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”
It would be good to also do research on how many CEO/MD's in Market Research are women. Those stats likely to meet the conference speakers ratios :)
ReplyDeleteI don't think we are still conscious of our prejudices.
Great post