Colette Van Laar

KU Leuven | ku leuven

Despite changes in their representation and visibility, there are still serious concerns about the inclusion and day-to-day workplace challenges various groups face (e.g., women, ethnic and cultural minorities, LGBTQ+, people as they age, and those dealing with physical or mental disabilities). Men are also underrepresented in specific work fields,...

While women are increasingly entering traditionally masculine, agentic occupations and roles, there has been less of a shift in the opposite direction: men moving into traditionally feminine, communal occupations and roles. This paper outlines the negative consequences of men's low communal engagement, and how this inhibits various benefits for men...

Guided by the early findings of social scientists, practitioners have long advocated for greater contact between groups to reduce prejudice and increase social cohesion. Recent work, however, suggests that intergroup contact can undermine support for social change towards greater equality, especially among disadvantaged group members. Using a large...

We examine the degree to which women in a male-dominated field cope with daily experiences of social identity threat by distancing themselves from other women. A daily experience-sampling study among female soldiers ( N = 345 data points nested in 61 participants) showed women to self-group distance more on days in which they experienced more ident...

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has been called the ‘civil rights issue of our time’ (Holt & Sweitzer, 2020, Self and Identity, 19(, p. 16) but the All Lives Matter (ALM) movement swiftly emerged as an oppositional response to BLM. Prior research has investigated some predictors of support for ALM over BLM, but these predictors have thus far...

Research suggests that positive contact with majorities may ‘sedate’ (undermine) minority support for social change, while negative contact may promote it. However, most studies to date have examined both forms of contact separately, which may not give an accurate picture of their effects. This study examines the joint effects and interplay of posi...

In the present work, we addressed the relationship between parental leave policies and social norms. Using a pre‐registered, cross‐national approach, we examined the relationship between parental leave policies and the perception of social norms for the gender division of childcare. In this study, 19,259 students (11,924 women) from 48 countries in...

Objectives: Perceptions of unequal treatment, especially when shared, can challenge the status-quo. Starting from the social grounding of shared perceptions, we ask when perceptions of inequality align and converge in ethno–racially diverse peer groups. We are especially interested when perceptions are shared among peers across ethno–racial group b...

Collective action is a powerful tool for social change and is fundamental to women and girls’ empowerment on a societal level. Collective action towards gender equality could be understood as intentional and conscious civic behaviors focused on social transformation, questioning power relations, and promoting gender equality through collective effo...

Although (cisgender, heterosexual) men are generally seen as the advantaged group compared to other genders, research has documented health and well‐being disadvantages specific to men. We present an integrative model of social identity mechanisms for (cisgender) men's health and well‐being. We integrate research on men and masculinities with resea...

Students tend to make educational choices in line with gender stereotypes. An example of such a gendered educational choice is that despite mounting evidence that girls and boys do not significantly differ in math ability (Hyde, 2014), girls are less likely to choose courses such as physics or computer science. On an aggregated level, such choices...

While much progress has been made towards gender equality, diversity and inclusion in the workplace, education and society, recent years have also revealed continuing challenges that slow or halt this progress. To date, the majority of gender equality action has tended to approach gender equality from one side: being focused on the need to remove b...

Having a clear and stable sense of how one performs in a field is a key contributor to goal pursuit. Performance feedback is often considered a crucial resource for developing this clear and stable self-knowledge but may be less optimally integrated when feedback is considered inaccurate or dishonest. The current paper investigates how such feedbac...

Despite continuing progress, men remain underrepresented in childcare, domestic labor, and other care work. Because parental leave is discussed as a gateway to increasing men’s childcare engagement, we aimed to gain insights into predictors of men’s parental leave-taking intentions during the transition to parenthood. Using outcomes on a continuum...

Using data from 15 countries, this article investigates whether descriptive and prescriptive gender norms concerning housework and child care (domestic work) changed after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results of a total of 8,343 participants (M = 19.95, SD = 1.68) from two comparable student samples suggest that descriptive norms about unpai...

The cultural moderation of gender stereotypes hypothesis argues that societies assign the most culturally valued traits to men, the dominant group. Thus, in line with cultural ideals, collectivistic societies should assign men more communality, whereas individualistic societies should assign men more individualism. Using archival data, Cuddy et al....

