The gender gap in preferences

This is taken from new work by Ángel Cuevas, Rubén Cuevas, Klaus Desmet, and Ignacio Ortuño-Ortín.  Here is the abstract:

This paper uses information on the frequency of 45,397 Facebook interests to study how the difference in preferences between men and women changes with a country’s degree of gender equality. For preference dimensions that are systematically biased toward the same gender across the globe, differences between men and women are larger in more gender-equal countries. In contrast, for preference dimensions with a gender bias that varies across countries, the opposite holds. This finding takes an important step toward reconciling evolutionary psychology and social role theory as they relate to gender.

Here is a bit more:

Our premise is that innately gender-specific interests should mostly conform to evolutionary psychology theory, whereas other interests should mostly conform to social role theory. We find strong evidence consistent with this premise.

And some detail on the categories:

We say that an interest is gender-related if it displays a systematic bias toward the same gender across the globe. More specifically, if in more than 90% of countries an interest is more prevalent among the same gender, then we refer to it as gender-related. For example, “cosmetics” and “motherhood” are universally more common among women, whereas “motorcycles” and “Lionel Messi” are universally more common among men. Conversely, we say that an interest is non-gender-related if its gender bias varies across countries. More specifically, if an interest is more common among men in at least 30% of countries and more common among women in at least another 30% of countries, then we refer to it as nongender-related. For example, “world heritage site” and “physical fitness” do not display a systematic gender bias across the globe.

And indeed everything works out as one ought to expect.  In the more gender-equal countries, men have “more male” interests, and the women have “more female” interests.  But for the less gender-specific interests, greater equality ends up resulting.  As for magnitude:

the standardized β is 30% when taking 9 dimensions, meaning that a one standard deviation increase in gender equality increases the difference in preferences between men and women by 30% of its standard deviation. The corresponding standardized β when taking 68 dimensions is 19%. Overall, the evidence points to a positive relation between gender equality and the difference in interests between men and women.

Hope you all are interested in this one!

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