Multidimensional gender discrimination in workplace and depressive symptoms

Gaeul Kim; Jinmok Kim; Su-Kyoung Lee; Juho Sim; Yangwook Kim; Byung-Yoon Yun; Jin-Ha Yoon

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0234415

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMarch 23, 2020
22 Apr 2020 Decision Letter - Amir H. Pakpour, Editor PONE-D-20-08368 Multidimensional Gender Discrimination in Workplace and Depressive Symptoms PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Yoon, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. We would appreciate receiving your revised manuscript by Jun 06 2020 11:59PM. When you are ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. 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The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Partly ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: The authors investigate an important topic on gender discrimination. Additionally, the large sample size with a good sampling method increase the external validity of the study findings. However, some revisions are needed before I recommend publication. Please see my comments below. 1. For the Introduction, please describe more thoroughly in the concept of discrimination and stigma. Specifically, I would like to see the authors mention that different populations (e.g., people with mental illness, people with overweight, people who are transgender, people who have same-sex marriage) all face the difficulties of discrimination. Then, the authors can narrow down the discrimination problem from different populations to their study topic; that is, female. There is an ongoing special issue in the IJERPH, which collect essential information for the authors to consider and cite: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph/special_issues/stigma The authors may also consider the following reference if relevant: Ahorsu, D. K., Lin, C.-Y., Imani, V., Griffiths, M. D., Su, J.-A., Latner, J. D., Marshall, R. D., Pakpour, A. H. (2020). A prospective study on the link between weight-related self-stigma and binge eating: Role of food addiction and psychological distress. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 53(3), 442-450. Alimoradi, Z., Golboni, F., Griffiths, M. D., Broström, A., Lin, C.-Y., & Pakpour, A. H. (in press). Weight-related stigma and psychological distress: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Clinical Nutrition. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clnu.2019.10.016 Lin, C.-Y., Imani, V., Broström, A., Huus, K., Björk, M., Hodges, E. A., Pakpour, A. H. (in press). Psychological distress and quality of life in Iranian adolescents with overweight/obesity: Mediating role of weight bias internalization and insomnia. Eating and Weight Disorders. doi: 10.1007/s40519-019-00795-5 2. For the first sentence in the Introduction, the authors mentioned the high prevalence of depression worldwide. Please directly provide the prevalence for readers to have a better idea here. 3. A major problem in the present study is that it is unclear how the gender discrimination was assessed. The authors mentioned "Participants were specifically asked whether they had experienced any of these types [hiring, promotion, paid wages, work assignments, training opportunities, and firing] according to a response scale for each item ranging from “never,” “rarely,” “almost,” to “always.”" The problem here is that only reading the descriptions, I cannot observe any "discrimination" concept here. For example, if the question is "Do you have any problems in hiring?" Then, this example question is not at all "discrimination". Therefore, the authors should give detailed information on the discrimination measure, especially this is their study's core concept. 4. Please provide psychometric properties of the short version CES-D, especially how the sensitivity and specificity of the cutoff 10 in the CES-D. 5. It is unclear whether all the discrimination items (hiring, promotion, paid wages, work assignments, training opportunities, and firing) were included in the same Model 2 of logistic regression model. 6. Following my comment #5, please use AOR instead of OR for Model 2; and COR instead of OR for the Crude Model. Also, add the footnotes to explain AOR (adjusted odds ratio) and COR (crude odds ratio). 7. Page 14, "The government established the Sex Discrimination Act in 2005....." should be explicitly indicate that it is South Korean government. 8. Apart from the limitation of self-report, I think that the questionnaire on gender discrimination is not a standardized instrument. Therefore, this should also be acknowledged as a limitation. ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. 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Revision 1
23 May 2020 Author Response Comment 1). For the Introduction, please describe more thoroughly in the concept of discrimination and stigma. Specifically, I would like to see the authors mention that different populations (e.g., people with mental illness, people with overweight, people who are transgender, people who have same-sex marriage) all face the difficulties of discrimination. Then, the authors can narrow down the discrimination problem from different populations to their study topic; that is, female. There is an ongoing special issue in the IJERPH, which collect essential information for the authors to consider and cite: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph/special_issues/stigma The authors may also consider the following reference if relevant: Ahorsu, D. K., Lin, C.-Y., Imani, V., Griffiths, M. D., Su, J.-A., Latner, J. D., Marshall, R. D., Pakpour, A. H. (2020). A prospective study on the link between weight-related self-stigma and binge eating: Role of food addiction and psychological distress. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 53(3), 442-450. Alimoradi, Z., Golboni, F., Griffiths, M. D., Broström, A., Lin, C.-Y., & Pakpour, A. H. (in press). Weight-related stigma and psychological distress: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Clinical Nutrition. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clnu.2019.10.016 Lin, C.