This paper explores how group preferences develop among children living in the post-conflict context of Kosovo and how this development shapes children’s willingness to be close to their outgroup peers among the segregated majority (ethnic Albanian) and minority (ethnic Serb) members. The study was conducted in four ethnically divided primary schoo...

Despite global commitments and efforts, a gender‐based division of paid and unpaid work persists. To identify how psychological factors, national policies, and the broader sociocultural context contribute to this inequality, we assessed parental‐leave intentions in young adults (18–30 years old) planning to have children (N = 13,942; 8,880 identifi...

Objectives: Envisioning one’s (non)smoking future may make (un)desired future identities more accessible, salient and personally relevant and facilitate smoking cessation. The current study assessed whether a future-self intervention can weaken smoker self-identity and expected identity loss when quitting smoking, and strengthen quitter- and nonsmo...

Social role theory posits that binary gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in less egalitarian countries, reflecting these countries’ more pronounced sex-based power divisions. Conversely, evolutionary and self-construal theorists suggest that gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in more egalitarian countries, reflec...

Identity, or ‘who I am’, is important for smoking behaviour. Identity constructs (parts of a person’s identity) are typically examined as separate entities, but emerging evidence suggests that the multifaceted nature of identity is relevant in the context of smoking. This cross-sectional study examined how smoking-related self- and group-identity c...

The shortage of engineering talent leads to a loss in economic output. This shortage-combat has to be fought on several fronts, one of them is attracting and retaining more currently underrepresented students. This paper discusses the need to improve a sense of belonging and to increase professional awareness, or the understanding of the different...

Despite the growing importance of care economy careers (e.g., healthcare and education), men remain underrepresented in these fields. Past research suggests that, while economically developed nations tend to support equal rights for men and women, their labor markets tend to be highly gender-segregated (Charles 1992; 2003). By examining this parado...

What counts as discrimination? Sometimes an event has to be a deliberate act of hate before it is described as discrimination. Sometimes “discrimination” can include much more subtle actions (e.g., microaggressions). There is good evidence that “what counts” as discrimination is mired in controversy, uncertainty, or ambivalence. We present a novel...

This article's key aim is to bring discursive insights on transnational identities together with the ‘identity strategies’-framework from psychological acculturation research. To do so, we discursively analyse the negotiation of identities in interviews of Belgian women with Turkish/Moroccan migration backgrounds. Our findings indicate that intervi...

Gender stereotypes tell us that women are seen to have more warmth while men are seen to have more competence. This chapter outlines where these stereotypes come from and how they are socially reinforced. We explain why these stereotypes matter for social equality: Ideas of what men and women are like often translate into ideas of what men and wome...

Although higher education has become more accessible to people from lower socio-economic backgrounds, the transition to university is more difficult for first- compared to continuing-generation students. Previous research showed that social identity processes are key to understand differences between first- and continuing-generation students’ exper...

There is widespread agreement that discrimination is bad, but disagreement about how discrimination is defined and identified. Discrimination is sometimes defined narrowly (including only a restricted range of behaviours), and sometimes broadly (encompassing a wide range of behaviours). Three experiments (the latter 2 preregistered) found that Whit...

Men are currently underrepresented in traditionally female care-oriented (communal) engagement such as taking parental leave, whereas they are overrepresented in traditionally male (agentic) engagement such as breadwinning or leadership. We examined to what extent different prototypical representations of men affect men’s self-reported parental lea...

In trying to understand women's underrepresentation in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), most existing research focuses on one STEM-field or collapses across all STEM-fields. However, these fields differ vastly in female representation: women tend to be most strongly underrepresented in technological and computer science univers...

What role does intergroup contact play in promoting support for social change toward greater social equality? Drawing on the needs-based model of reconciliation, we theorized that when inequality between groups is perceived as illegitimate, disadvantaged group members will experience a need for empowerment and advantaged group members a need for ac...

Institutional contexts show a high potential for identity struggles, since many dimensions of identity are made relevant in workplace interactions, varying from context to context (Holmes et al., 2011, p. 163). This is argued to be especially the case for women with a migration background, since contemporary workplaces are often associated with 1)...

Using two intervention studies, this article examines the effectiveness of a newly developed electronic job crafting intervention (i.e., e‐intervention) that aims to stimulate task, relational, and cognitive crafting and offers a time‐efficient and cost‐effective alternative to traditional face‐to‐face job crafting interventions. In Study 1, we qua...

