Women’s online opinions are still not as influential as those of their male peers in buying decisions

As we make progress towards gender parity in many spheres of life, an important question is whether people place as much value on women’s opinions as they do on men’s opinions, especially when making buying decisions. Using online product opinions (reviews)—an increasingly important source of information in buying decisions—as our context, we investigate whether women’s product opinions are as valuable as those of their male peers. Across three studies—one experimental and two using field data from online review platforms in the United States, we report evidence of implicit gender bias in evaluating online product opinions. In the experimental study, 216 participants (108 men, 108 women, mean age 40.6) participated in an online study where they evaluated reviews written by men and women across different product types. We find that, compared to men, women’s product opinions were rated as less helpful and were less likely to influence people’s buying decisions. For gender-typed products, that is, products highly associated with specific gender groups, men’s product opinions were rated higher than women’s in helpfulness and likelihood to influence buying decisions for male gender-typed products. However, there was no significant difference between men’s product opinions and women’s product opinions for female gender-typed products, indicating that women’s product opinions are not perceived as being more valuable than men’s opinion even for products typically associated with women. In the field data studies, we relied on the internet public’s helpfulness and usefulness votes on reviews contributed by both men and women across both search and experience goods to confirm the findings in the experimental study. We discuss some of the potential reasons and implications of our findings.