Society is awash with gender-based stereotypes and biases that influence how we think and behave.  A recent Stanford study reveals that such biases even extend to how we feel about products when we know the sex of their maker, especially when the sex of the maker differs from the gender we associate that product with.

For instance, if beer is brewed by a woman or cakes baked by a man, our perceptions can be altered significantly, with women often baring the brunt of those misconceptions.

“Our research suggests that customers don’t value and are less inclined to buy traditionally male products if they think they’ve been manufactured by women,” the authors explain. “There’s an assumption that your woman-made craft beer, screwdriver, or roof rack just won’t be as good.”

The research began with a survey of 150 people of both sexes that asked them to rate a range of consumer products for their perceived masculinity or femininity.  The insights from this initial survey allowed the team to hone in on two core products: cupcakes and craft beer, which were seen as being feminine and masculine respectively.

Male or female products

The researchers set out to explore both what it was that made a product either masculine or feminine, and what happened when those expectations were broken.  They surveyed another few hundred volunteers to gauge their opinion of a craft beer label.  Each beer was identical, with the only exception being the gender of the brewer.  A similar survey was conducted with a new cupcake label, with the sex of the baker the only thing changed.

For the beer, when the consumers learnt that it had been brewed by a woman, they suggested they had lower expectations of both taste and quality, and would therefore pay less for the beer as a result.  This didn’t seem to apply when the cupcake was baked by a man however.

“What we’re seeing here is that woman-made goods for sale in male-typed markets are being penalized for no reason other than the fact they are made by women,” the researchers explain. “Imagine that these goods are being graded on a scale of A to F. What you find is that an equivalent product, when made by a woman rather than a man, is knocked down to an A- or a B+ while a man’s product consistently gets an A. The same isn’t true for man-made products that target women. So the result is that across the board, identical products are cumulatively disadvantaged purely because they are woman-made.”

What’s more, this phenomenon might not be limited to consumer goods, as the authors believe it could also apply to everything from entrepreneurship to academic research.

Breaking the mould

Women were able to break free from these negative stereotypes, but they had to work especially hard to do so.  For instance, if consumers learned that the female brewer had won awards for her work, then her beer tended to be viewed the same as if a man had brewed it.  It’s almost like these external forms of verification act as testimony to the talents of the woman.

Similarly, if the consumer is an expert in their field, they also bought free from any gender bias.  Whilst these may offer a glimmer of hope, in reality, the long-term solution has to be tackling the gender biases that result in these skewed opinions in the first place.