The degree to which gender and organizational social identities are perceived as compatible has been proven a key factor in promoting creative performance, job satisfaction and organizational commitment of female workers. But what are the factors that help them develop a high level of Gender-Work Identity Integration (GWII)? Previous studies have f...

Precarious manhood beliefs portray manhood, relative to womanhood, as a social status that is hard to earn, easy to lose, and proven via public action. Here, we present cross-cultural data on a brief measure of precarious manhood beliefs (the Precarious Manhood Beliefs scale [PMB]) that covaries meaningfully with other cross-culturally validated ge...

Given negative social identity, different perceptions of the structure of an intergroup relation (i.e., stability, legitimacy, permeability) should be related to different identity‐management strategies (i.e., social competition, social creativity, or individual mobility) depending on group identification. This is among the basic tenets of social i...

Gender stereotypes tell us that women are seen to have more warmth while men are seen to have more competence. This chapter outlines where these stereotypes come from how they are socially reinforced. We explain why these stereotypes matter for social equality: Ideas of what men and women are like often translate into ideas of what men and women sh...

The importance of identity in smoking cessation is increasingly becoming recognized by researchers. This study is the first in-depth longitudinal qualitative investigation of identity change processes among smokers who intend to quit. Participants’ accounts of smoking, attempts to quit and sense of identity were explored over time to examine identi...

Despite equal rights, minority groups such as ethnic minorities, LGBTQ + people, and people with mental or physical disabilities face discrimination on a day‐to‐day basis in subtle and hard‐to‐recognize forms. As discrimination slips beneath the surface, it becomes difficult to fight the stigma using collective social identity coping mechanisms. In...

Objectives: School belonging is key to enabling sustained engagement with learning, yet minorities. sense of belonging is more vulnerable and contingent on the intergroup context. From a social identity approach, discrimination experiences signal rejection of the minority identity, and hence threaten minorities. school belonging. Conversely, a posi...

We present a case study of a small talk sequence in a Belgian workplace between two female colleagues with a migration background, in which they share stories with each other on racial micro-aggressions they personally experienced. We draw on the social practice approach and focus on the narrators’ identity work in this interaction. We found that t...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Men sometimes withdraw support for gender equality movements when their higher gender status is threatened. Here, we expand the focus of this phenomenon by examining it cross‐culturally, to test if both individual‐ and country‐level variables predict men's collective action intentions to support gender equality. We tested a model in which men's zer...

Given negative social identity, different perceptions of the structure of an intergroup relation (i.e., stability, legitimacy, permeability) should be related to different identity‐management strategies (i.e., social competition, social creativity, or individual mobility) depending on group identification. This is among the basic tenets of social i...

As most immigrant‐origin minority youth grow up in ethnically diverse social worlds, they develop a sense of belonging to both the national majority and the ethnic minority group. Our study adds to a growing body of research on minority experiences of intergroup contact by (1) including both minority and majority group belonging as outcomes and (2)...

What role does intergroup contact play in promoting support for social change toward greater equality? Drawing on the needs-based model of reconciliation, we theorized that when inequality between groups is perceived as illegitimate, disadvantaged groups members will experience a need for empowerment and advantaged groups members a need for accepta...

What role does intergroup contact play in promoting support for social change toward greater equality? Drawing on the needs-based model of reconciliation, we theorized that when inequality between groups is perceived as illegitimate, disadvantaged groups members will experience a need for empowerment and advantaged groups members a need for accepta...

Universities struggle with students’ low well‐being and high dropout rates. High (compared to low) fit between students’ self‐construal and perceived university norms might help to prevent these problems. A strong dignity self‐construal (i.e., the understanding that one’s worth is independent of others) is adaptive if university norms stress indepe...

Special Issue description: Despite equal rights, minority groups such as ethnic minorities, LGBTQ + people, and people with mental or physical disabilities face discrimination on a day-to-day basis in subtle and hard-to-recognize forms. As discrimination slips beneath the surface, it becomes difficult to fight the stigma using collective social ide...

The positive effects of intergroup contact on prejudice reduction have been widely validated by now. However, the potential of contact for intergroup relations is only available when there is readiness to have contact with outgroup members to begin with. In two correlational studies with the main ethnic groups in postconflict Kosovo, Albanian major...

