Elizabeth F. Churchill & Hugo Liu (2014). Brand choice as gender identity. Proceedings of the CHI 2014 Workshop: Perspectives on Gender and Product Design, ACM Press.
Churchill, E. F., & Liu, H. (2014). Brand choice as gender identity. In Proceedings of the CHI 2014 Workshop: Perspectives on Gender and Product Design. ACM Press.
@inproceedings{churchill2014brand,
author = {Elizabeth F. Churchill and Hugo Liu},
title = {Brand choice as gender identity},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the CHI 2014 Workshop: Perspectives on Gender and Product Design},
publisher = {ACM Press},
url = {https://starheartsong.com/papers/pdf/CHI2014-BrandGender.pdf},
year = {2014}
}This workshop paper treats brand choice as a possible form of gender expression rather than assuming product design should simply mirror a profile's male/female field. Using 2013 eBay purchases, it assigns each of 1,500 brands a femininity percentile from its reported buyer mix, then averages the distinct brands bought by each of 608,000 accounts across shoes, watches, and small kitchen appliances. Female-labeled accounts formed a near-normal distribution around 0.54; male-labeled accounts had a more masculine mode of 0.34 and a long feminine tail. The interpretation is deliberately tentative. Reported gender was unverified and menu-order biased; accounts could be shared, used for gifts, or represent households. Purchases cannot establish one person's identity, much less causation.