Some profound silliness on the part of Wapo.Researchers have known for decades that women tend to beat men on environmental metrics. They generally use less fuel and energy. They eat less meat. They're more concerned about climate change.
They're easier to fool, in other words.
They're smaller, more compact when young, better built (hubba hubba!), eat differently and smell different.
James Wilkie, a business professor at the University of Notre Dame, wanted to understand what drives this gender eco-friendliness gap. After years of exploring psychological bias, he and his colleagues developed a theory.
How's this: Men are designed for more physical activities. They're larger in build, stronger as a group, and fleeter of foot. All this overlaps in a kind of gender Venn diagram that's not closer to a perfect circle. As they grow older, men tend to become meaner and less group-oriented, not quite silverbacks but I think definitely a leftover -- and again, think Venn, not universal. Women tend to become softer, more comforting.
"Men’s resistance may stem in part from a prevalent association between the concepts of greenness and femininity and a corresponding stereotype (held by both men and women) that green consumers are feminine," they assert this month in the Journal of Consumer Research. "As a result of this stereotype, men may be motivated to avoid or even oppose green behaviors in order to safeguard their gender identity."
Silly researchers. They misspelled personal sanity.
So it has everything to do with gender stereotypes and nothing to do with several million years of evolution and adaptation and cognate behavior in animals from the same evolutionary background can be discounted? Scientific method at work is a wonderful thing.
The researchers conducted a set of experiments, each designed to gauge if we actually do ascribe gender to green products and whether such perceptions impact our willingness to use them. They found people consistently connect environmentally conscious goods to their idea of femininity.
The first survey of 127 college students asked respondents if they thought green products appeared masculine, feminine or neither. Most participants, both men and women, said items designed to protect the planet seemed feminine.
As mentioned above, there's a reason for that. Wimminzez are more pliant, easier to fool.
Another group of 194 students took an online quiz instructing them to imagine two grocery store shoppers, one carrying a green reusable bag and another toting a plastic sack. The quiz asked: Which seemed more eco-friendly, wasteful, masculine and/or feminine? The green shoppers seemed to respondents more eco-friendly and feminine, regardless of their gender. The plastic shoppers came off as more wasteful and masculine.
Pretty funny. At the grocery store I shop at (years and years ago, BTW), tote bags and paper bags became the latest Green rage, and then subsequently store policy. Then a genius marketeer came up with the idea of allowing plastic bags in the self serve line. Everyone else got paper bags. Now you can ask for plastic, and I do so, loudly. The observable point is that even though they still do offer paper bagging, plastic bags for all their characterization of being not environmentally friendly went down the sh*tter, along with the motivation.
The researchers next gave a group of men phony gift cards and told them to pick from a selection of batteries, which included a green option. In both a faux Walmart and an online shopping scenario, the men avoided the green choice. “Self-perceptions of femininity suggest that threats may also influence private behavior,” the authors wrote.
Given the choice I would have not purchased the green battery, mainly because green products are known to be unreliable, having yet to live up to their hype and their perception of value. Honest, I didn't check my man card. It was straight up economics. I suspect you take a woman out on her own with a coupla babies riding around with her in the grocery store, she'll be looking at her household budget, not checking her woman card, whatever that is. She'll buy whatever has the best value, not what "saves the planet."
Wilkie’s team also found men in the studies were more likely to donate to an environmental nonprofit group that had a “masculine” logo — one with darker colors and bold fonts — than to an organization that displayed lighter tones and “frilly” letters. Logos didn’t have an impact on where women said they’d want to donate.
A similar trend emerged in an experiment at a BMW dealership. When presented with two versions of the same “green” car, men favored the one called the “Protection Model” over the “Eco-friendly Model.” Women, meanwhile, weren’t particularly swayed by either title.
One look at the price of those driving machines would have been enough for me to look elsewhere. "Okay, cool. Can we see some pickup trucks, now?"
| A woman in the market for a BMW either wants a fun driving car because she likes to drive aggressively, or she wants an expensive piece of vehicular jewelry. Neither is enhanced by being labelled either Eco or Protection. |
| Professor Wilkie is a bigot who has never observed suburban men mowing the lawn. When I mow the lawn, I take out the lawn mower, go round and round until the grass is mostly about the same shorter height, then put the mower back in the garage. When Mr. Wife mows the lawn, he edges before with one machine I don't touch, then after mowing he blows all the clippings off the driveway and sidewalk with another machine I don't touch. And if there is a chance that the clippings will clump instead of falling neatly between the standing grass blades, he uses the bagger and takes the captured clippings to the mulch pile in the back to break down into mulch. One of us cares a great deal more than the other. |
Ya think?
Previous research, Wilkie noted, suggests that men are socially penalized more for breaking gender norms when it comes to the products they use — or even the drinks they order. “If a man at a bar were to order a girlie drink, he might get some looks,” Wilkie said. “He might get some snickers. He might even get into a fight.”
Just what is a girlie drink? Help a fella out here?
A woman requesting something that reads masculine, such as, say, a whiskey on the rocks, probably wouldn’t encounter that problem. “Some people might even be impressed,” he said.
None of that seems to be surprising. Men are more likely to have trouble admitting having same gender sex, for example, than wimminzez.
Carrie Preston, director of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Program at Boston University, said it’s concerning that feminine-seeming goods or actions repel some men. “That says what’s feminine is bad, is lesser, is second class,” she said. “Although men’s and women’s roles have changed significantly, masculinity hasn’t changed as much.”
And it's not likely to.
Caring about what people think of your drink choice or grocery bag may seem silly. There’s nothing inherently feminine about recycling, and some would argue that femininity itself (and how it’s marketed) is a cultural creation. Still, a 2011 survey from the global marketing firm Ogilvy and Mather found 82 percent of adults in a nationally representative sample said “going green” is more ladylike than manly.
I woulda hung up the phone on that question.
Marketers are unlikely to shatter gender expectations overnight — or nix the belief that feminine is lesser — but a packaging or messaging tweak could draw more men to the green movement.
Or to a bowel movement.
"Despite a prevalent stereotype that green consumers are more feminine than non-green consumers," the researchers wrote, "we show that men’s inhibitions about engaging in green behavior can be mitigated through masculine affirmation and masculine branding."
That's if you're brain dead.