Research on Gender-related Topics

By Yiler Huang

The perception people have towards different genders has always been a controversial topic. It is also difficult to collect people's opinions on the topic, due to the controversy of it. In this research, the researcher attempted to design a survey aiming to know the people's preference for gender of worker interacted with in certain service industry encounters. the researcher believes that with the result of this survey, we can identify the less preferred gender in different work places and give them additional support, which can allow the less preferred gender to perform as good as people of the privileged gender. The researcher assumed that the more people would choose the female workers. This is because women are generally considered to be better at communicating with people than male, and the services industry often involves communication between the customers and the server.

Two workplaces, convenience stores and hotels, were chosen to represent the service industry. One represented a cheaper service, and another represented a more expensive service so we could see if people's answers vary when the price of the service was different. The researcher decided to differentiate the two environment by price, because other factors such as size, locations etc. were difficult to represent with the chosen method. It was a challenge to find a way that can get answers about this topic from people, because people might not always give their true answers due to the social pressure they feel when they answer the question. Therefore, tools were designed in this survey to help with getting more accurate answers from the respondents. The researcher designed boards with two sides, side 1 had pictures of two workers in the service industry of different genders, side 2 had a table to keep track of the answer from the respondents with stickers. The figures representing both genders were generated with AI, with prompts intended to make them look similar to reduce the amount of variables. During the survey, the researcher would approach people of different gender on the street, and ask them the question “which one of these people do you think are more suitable to work in a convenience store/hotel”. After the respondent made their choice, they would need to stick a sticker that represented their gender onto the respecting box for the gender they have chosen.

The researcher conducting the survey

In total, 41 responses were collected in this survey. 21 were regarding to the hotel scenario, and 20 were regarding to the convenience stores scenario. 11 responses regarding the hotel scenario were from females, and 10 were from males. There were 10 responses regarding the convenience store scenario from each gender. 9 female and 3 male respondents preferred a female counter worker in a hotel, and 2 female and 7 male respondents preferred a male counter worker in a hotel. 3 female and 5 male respondents preferred a female convenience store worker, and 7 female and 5 male respondents preferred a male worker in a convenience store.

Side 2, red stickers represent female respondents, and blue stickers represent male respondents

From the results, we can see that the researcher's hypothesis was not entirely correct. One interesting thing was that for the hotel scenario, most man (7 out of 10) chose the male worker, and most women (9 out of 11) chose the female worker. The researcher initially believed this is because people are embarrassed of choosing people of opposite gender, but the same situation did not happen with the convenience store. The researcher thought a reason why this happened was that hotels services are generally more time consuming and complicated compared to convenience stores. Therefore, people might mind more about who's serving them at a hotel. In convenience stores, the service process is usually fast so people are less likely to be picky about employees in convenience stores.

Another interesting finding was that there are more respondents who preferred a female worker in a hotel, but fewer respondents preferred a female worker in a convenience store. it was really difficult to conclude the reason of this result. One of the reasons could be that in hotel, the services are more related to interacting people, and in convenience store it is more about dealing with numbers and money. Traditionally, male are thought to be better at dealing with numbers and money, and female were thought to be better at social situations. These two traditional thoughts could be the factors the respondents considered while making their choice. It could also be due to the fact that the amount of respondents is not big enough to represent the reality.

In the end, the result collected might not be very accurate, due to the limited sample size. Nonetheless, it can still act as a decent representation of people's perception about servers in different gender. From the result, we learned that women in convenience stores or men in hotels might need additional help in order to make the customer feel more comfortable with interacting with them. We also learned that in hotels, it could be a good idea to train workers to interact with customers of opposite gender more because most people preferred server of the same gender in hotel. Overall, this research provided valuable data that can help us to gain a more educated view about the society and what we can do to improve the service industry.