Why are observations of inflation so biased? And biased by gender?

This is from an older piece, but I ran across it while browsing the internet.  It is from the Cleveland Fed, by Michael Bryan and Guhan Venkatu, 2001, excerpt:

The data indicate that the public’s estimates and predictions of inflation are significantly and systematically related to the demographic characteristics of the respondents. People with high incomes perceive and anticipate much less inflation than people with low incomes, married people less than singles, whites less than nonwhites, and middle-aged people less than young people. This Commentary describes what is perhaps the most curious observation of all: Even after we hold constant income, age, education, race, and marital status, men and women hold very different views on the rate at which prices are changing.

And now, more specifically:

In the roughly 20,000 responses we have received from our telephone survey since August 1998, the average rate at which respondents thought prices had risen over the previous 12 months was about 6.0 percent. This “perception” of inflation is more than twice the rise recorded by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) over the same period (2.7 percent). Further, if we separate our sample by gender, we find that the average inflation perceived by the nearly 8,500 men who answered our survey was 4.6 percent. While this response is higher than the official CPI inflation estimate, it pales in comparison to the 6.9 percent inflation perceived by the roughly 11,500 women who took our survey. What accounts for such a large discrepancy between the inflation rate perceived by the two sexes?

I found it through this piece, cited by Instapundit.  Is it possible that a high perception of inflation is largely the result of a relatively low real income, perhaps mixed in with a slight unwillingness to blame oneself for imperfect labor market prospects?  Does this help explain why tight money and stagnant median income have come together?

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