-Y., Imani, V., Broström, A., Huus, K., Björk, M., Hodges, E. A., Pakpour, A. H. (in press). Psychological distress and quality of life in Iranian adolescents with overweight/obesity: Mediating role of weight bias internalization and insomnia. Eating and Weight Disorders. doi: 10.1007/s40519-019-00795-5 (Response) Thank you for your constructive comments. We have added the concept of stigma and examples of discrimination in different populations. In introduction section, “When a group of people is stigmatized based on their characteristic, since stigma is linked to social difference, they could easily face the difficulties of discrimination. The population can be minority immigrant, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ), people who are overweight, people with health problems (e.g. AIDS or mental illness), or female gender. Discrimination is found in wide situations, such as social isolation of minority immigrant youth, experience of being bullied in adolescents with obesity, housing discrimination based on sexual orientation, or employment discrimination against people with AIDS.”, and “. Among people who had experienced discrimination due to their HIV status, internalized stigma significantly predicted cognitive-affective depression. Weight-related perceived stigma as well as self-stigma is shown to be associated with psychological distress. Recent studies have also shown that gender-based discrimination also produce deleterious health impacts such as cardiovascular disease , may increase drinking and smoking behaviors , and can aggravate depressive symptoms .” Please read our revised manuscript, too. Comments 2). For the first sentence in the Introduction, the authors mentioned the high prevalence of depression worldwide. Please directly provide the prevalence for readers to have a better idea here. (Response) We added sentence regarding prevalence of depression, as your comment. “The 12-month prevalence estimate of major depressive episodes averaged 3.2% in healthy participants and 9.3% to 23.0% in participants with comorbid physical disease in the WHO World Health Survey across 60 countries[11].” Comment 3). A major problem in the present study is that it is unclear how the gender discrimination was assessed. The authors mentioned "Participants were specifically asked whether they had experienced any of these types [hiring, promotion, paid wages, work assignments, training opportunities, and firing] according to a response scale for each item ranging from “never,” “rarely,” “almost,” to “always.”" The problem here is that only reading the descriptions, I cannot observe any "discrimination" concept here. For example, if the question is "Do you have any problems in hiring?" Then, this example question is not at all "discrimination". Therefore, the authors should give detailed information on the discrimination measure, especially this is their study's core concept. (Response) The exact questionnaires were as follows. And we added the sentence below in methods section. Please read our revised manuscript, too. In method section, (1) Hiring: If candidates have similar qualifications for appointment, men are preferred to women. (2) Promotion: Even with identical or similar careers, male workers are promoted faster than female counterparts. (3) Paid wages: Even in identical or similar positions, male workers receive higher wages and bonuses than female workers. (4) Work assignments: Duties are fixed or customarily divided between men and women. (5) Training opportunities: Even with similar duties, men have more opportunities of receiving education and training than women. (6) Firing: In case of restructuring, female workers are more likely to be forced to quit. 4. Please provide psychometric properties of the short version CES-D, especially how the sensitivity and specificity of the cutoff 10 in the CES-D. (Response) Thank you for your comments. The CES-D is wide used psychological questionnaires. And we reviewed the article about psychometric properties of CESD, and summarized it into method section, as below. Furthermore, we added validation (such as Kappa value, sensitivity, specificity) in method section. “CES-D 10 has been proven as a reliable alternative to the original CES-D 20(Kappa=0.82, P<0.001) in classifying participants with depressive symptoms (sensitivity 91%, specificity 92%, positive predictive values 92%)” 5. It is unclear whether all the discrimination items (hiring, promotion, paid wages, work assignments, training opportunities, and firing) were included in the same Model 2 of logistic regression model. (Response) One of discrimination item was included in each logistic regression model (Crude). So we repeated 6 times to make Crude OR column of Table 3. Then, we adjusted variables for each logistic regression model. 6. Following my comment #5, please use AOR instead of OR for Model 2; and COR instead of OR for the Crude Model. Also, add the footnotes to explain AOR (adjusted odds ratio) and COR (crude odds ratio). (Response 6) Thank you for your detailed comment. we used full name of each OR as “crude odds ratio” and “adjusted odds ratio” in row of Table as your comment. 7. Page 14, "The government established the Sex Discrimination Act in 2005....." should be explicitly indicate that it is South Korean government. (Response 7) We added the ‘South Korean government’, in that sentence. 8. Apart from the limitation of self-report, I think that the questionnaire on gender discrimination is not a standardized instrument. Therefore, this should also be acknowledged as a limitation. (Response 8) We agree that the questionnaire was not validate or standardized for study. So, we added sentences in limitation section as below. “Also, the questionnaires of current study are not validated or standardized instrument, so they did not measure objective levels of discrimination such as frequency, thereby current study results are not free from systemic error.” Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: response to reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0234415.r002
27 May 2020 Decision Letter - Amir H. Pakpour, Editor Multidimensional Gender Discrimination in Workplace and Depressive Symptoms PONE-D-20-08368R1 Dear Dr. Yoon, We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it complies with all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you will receive an e-mail containing information on the amendments required prior to publication. When all required modifications have been addressed, you will receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will proceed to our production department and be scheduled for publication. Shortly after the formal acceptance letter is sent, an invoice for payment will follow. To ensure an efficient production and billing process, please log into Editorial Manager at https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the "Update My Information" link at the top of the page, and update your user information. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to enable them to help maximize its impact. If they will be preparing press materials for this manuscript, you must inform our press team as soon as possible and no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. With kind regards, Amir H. Pakpour, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0234415.r003
Formally Accepted
8 Jun 2020 Acceptance Letter - Amir H. Pakpour, Editor PONE-D-20-08368R1 Multidimensional Gender Discrimination in Workplace and Depressive Symptoms Dear Dr. Yoon: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Amir H. Pakpour Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0234415.r004

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