Comments on El-Alayli et al 2018 "Dancing Backwards in High Heels"

Sex Roles published El-Alayli et al 2018 "Dancing Backwards in High Heels: Female Professors Experience More Work Demands and Special Favor Requests, Particularly from Academically Entitled Students".

El-Alayli et al 2018 discussed their research design for Study 2 as follows (pp. 141-142):

The name of the professor, as well as the use of gendered pronouns in some of the subsequent survey questions, served as our professor gender manipulation, and participants were randomly assigned to one of the two experimental conditions...After reviewing the profile, participants were given seven scenarios that involved imagining special favor requests that could be asked of the professor...For each scenario, participants were first asked to indicate how likely they would be to ask for the special favor on a scale from 1 (Not at all likely) to 6 (Extremely likely). Using the same response scale, participants were then asked the likelihood that they would expect the professor to say "yes", ...

El-Alayli et al 2018 discussed the results for this item (p. 143, emphasis added):

There was a statistically significant main effect of professor gender on expectations, F(1, 117) = 5.68, p = .019 (b = −.80, SE = .34), such that participants were more likely to expect a "yes" response to the special favor requests when the professor had a woman's name than when the professor had a man's name. (Refer to Table 1 for condition means for all dependent measures.)

El-Alayli et al 2018 Table 1 reports that, for this "Expecting 'Yes'" item, the mean was 2.12 for the female professor and 2.05 for the male professor, with corresponding standard deviations of 0.80 and 0.66. The sample size was 121 total participants after exclusions (p. 141), so it wasn't clear to me how these data could produce a p-value of 0.019 or a b of -0.80 for the main effect of professor gender.

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I suspect that the -0.80 is not a main effect of professor gender but is instead the predicted effect of professor gender when the other term in the interaction (academic entitlement) is zero (with the lowest level of the academic entitlement scale being 1, see p. 142).

From El-Alayli et al 2018 (p. 143):

...the professor gender × academic entitlement interaction was statistically significant, F(1, 117) = 7.80, p = .006 (b = .38, SE = .14, ΔR2 = .06).

El-Alayli et al 2018 Table 1 indicates that the mean for academic entitlement is 2.27 for the male professor and 2.27 for the female professor, with corresponding standard deviations of 1.00 and 0.87. I'll ballpark 0.93 as the combined standard deviation.

From El-Alayli et al 2018 (p. 143):

Students had a stronger expectation of request approval from the female professor than from the male professor when they had a high level (+1 SD) of academic entitlement, t = 2.37, p = .020 (b = .42, SE = .18, 95% CI [.07, .78]), but not when they had average, t = .54, p = .590 (b = .07, SE = .13, 95% CI [−.18, .32]) or low (−1 SD) levels of entitlement, t = −1.61, p = .111 (b = −.29, SE = .18, 95% CI [−.64, .07]).

So the above passage provides three data points:

X1 = +1 SD = 2.27 + 0.93 = 3.20 || Y1 = 0.42

X2 = average = 2.27 || Y2 = 0.07

X3 = -1 SD = 2.27 - 0.93 = 1.34 || Y = -0.29

I used an OLS regression to predict these Ys using the Xs: to two decimal places, the X coefficient was 0.38 (which equals the coefficient on the interaction term), and the constant was -0.80 (which equals the purported "main effect"); however, in this regression -0.80 is the predicted value of Y when X (academic entitlement) is zero.

I'll add a highlight to the passage quoted above from El-Alayli et al 2018 (p. 143) to indicate what I think the main effect is:

Students had a stronger expectation of request approval from the female professor than from the male professor when they had a high level (+1 SD) of academic entitlement, t = 2.37, p = .020 (b = .42, SE = .18, 95% CI [.07, .78]), but not when they had average, t = .54, p = .590 (b = .07, SE = .13, 95% CI [−.18, .32]) or low (−1 SD) levels of entitlement, t = −1.61, p = .111 (b = −.29, SE = .18, 95% CI [−.64, .07]).

The b=0.07 is equal to the difference between the aforementioned means of 2.12 for the female professor and 2.05 for the male professor.

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The subscripts for El-Alayli et al 2018 Table 1 indicate that p<0.05 for the main effect of professor gender for four of the six items, but I don't think that p<0.05 for the main effect of professor gender any of those four items.

Moreover, I think that González-Morales 2019 incorrectly described the El-Alayli et al 2018 results as applying to all students with a stronger effect among academically entitled students, instead of the effect being detected only among academically entitled students:

In a recent experimental study, El-Alayli, Hansen-Brown, and Ceynar (2018) found that when students identified a fictitious professor as a woman, they expected that this professor would respond positively to requests for special favors or accommodations. This effect was stronger among academically entitled students.