Sex/Gender and Personal Care Products
Sex/Gender and Personal Care Products
For this application paper, I chose to write about personal care products as they relate to sex and gender. I chose this topic because I think that separate personal care products for men and women are, for the most part, ridiculous, and I also wanted to see what sort of differences there were between the two genders’ answers to the questions.
The people I had complete the survey were around the same age, which could have affected the results, but I found that women used about 4-6 more products than the men, on average. However, the women had a significantly higher proportion of products used to maintain appearance. One of the men reported that he did not use any products only to improve appearance, while all of the women listed at least 3 products for appearance purposes only.
I found the most interesting responses on the question that asked which 5 products the person would choose if they could only use 5 products for an entire week. All of the men included toothpaste, shampoo, soap/bodywash, and deodorant. One of the three men included hair gel, but he was the only man who included anything in the list of 5 items that was exclusively for appearance purposes. On the contrary, all of the women included body lotion and body soap, but one woman wrote that she would choose mascara and lip balm and not toothpaste.
An interesting observation that I made was that the men had trouble understanding the difference between which products were for good health/hygiene and which were for appearance. None of the women asked me questions about those two questions on the survey, but all of the men did. While all of the women assumed that the two categories were mutually exclusive, none of the men did, and answered the two questions with very similar numbers (for example, the health/hygiene proportion would be 9/10, and appearance proportion would be 10/10). The women had more even proportions, with about 1:3 to 1:1
For this application paper, I chose to write about personal care products as they relate to sex and gender. I chose this topic because I think that separate personal care products for men and women are, for the most part, ridiculous, and I also wanted to see what sort of differences there were between the two genders’ answers to the questions.
The people I had complete the survey were around the same age, which could have affected the results, but I found that women used about 4-6 more products than the men, on average. However, the women had a significantly higher proportion of products used to maintain appearance. One of the men reported that he did not use any products only to improve appearance, while all of the women listed at least 3 products for appearance purposes only.
I found the most interesting responses on the question that asked which 5 products the person would choose if they could only use 5 products for an entire week. All of the men included toothpaste, shampoo, soap/bodywash, and deodorant. One of the three men included hair gel, but he was the only man who included anything in the list of 5 items that was exclusively for appearance purposes. On the contrary, all of the women included body lotion and body soap, but one woman wrote that she would choose mascara and lip balm and not toothpaste.
An interesting observation that I made was that the men had trouble understanding the difference between which products were for good health/hygiene and which were for appearance. None of the women asked me questions about those two questions on the survey, but all of the men did. While all of the women assumed that the two categories were mutually exclusive, none of the men did, and answered the two questions with very similar numbers (for example, the health/hygiene proportion would be 9/10, and appearance proportion would be 10/10). The women had more even proportions, with about 1:3 to 1:1