On 2014 Nov 30, Hilda Bastian commented:

Thanks for the helpful and informative reply, Tetyana.

While modeling can take account of some known variables, it can't overcome the limitations of measures based on these traditional theories. Other mechanisms that could explain the results remain. There are assumptions used to explain the results of these data simulations (such as that hiring and firing exposes people to conflict and hostility, but pay decisions do not) that remain open to question.

The results do not exclude the possibility that the women did not have enough authority in comparison with the men with whom they were compared, or other associated (in)tangible benefits that the men could take for granted with the "hire/fire/influence pay" status. Having equal status may indeed have brought similar benefits. Adequate markers for a particular status attainment for the original in-group from whom the measures were derived, may lack the power to discriminate unequal status for others. If so, then like is not necessarily being compared with like. It wasn't possible to "take all other job characteristics into account," because they weren't measured.

Using unreported modifications of measurement tools for the key outcome makes it difficult for others to be able to assess the validity of the data and its interpretation. It would be helpful if that were done within the larger project, and linked here. Depression implies an adverse mental health condition (both in the community and clinically), and the study's conclusions refer to health benefits, not happiness. The CESD has cut-offs for symptomatology that has no clinical relevance.

While there's no doubt that workplace circumstances for women and other traditional "out groups" must change, I don't believe on the basis of this data that people should believe that workplace authority over others per se makes women depressed. But the data are enormously valuable, and this work is indeed an important contribution to addressing an important social issue. Thank you for that, as well as the additional information in your reply.

On 2014 Nov 30, Tetyana Pudrovska commented:

Dear Hilda, thank you for your thoughtful and insightful comments and for engaging in this dialogue. It was a pleasure to ponder over the points you made and to consider our methodology, data, and findings from another perspective. Below are some of my thoughts.

1. The measure of depression does not have a clear clinical relevance. Different terms are used interchangeably. Each item is coded 0 or 1.

The most widely used term for the CES-D scale is depressive symptoms. We also use depression because it is a very general term that doesn’t refer to a clinical diagnosis. Depression is not a disease in the DSM, “major depressive disorder” is.

The CES-D items (like almost all other measures of self-reported physical and mental health) are highly skewed because most people report no depressive symptoms. Hence, the dichotomization of each item. We conducted a variety of sensitivity analyses using different coding approaches for the outcome, such as averaging all items and taking a natural log to reduce the positive skew, and the findings were remarkably similar.

The issue of using continuous scales vs binary diagnoses has received a lot of attention in sociology of mental health. Both approaches have strengths and weaknesses. Our findings hold in a variety of alternative models when we use a binary measure with a cutoff at the 75th percentile or at 10+ symptoms.

Sociologists typically prefer continuous scales because they are better for capturing the stressful consequences of social inequality. Unlike clinicians, sociologists are interested in the full spectrum of mental health, not only its negative extremes. To uncover the effects of social structures and social relationships on individual mental health, we need a continuum from mild to very severe that enables us to compare social groups on this scale. Binary diagnoses can obscure important differences because people who have, for example, 5 symptoms are in the same category as people who have no symptoms.

Because the effects documented in our study are large in magnitude and statistically significant after adjustment for many factors that are traditionally used to explain women’s higher depression, our findings provide important insights into the psychological consequences of social arrangements.

Ultimately, clinical relevance is not consistent with the brunt of our argument. One of the major implications of our study is that a higher level of depression among women in authority positions is not a clinical issue that can be addressed by diagnosing and treating specific individuals. It’s a social issue that should be addressed at the macro-level of society and the meso-level of organizations.

2. The observed differences in depression may reflect not the effect of job authority itself but the effects of many other job characteristics that differ between men and women with job authority.

The workplace situation is certainly not equal between men and women in authority positions. It is well-documented that in the same occupations and at the same levels of human capital characteristics, women have lower earnings, lower autonomy, and lower levels of many other desirable workplace characteristics than men.

Yet, the gender difference in depression documented in our study is not due to the differences in other job characteristics between men and women. Our models control for all these variables, and the effects of job authority are observed after we take all other job characteristics into account.

In addition to multiple regression, we use counterfactual approach to improve causal inference. It’s also called a “quasi-experimental” design because it simulates random assignment in an experiment. Our approach matches people with job authority (the “treatment” group) and people without job authority (the “control” group) in 1993 on many characteristics, including baseline depression, education, occupation, earnings, weekly hours, job characteristics and job satisfaction, marriage, parenthood, and early-life characteristics, especially parents’ socioeconomic resources. By matching people, we make the two groups as similar as possible with the exception of job authority and then see how depression changes over time based on people’s authority status in 1993.

