New preprint on gender differences in mask wearing.

Another brief post! Just to let you know that we have submitted a new preprint to PsyArxiv. “We” as this is a project together with two Bachelor students. It started out as a Bachelor thesis. In this thesis, Sophie (with the help of Sarah) wanted to explore whether there were gender differences in mask wearing. Also in the use of hand sanitiser, but it turned out she observed no one using the hand sanitiser stands at our campus. Given that in most domains, we typically find that, all else being equal, women make more preventative health behaviours than men, we expected women to be more inclined to wear masks than men. Over a couple of weeks, she observed >1,000 individuals and coded their perceived gender and whether or not they were wearing a mask. When it came to analysing the data, unlike other papers, we found no evidence for a gender difference. This then prompted us to have a quick scour for all papers we could find on mask wearing during COVID-19, which relied on observation and allowed for coding gender. As you’ll read, we found one paper suggesting the opposite : men were more inclined to wear masks than women, but this difference was very far from significant. So what happens when we look across all those papers, over 70,000 observations from 10 studies (including our own). Well, there is an inkling of an effect, with women being more inclined to be observed to wear masks than men. What is perhaps more striking is the considerable variation between all these studies: we call this heterogeneity. Moving forward we need more studies and we should see if we can explain some of the variation between these studies. Have a read! (Or don’t and just enjoy the sunshine. It is very lush here in the Toon).