Gender norms indicate that men should be agentic and work-oriented rather than communal and family-oriented. Yet, this traditional expectation conflicts with findings that communion is highly valued in romantic partners. Moreover, because more women in industrialized countries are pursuing careers, they may increasingly seek family-oriented partner...

First-generation students show lower academic performance at university compared to continuing-generation students. Previous research established the value in taking a social identity perspective on this social-class achievement gap, and showed that the gap can partly be explained by lower compatibility between social background and university iden...

Background and aims: Intensive mothering norms prescribe women to be perfect mothers. Recent research has shown that women’s experiences of pressure toward perfect parenting are related to higher levels of guilt and stress. The current paper follows up on this research with two aims: First, we examine how mothers regulate pressure toward perfect mo...

Previous research has revealed that women may attempt to avoid negative gender stereotypes in organizations through self-group distancing, or “queen bee”, behaviors: emphasizing masculine qualities, distancing themselves from other women, and legitimizing organizational inequality. Factors that increase self-group distancing have been identified (e...

Gender norms can lead men to shy away from traditionally female roles and occupations in communal HEED domains (Healthcare, Early Education, Domestic sphere) that do not fit within the social construct of masculinity. But to what extent do men underestimate the degree to which other men are accepting of men in these domains? Building on research re...

Objectives: Smoking-related self-identity processes are important for smoking cessation. We examined whether quitter self-identity (i.e. identification with quitting smoking) could be strengthened through a writing exercise, and whether expected social support for quitting, manipulated through vignettes, could facilitate identification with quittin...

Objective: Although it has been found that identity constructs related to smoking are associated with changes in smoking behaviour, the direction of causal associations is as yet unclear. This study aims to clarify the nature and direction of these associations. Methods: In this longitudinal study we examined the reciprocal relations between ide...

Studies with segregated ethnic groups in newly-independent Kosovo (NAlbanians=221, NSerbs=110) reveal that superordinate categorization at national level predicts negative intergroup outcomes for Albanian majority. For Serb minority, it predicts positive ones but is currently low. More complex identities benefit Albanians

People in Kosovo are still faced with reconciliation hardships since the conflict ended in 1999. The two main ethnic groups, Albanian majority (93% of the population) and Serb minority (about 5% of the population), have a history of problematic differences that have further continued with Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008. Now, their big...

Successful smoking cessation appears to be facilitated by identity change, that is, when quitting or nonsmoking becomes part of smokers’ and ex-smokers’ self-concepts. The current longitudinal study is the first to examine how identity changes over time among smokers and ex-smokers and whether this can be predicted by socioeconomic status (SES) and...

The aim of this study is twofold. First, we expand on the literature by testing whether generalized trust is negatively related to anti-immigrant sentiments in Europe. Second, we examine to what extent the relation between generalized trust and anti-immigrant sentiments is dependent upon cross-group friendships. We apply multilevel linear regressio...

One of the biggest challenges in most post-conflict contexts is reconciliation and functional intergroup relations. In Kosovo, as one such context, declaration of independence in 2008 offers a possibility for ethnic groups to recategorize themselves under a common ingroup identity – Kosovar national identity. However, this identity building process...

The current paper examines antecedents and consequences of perceiving conflict between gender and work identities in male-dominated professions. In a study among 657 employees working in 85 teams in the police force, we investigated the effect of being different from team members in terms of gender on employees’ perception that their team members s...

The current study investigates how descriptive and prescriptive gender norms that communicate work and family identities to be (in)compatible with gender identities limit or enhance young men and women’s family and career aspirations. Results show that young adults (N = 445) perceived gender norms to assign greater compatibility between female and...

We address intergroup relations in a post-conflict context, Kosovo—where the 2008 declaration of independence led to the creation of a new national Kosovar identity. However, Kosovars still identify primarily with the ethnic identity, central to historical tensions between two main ethnic groups: the Albanian majority (over 90 % of the population)...

This contribution reviews work on the queen bee phenomenon whereby women leaders assimilate into male-dominated organizations (i.e., organizations in which most executive positions are held by men) by distancing themselves from junior women and legitimizing gender inequality in their organization. We propose that rather than being a source of gende...

Three studies investigated how politicized collective identification affects individuals’ reactions towards others. We hypothesized that a strong politicized identity tends to be accompanied by a moral conviction about the politicized cause, which in turn determines how the politicized respond to those less committed to their cause. Consistent with...