It is also important that we conduct not only between-gender comparisons but also within-gender comparisons. Women with job authority have more depressive symptoms compared to women without job authority. In contrast, men with job authority have lower depression than men without job authority. What’s striking is that women with job authority in our study are socially advantaged in terms of most socioeconomic characteristics that are strong predictors of positive mental health. These women have more education, higher income, more prestigious occupations, and higher levels of job satisfaction and job autonomy than women without job authority. By all traditional models of socioeconomic status and health women with job authority should fare better than lower-status women. Yet we find the opposite.

3. Absence of direct measures of interpersonal stress, harassment, and prejudice.

Ideally we’d certainly like to have all possible measures of interpersonal stress and discrimination. But such a data set simply does not exist. The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) that we use is currently among the best for our purposes. We are doing more work with other data sets, including the National Longitudinal Surveys, but all data have their advantages and limitations. So we are launching our own data collection. The current study, by documenting these patterns and providing a theoretically and empirically grounded interpretation, makes an important contribution and one of the first steps to address an important social issue.

The WLS has very rich array of measures of job characteristics. We include all variables that are considered main stressors in traditional theories of work stress. Yet, the effect of job authority persists net of these traditional explanations, which bolsters the indirect evidence for the mechanisms we propose.

The WLS started in 1957 and is still ongoing. We have information about our participants’ employment histories for the last 55 years. Job authority (but not depression) was measured for the first time in 1975 when our participants were 36 years old. We used this earlier measure of job authority in related articles that are all components of a larger project.

On 2014 Nov 29, Hilda Bastian commented:

This paper uses the terms "depressive symptoms" and "depression" interchangeably. However, the relationship between the screening questions asked and the "clinical" condition of depression is unclear. A modified form of an unspecified version of the CESD screening tool was used. It included an unspecified 10 of the 16 CESD questions, applied only for the last week. In a further variation to the CESD, answers were scored with only a dichotomous outcome.

The cut-off for determining "depression" was also not explained and the "clinical" relevance of the measure (and associated increase) is unclear. If there has been a validation of an association between the scores used here and depression, it was not referred to in the paper. More details on this would be helpful to people interested in interpreting the results of this study.

The workplace situation was not equal between the men and women bracketed in the same job authority categories in this sample. The women worked fewer hours per week, earned less than the men of the same age, and were supervised more often. It's women's job authority with less pay and less freedom than men's job authority that is being compared. That would also be a function of the gender inequality the authors identify as a clear problem here. But it raises a question about the level of emphasis given to the psychological impact of having supervisory authority, and, therefore, to know what to do about it.

The range of workplace factors addressed by this study include the traditional ones related to autonomy. Those questions don't address the kinds of gender-related issues the authors point to in the literature as constituting psychological workplace adversity for women in management: such as endemic social exclusion by peers and supervisors, frequent slights from all directions, being judged more frequently as socially disruptive, unequal opportunity and status attainment, and harassment. More sensitive tools (and relevant data from before the age of 54) would have been needed to unpack what made that generation of women unhappier than the men. The underlying point these authors show, though - that psychological aspects of the workplace experience have serious bearing on women's happiness - is a critical one.

The full text of this article is available here.

On 2014 Nov 29, Hilda Bastian commented:

This paper uses the terms "depressive symptoms" and "depression" interchangeably. However, the relationship between the screening questions asked and the "clinical" condition of depression is unclear. A modified form of an unspecified version of the CESD screening tool was used. It included an unspecified 10 of the 16 CESD questions, applied only for the last week. In a further variation to the CESD, answers were scored with only a dichotomous outcome.

The cut-off for determining "depression" was also not explained and the "clinical" relevance of the measure (and associated increase) is unclear. If there has been a validation of an association between the scores used here and depression, it was not referred to in the paper. More details on this would be helpful to people interested in interpreting the results of this study.

The workplace situation was not equal between the men and women bracketed in the same job authority categories in this sample. The women worked fewer hours per week, earned less than the men of the same age, and were supervised more often. It's women's job authority with less pay and less freedom than men's job authority that is being compared. That would also be a function of the gender inequality the authors identify as a clear problem here. But it raises a question about the level of emphasis given to the psychological impact of having supervisory authority, and, therefore, to know what to do about it.

The range of workplace factors addressed by this study include the traditional ones related to autonomy. Those questions don't address the kinds of gender-related issues the authors point to in the literature as constituting psychological workplace adversity for women in management: such as endemic social exclusion by peers and supervisors, frequent slights from all directions, being judged more frequently as socially disruptive, unequal opportunity and status attainment, and harassment. More sensitive tools (and relevant data from before the age of 54) would have been needed to unpack what made that generation of women unhappier than the men. The underlying point these authors show, though - that psychological aspects of the workplace experience have serious bearing on women's happiness - is a critical one.

