Gender Bias in Perceived Quality. An Experiment with Elite Soccer Performance

Carlos Gomez-Gonzalez (), Helmut Dietl, David Berri () and Cornel Nesseler ()
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Carlos Gomez-Gonzalez: Department of Business Administration, University of Zurich
David Berri: Southern Utah University, Cedar City, UT, USA
Cornel Nesseler: Department of Business Administration, University of Zurich

No 391, Working Papers from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW)

Abstract: Whether one looks at revenue, investment, or coverage, men’s sports do better than women’s. Many assume that the differences are driven by absolute differences in quality of athletic performance. However, the existence of stereotypes should alert us to another possibility: What if perceived quality is filtered through gender stereotypes? We perform an experiment showing participants video clips of elite female and male soccer players. In the control group, participants evaluated normal videos where the gender of the players was clear to see. In the treatment group, participants evaluated the same videos but with gender obscured by blurring. We find that participants only rated men’s videos higher when they knew they were watching men. When they didn’t know who they were watching, ratings for female and male athletes did not differ significantly. The findings are consistent with the interpretation that gender bias plays a role in the evaluation of athletic performance. Implications for research and the sports industry are discussed.

Keywords: experiment; evaluation; gender bias; fans; soccer; women’s sport (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 D70 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2022-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-gen, nep-hrm and nep-spo
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zrh:wpaper:391

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