Is the Market Research Industry – Unconsciously Conscious or Consciously Unconscious of Gender Bias

My hypothesis is that the Market Research Industry is not insulated from  gender bias but the question is whether it unconsciously conscious or consciously unconscious. Let me try and unpeel it from my perspective.

I have never understood why you cant generate random number through deterministic means but I have learnt how you can use deterministic means to combine random thoughts to create a new concept or idea. It’s the “corporate” version of the theory of dialectic materialism at work. So here are three random events which have coalesced into my thoughts summarised in the title of the blog.

Random Event 1 -  Sports is an area that is littered with examples of gender bias. For starters men and women are not paid the same – remember the row over the wages of men and women in tennis. Look at the photographs of the finish line of a marathon and you will find it littered with pictures of men even though women make up a significant chunk of the participants.

Last year before the cricket World T20, the English teams, men and women, went to meet the Prime Minister David Cameron (he was still PM then!!!). After the meeting, the teams went to the airport to fly out to India. The men flew business class while the women flew coach. It did make me realise that gender bias was still real, cuts across geographies, cuts across developed vs. developing economies and cuts across occupations and industries.  

Random Event 2 – Serena Williams recently announced that she was pregnant and within minutes the Twitterati figured out that she had won a Grand Slam when she was 8 weeks pregnant - women are clearly “super achievers”.

On my last holiday to India I met with an old friend. She is an alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad (the Harvard Business School of the East) and holds down a high pressure job. She does a full days work, comes home at 8PM and then cooks a hot meal for her family. I don’t recall a single conversation with any of my male batchmates about the need to come home and cook. Yet both genders have the same job specs and same expectations at the workplace. Stereotype or Prejudice?

Random Event 3 – I recently received an invite to attend a Market Research Conference. I looked through the event guide and noticed that a vast majority of the speakers were men. Surely the gender balance in the industry was better than the speaker panel. Why does it matter who speaks at a conference.

At a wedding I attended recently all the speeches were made by men. So I did a bit of research and found that the following is the order of speeches at a wedding

1.      The Master of ceremonies introduces and welcomes everyone

2.      Toast to the Bride and Groom made by the Father of the bride

3.      Response by the Groom and toast to the Bridal part

4.      Response on behalf of the Bridal party by the Best Man

5.      Toast to the Brides parents by the Best Man

6.      Response by the Bride’s Father

7.      Toast to the Grooms Parents by the Father of the Bride

There it is – speeches at the wedding is a “mans domain”.

The “post positivist” part of me says - surely you hear about bridesmaids now making speeches. Well again I did some research and while I did not find any study on the incidence of the bridesmaids  making speeches I found pointers to the fact that it is a small proportion. Here are the pointers

1. On Twitter, #bestmanspeech had 19 times as many mentions as compared to #bridesmaidsspeech. This would indicate that about 5% of weddings had a bridesmaids speech.

2.  Google trends, which is a good indicator of “needs”, shows an index of 40 for “best man speech” and 8 for “bridesmaids speech”. That would approximate to bridesmaids speeches at 20% of weddings.

A quick poll on LinkedIn coupled with speaking to a few people suggests, a number of 15-25% for the proportion of weddings with a speech from a bridesmaid, seems to range between “higher end of possible” to “optimistic” – clearly a minority and a small one at that.

“Traditions” tend to have a tenacity for survival and epitomise biases that we have inherited over generations. Speaking at weddings, arguably the most sacrosanct societal event and steeped in tradition, is a “mans domain”. It epitomises the importance of speaking at public functions (including conferences).

As someone who has been in market research for two decades the principle of epistemology, in particular the need to draw a distinction between justified belief and opinion, is well ingrained in me.  

First up, what is the gender balance of the industry. My friends at TNS pulled out statistics based on LinkedIn Pylon data showing male-female split in the market research industry is 55%-45%. That seems pretty good.

So was the conference I got invited to an aberration. I looked up the websites of major market research conferences and combed through the photographs of the speakers. Across 16 conferences, the average gender ratio was 63%-37% meaning women were under represented. To reassure you I looked at the median and it was 62%-38% i.e no different from the mean. To be fair, and in full disclosure, the last MRS in the UK had a perfect gender ratio i.e 50%-50%.

Basics of market research dictate that we need to “de-average” the data. Yes we do and I did. There is a (slight) difference between conferences in the D&E (67%-33%) and D (60%-40%) worlds but going back to the sports example economic development does not preclude discrimination (or stereotypes).

I looked up 1000 qualitative researcher profiles on LinkedIn (not a census but a reasonably large sample size) and found 19% were men i.e this segment of the industry is dominated by women. To be honest, from personal experience I would have expected the proportion of men to be in single digits but being a constructivist I accept the findings.

In a segment of the industry dominated by women, you would expect, the gender composition of speakers to be more reflective. Surely the feminist critiques of anthropological masculine bias would have impacted a woman dominated segment of the industry. I looked at qualitative specific conferences and it is really amazing that only 47% of all speakers were women i.e under representation of women is worse in the qualitative research segment of the industry.

	Male	Female	Female Representation Index
Average Market Research Conference	63	37	82
Qualitative Research Conference	53	47	58

You would expect that as we become conscious of our prejudices we would act to counter them. But maybe our prejudices always seem so rational. Is it a prejudice or a stereotype or is it discrimination? To quote Karl Marx “Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity”