Gender and vaccination: understanding the multifaceted role of a multidimensional conceptualization of vaccine hesitancy

ABSTRACT

Popular press and academic articles alike speculate that gender influences vaccine receipt, but they often disagree whether men or women are less likely to become vaccinated. In the current article, we further test the relation of gender and vaccination in four datasets, and we assess the mediating role of vaccine hesitancy dimensions. Our results demonstrate that: (1) gender has significant relations with several vaccine hesitancy dimensions, which are mixed between both women and men having negative perceptions regarding vaccination; (2) gender does not significantly relate to flu and COVID-19 vaccination willingness or receipt, but women were more likely to receive other vaccines; and (3) a significant indirect effect did emerge in the two datasets collected after widespread access to the COVID-19 vaccine, such that the perception that vaccines cause health risks mediates the relation of gender with flu vaccination willingness as well as COVID-19 vaccination willingness and receipt. Our discussion integrates these findings with models of preventative behaviors and identifies directions for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• vaccine hesitancy
• vaccination
• individual differences
• preventive behaviors

Disclosure statement

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

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13548506.2023.2280462.

Notes

1. It is recognized that gender is not a dichotomous conceptualization of only male and female, but we focus on these two categories for two reasons: (1) Prior research has almost exclusively focused on male and female comparisons when discussing gender and vaccination. (2) While our sample sizes were large, we did not obtain enough participants that identified as other than male and female to perform analyses with other identifications.

2. Studies 1 and 2 were conducted before the widespread availability of the COVID-19 vaccine. For this reason, the parenthetical statement was not included in Studies 1 and 2.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.