The full text of this article is available here.

On 2014 Nov 30, Tetyana Pudrovska commented:

Dear Hilda, thank you for your thoughtful and insightful comments and for engaging in this dialogue. It was a pleasure to ponder over the points you made and to consider our methodology, data, and findings from another perspective. Below are some of my thoughts.

1. The measure of depression does not have a clear clinical relevance. Different terms are used interchangeably. Each item is coded 0 or 1.

The most widely used term for the CES-D scale is depressive symptoms. We also use depression because it is a very general term that doesn’t refer to a clinical diagnosis. Depression is not a disease in the DSM, “major depressive disorder” is.

The CES-D items (like almost all other measures of self-reported physical and mental health) are highly skewed because most people report no depressive symptoms. Hence, the dichotomization of each item. We conducted a variety of sensitivity analyses using different coding approaches for the outcome, such as averaging all items and taking a natural log to reduce the positive skew, and the findings were remarkably similar.

The issue of using continuous scales vs binary diagnoses has received a lot of attention in sociology of mental health. Both approaches have strengths and weaknesses. Our findings hold in a variety of alternative models when we use a binary measure with a cutoff at the 75th percentile or at 10+ symptoms.

Sociologists typically prefer continuous scales because they are better for capturing the stressful consequences of social inequality. Unlike clinicians, sociologists are interested in the full spectrum of mental health, not only its negative extremes. To uncover the effects of social structures and social relationships on individual mental health, we need a continuum from mild to very severe that enables us to compare social groups on this scale. Binary diagnoses can obscure important differences because people who have, for example, 5 symptoms are in the same category as people who have no symptoms.

Because the effects documented in our study are large in magnitude and statistically significant after adjustment for many factors that are traditionally used to explain women’s higher depression, our findings provide important insights into the psychological consequences of social arrangements.

Ultimately, clinical relevance is not consistent with the brunt of our argument. One of the major implications of our study is that a higher level of depression among women in authority positions is not a clinical issue that can be addressed by diagnosing and treating specific individuals. It’s a social issue that should be addressed at the macro-level of society and the meso-level of organizations.

2. The observed differences in depression may reflect not the effect of job authority itself but the effects of many other job characteristics that differ between men and women with job authority.

The workplace situation is certainly not equal between men and women in authority positions. It is well-documented that in the same occupations and at the same levels of human capital characteristics, women have lower earnings, lower autonomy, and lower levels of many other desirable workplace characteristics than men.

Yet, the gender difference in depression documented in our study is not due to the differences in other job characteristics between men and women. Our models control for all these variables, and the effects of job authority are observed after we take all other job characteristics into account.

In addition to multiple regression, we use counterfactual approach to improve causal inference. It’s also called a “quasi-experimental” design because it simulates random assignment in an experiment. Our approach matches people with job authority (the “treatment” group) and people without job authority (the “control” group) in 1993 on many characteristics, including baseline depression, education, occupation, earnings, weekly hours, job characteristics and job satisfaction, marriage, parenthood, and early-life characteristics, especially parents’ socioeconomic resources. By matching people, we make the two groups as similar as possible with the exception of job authority and then see how depression changes over time based on people’s authority status in 1993.

It is also important that we conduct not only between-gender comparisons but also within-gender comparisons. Women with job authority have more depressive symptoms compared to women without job authority. In contrast, men with job authority have lower depression than men without job authority. What’s striking is that women with job authority in our study are socially advantaged in terms of most socioeconomic characteristics that are strong predictors of positive mental health. These women have more education, higher income, more prestigious occupations, and higher levels of job satisfaction and job autonomy than women without job authority. By all traditional models of socioeconomic status and health women with job authority should fare better than lower-status women. Yet we find the opposite.

3. Absence of direct measures of interpersonal stress, harassment, and prejudice.

Ideally we’d certainly like to have all possible measures of interpersonal stress and discrimination. But such a data set simply does not exist. The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) that we use is currently among the best for our purposes. We are doing more work with other data sets, including the National Longitudinal Surveys, but all data have their advantages and limitations. So we are launching our own data collection. The current study, by documenting these patterns and providing a theoretically and empirically grounded interpretation, makes an important contribution and one of the first steps to address an important social issue.

The WLS has very rich array of measures of job characteristics. We include all variables that are considered main stressors in traditional theories of work stress. Yet, the effect of job authority persists net of these traditional explanations, which bolsters the indirect evidence for the mechanisms we propose.

The WLS started in 1957 and is still ongoing. We have information about our participants’ employment histories for the last 55 years. Job authority (but not depression) was measured for the first time in 1975 when our participants were 36 years old. We used this earlier measure of job authority in related articles that are all components of a larger project.