to her husband and start her family. L’Huillier walked away from her job and moved from France to Sweden, where she was unemployed for a while. Ghez waited years to have kids. There is no single trajectory. But time away from research can give you fresh perspectives and inspiration to take the next steps.
They also talk about how diversity enriches the research itself. A team that is open to different points of view is more creative. It is also more fun to work in.
These women have pointed out that the culture for women in science has improved over their careers and they are optimistic about the future. If you calculate the percent of Nobel Prizes in physics awarded to women in the past decade alone, then about 1 in 10 Nobel recipients have been women. To me, this indicates that, indeed, things may be getting better.
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Only 5 women have won the Nobel Prize in physics—recent winners share advice for young women in the field (2024, October 1)
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Despite being widely popular, moths, and their larvae in particular, are not always welcome in forests, parks and gardens. Some moth species constitute a real threat to forests when they appear en masse.
In the past, they have stripped entire deciduous and coniferous stands bare in many places in Germany. Forest pest monitoring is consequently particularly important to track their reproduction and to protect forests from greater damage.
Research scientists from the Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation and Automation IFF are developing a digital, automated pheromone trap, together with the Nordwestdeutsche Forstliche Versuchsanstalt in the DiMoTrap project, which could significantly reduce the labor of hitherto complex manual monitoring for forest protection.
Fraunhofer IFF research scientists and the Nordwestdeutsche Forstliche Versuchsan-stalt’s forest protection division are particularly interested in gypsy, nun, pine beauty, pinetree lappet, winter and spring usher species of moths in the project DiMoTrap (short for Digital Moth Trap).
Sensitive forest ecosystems become more vulnerable, particularly when the sun shines and it does not rain—pest insects, such as gypsy moths and the like, can proliferate in the forest and cause tremendous damage.
Nun moth larvae, for instance, eat the needles or leaves of infested trees and strip them bare when they appear en masse. A reliable forecast of mass reproduction makes it possible to take suitable actions to protect forests from greater damage in good time.
Insect monitoring with pheromone traps has proven particularly effective. Conventional trap systems are not optimal for monitoring, though, since their maintenance is very labor-intensive. This is why research scientists are developing automated pheromone traps in the DiMoTrap project that monitor pest moth species.
The goal is to simplify large-area monitoring substantially and to reduce labor significantly.
A new system intended to replace standard pheromone traps
“The Nordwestdeutsche Forstliche Versuchsanstalt manages some 400 monitoring stations for the nun and pine beauty moth alone. Every year, they are each equipped with three pheromone traps from April to May (pine beauty) and from July to September (nun moth). They are hung for periods of up to three months and have to be serviced by hand and the pests counted once a week,” says Dr. Ina Ehrhardt, research scientist at Fraunhofer IFF in Magdeburg.
“Climate change, which is exacerbating the proliferation of pest insects, is making monitoring increasingly more complex.” Another problem: The pheromone bait used, which attracts the moths and varies depending on the species, does not release a constant level of pheromones over the entire period.
The new DiMoTrap system is intended to resolve these problems and make pest monitoring significantly more efficient. DiMoTrap will replace time-consuming manual servicing and perform the jobs of pest counting, bait replacement and trap assembly.
Automated data acquisition will continuously record and transmit catch data directly to a central location. This would reduce manual labor substantially and enable a rapid response to pest proliferation.
“The digital, modular trap, which runs self-sufficiently over up to three months thanks to its integrated power supply, systematically attracts, catches and digitally counts moths. What is more, the trap empties itself at regular intervals and ensures that untargeted organisms can escape the trap alive. A microcontroller, the centerpiece of the trap, controls all the electronics,” says the engineer, explaining how the digital trap works.
A component, which contains a reservoir filled with several baits, was developed to release pheromones continuously. A digitally controlled mechanism replaces pheromone baits at user-defined intervals.
The research scientists are additionally working on the release of liquid pheromone solutions by a micropump. Both models have been field tested.
The current version still transmits data on counts, date, operating time, trap condition and other parameters to an interpretation software by cable but a Bluetooth connection is planned.
In the future, the scientists also want to implement remote data transmission, for instance, over suitable sensor networks that wirelessly transmit by cell phone the collected data recorded by many single traps over a defined period.
Long-term tests with gypsy moths and nun moths
Different versions of the trap are currently being tested for gypsy and nun moths over three months at locations in Saxony-Anhalt and Hesse. Among other things, the research scientists are testing the prototype test models’ component interaction and counts. In the next step, the prototypes will be developed.
“Our traps have potential for use in agriculture too, specifically in fruit farming. Their modularity enables customers to customize the range of functions for their needs and to opt for just certain components,” says the research scientist.
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Automated pheromone traps aim to simplify forest pest monitoring (2024, October 1)
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