Gender information and perceived quality: An experiment with professional soccer performance

ABSTRACT

Whether one looks at revenue, investment or coverage, men’s sports do better than women’s. Many assume that absolute differences in quality of athletic performance are the driving force. However, the existence of stereotypes should alert us to another possibility: gender information might influence perceived quality. We perform an experiment in which 613 participants viewed clips of elite female and male soccer players. In the control group, participants evaluated unmodified videos where the gender of the players is clear to see. In the treatment group, participants evaluated the same videos but with gender obscured by blurring. Using a regression analysis, we find that participants rate men’s videos higher – but only when they know they are watching men. When blurring obscures the gender, ratings for female and male athletes do not differ. We discuss implications for research and the sports industry.

KEYWORDS:

• Experiment
• fans
• gender information
• performance
• soccer
• women’s sport

Acknowledgments

For their comments and suggestions, the authors would like to thank conference participants at the HSE Analytics for Management and Economics Conference (October 2020), the WEAI International Conference (March 2021), the 96th WEAI Annual Conference (June 2021), the XI CIED Conference (June 2021), and seminar participants at the NTNU Spring Seminar, Center for Sport and Culture Management Research (March 2021) and Reading Online Sport Economics Seminars (February 2023).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are publicly available in HarvardDataVerse, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/P12G8I. We deleted individual identifiable information.

Notes

¹ For example, in December 2019, it was announced that David Tepper had paid $325 million for a new Major League Soccer (MLS) franchise in Charlotte, North Carolina (Negley, 2019). A few months later, it was thought the expansion fee for a new National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) team in Sacramento, California, was between $1 and $2 million (Kassouf, 2020).

² Today the National Football League generates more revenue than any other sports league in the world. But when it began it was far less successful. Across the first 16 years of the league, 50 NFL franchises started. Ultimately, only seven of these franchises failed to go out of business (Kelly et al., 2020). Despite a failure rate approaching 90%, the NFL kept attracting investors.

³ The experimental approach adopted in our paper has been used in other research settings. The concept of blinding identity features to analyze behavior has also been explored in labor (Goldin & Rouse, 2000), education (Hinnerich et al., 2015) and criminal justice (Sah et al., 2015). To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first study to empirically analyze the effect of blinded decision-making in the context of gender differences in sports. See Thomson et al. (2022) and Valenti et al. (2018) for a review.

⁴ Sports highlights are an increasing touchpoint to connect with the younger generations, who prefer short-form content to consume and share on social media platforms (Silverman, 2020).

⁵ All parameters of how we manipulated videos in Adobe Premiere Pro are available upon request.

⁶ We wrote a machine learning algorithm as well. Unfortunately, the algorithm often failed with individual frames and players. It took too much time to correct for all errors. Accordingly, we dismissed this possibility.

⁷ In a small subsample, we found no differences when the demographic questions were asked after evaluating the videos rather than before.

⁸ The data that support the findings of this study is publicly available in HarvardDataVerse, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/P12G8I (accessible upon publication).

⁹ Using 10 observations per participant, i.e., one for each video, yields almost the same results.

¹⁰ Inserting all other variables stepwise does not markedly change the magnitude of the variable WomenVideo.

¹¹ Running OLS, OLS with clustered standard errors, Poisson with dummies for each participant and clustered standard errors, ANOVA or Tobit models does not significantly change the results. For readability, we show only the OLS results. All other results are available upon request.

¹² For example, Diego Pablo Simeone, a successful coach in Spanish soccer, was asked in an interview for the Argentinian newspaper La Nación to evaluate the performance of female soccer players. He answered that the only real difference at the professional level in men’s soccer is physical power; women have the technique, quality and talent (Grosso, 2019). Similarly, Jurgen Klopp, Liverpool FC’s coach, also highlighted the quality of women’s soccer after the 2022 Women’s Euro tournament: “The quality of the tournament is insane” (Sky Sports, 2022).

Additional information

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.