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The gender breakdown of the vegetarian population—that more women than men are vegetarian (Rosenfeld, 2018, Ruby, 2012)—may also play a role in establishing social norms that influence how people engage in social comparison (Festinger, 1954).
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Learn More »Approximately 5% of people in the United States are vegetarians (Gallup, 2018), the majority of whom are women (Rosenfeld, 2018, Ruby, 2012). Accordingly, gender has played a central role in psychological investigations of vegetarianism (Rosenfeld, 2018, Ruby, 2012). Recent studies, for example, have documented how men and women have different attitudes toward meat and vegetarianism (Graça et al., 2015, Judge and Wilson, 2018), how vegetarian men and women are perceived differently by others (MacInnis and Hodson, 2017, Thomas, 2016), and how omnivorous men and women reason differently about the morality of eating meat (Dowsett, Semmler, Bray, Ankeny, & Chur-Hansen, 2018). What remains less known, however, is whether men and women who go vegetarian construe their diets differently. Understanding the gendered nature of vegetarianism is important given that overconsumption of meat has adverse effects on both public health and the environment (Tilman and Clark, 2014, Willett et al., 2019). Many scholars and organizations, accordingly, recommend following a more vegetarian diet as a way of improving health and reducing agriculture’s environmental impacts (Wynes & Nicholas, 2017). Yet two considerations are critical to understanding how people think about reducing their meat intakes: (1) Food choice comprises a central domain of one’s identity (Bisogni, Connors, Devine, & Sobal, 2002), with vegetarianism constituting a distinct social identity (Rosenfeld & Burrow, 2017a); and (2) food choice-identity is intersected with gender. If men and women differ in how they construct social identity around vegetarianism, then greater considerations of gender may be needed for advocates, policy makers, and practitioners to successfully persuade consumers to eat less meat. As of yet, conceptual and qualitative research adopting a social identity approach to studying vegetarianism is plentiful, but quantitative research on identity processes involved in vegetarianism is sparse (Rosenfeld, 2018, Rosenfeld, 2019c). To this end, in one important regard, empirical evidence on whether vegetarian men and women express their vegetarian identities in different ways is entirely lacking—a knowledge gap the current research aimed to address. There is strong reason to suspect that gender influences how individuals feel and behave with respect to vegetarian eating. A main theoretical framing of the current research relates to gender roles in Western cultures. In contrast to biological sex, gender is a socially constructed identity grounded in social roles. As a social identity, gender can be susceptible to various forms of identity threat (Branscombe, Ellemers, Spears, & Doosje, 1999), such that the stability of one’s gender identity may be threatened if one publicly violates gender norms. Thus, enacting gender implicates not only how one views oneself personally but also how one is viewed by others. According to Goffman (1976), people readily engage in “gender displays,” acting in ways that satisfy social expectations about how individuals of their gender ought to act—with men acting masculine and women acting feminine. Goffman and other theorists (e.g., West & Zimmerman, 1987) have suggested that gender displays entail enacting behaviors in response to social situations. To this point, role theory proposes that people do not possess a stable trait-like sense of gender; rather, people exhibit and construct gender through social interaction (West & Zimmerman, 1987). This makes gender particularly relevant for impression management (Goffman, 1959): When people are in social contexts, they may be motivated to act more in line with gender norms in order to satisfy others’ expectations of them. Eating is a highly social behavior (Sobal, Bisogni, & Jastran, 2014) with established ties to impression management (Vartanian, 2015, Vartanian et al., 2007) and gender displays (Julier and Lindenfeld, 2005, Sobal, 2005). Through the food choices one makes, one can engage in gender displays and symbolically present a gendered image of one’s self. Meat poses a particularly relevant food when it comes to gender differences in eating. Several scholars have highlighted that meat is deeply associated with masculinity (Adams, 1990, Rogers, 2008, Rozin et al., 2012, Rothgerber, 2012, Ruby and Heine, 2011, Sobal, 2005, Stibbe, 2004). Vegetarianism, accordingly, is viewed as a stereotypically feminine behavior (Browarnik, 2012, Mycek, 2018, Sobal, 2005). These gendered conceptions are exemplified through, and reinforced by, advertisements that often portray meat-eating as essential to maintaining a masculine identity while denigrating vegetarianism as the enemy of “eating like a man” (Rogers, 2008). As such, it is unsurprising that, compared to women, men tend to eat more meat (de Boer et al., 2017, Keller and Siegrist, 2015) and are less likely to become vegetarian (Forestell and Nezlek, 2018, Pfeiler and Egloff, 2018, Ruby, 2012). Beyond such gender-category effects, within-group heterogeneity in gender identity among men may even influence how men feel toward meat: Men for whom gender is a more central aspect of their identity are particularly likely to exhibit strong emotional attachments to eating meat (Jansen, 2016). One reason why people may associate vegetarianism with femininity is that vegetarianism may be viewed as a lighter, more healthful eating pattern. Eating healthful foods is seen as feminine, whereas eating unhealthful foods is seen as masculine (Vartanian et al., 2007). Women are expected to eat light and healthful food and men to eat heavy and hearty food, which may explain why vegetables—as a healthful, low-calorie, low-fat food—are more commonly consumed among women and meat among men (Bradbury and Nicolaou, 2012, Roos et al., 2001). Furthermore, women are socialized to see themselves as more fragile than men are (Boskind-White & White, 1986), which may explain why perceptions exist that meat may be too heavy for women to consume and that vegetables are “wimpy” foods (Sobal, 2005). Social expectations of gender and eating manifest themselves in individuals’ behaviors in romantic contexts: When on a date, women are more concerned about eating lightly than are men (Laner & Ventrone, 2000). Women are also more likely to view vegetables as an acceptable dating food compared to men (Amiraian & Sobal, 2009). Simply put, men may feel as if consuming a vegetarian diet—one that is light and healthful—is incongruent with maintaining a masculine identity and thus constitutes a socially discouraged behavior. Vegetarians are generally viewed as health-conscious individuals (Hartmann, Ruby, Schmidt, & Siegrist, 2018), which may in part account for why vegetarianism is perceived as feminine. Aside from health aspects, another reason why people may associate vegetarianism with femininity stems from the inherent human dominance over other animals that occurs with meat consumption. Masculinity in Western cultures is characterized by strength and dominance (Adams, 1990, Schrock and Schwalbe, 2009), and the hunting, killing, and butchering of animals for meat may signify these connotations of virility (Sobal, 2005, Roos et al., 2001). According to Adam’s (1990) feminist-vegetarian critique, male dominance over animals is intertwined with patriarchal dominance over women. Eating meat can make men feel like “real men” (Rothgerber, 2012, Sobal, 2005), symbolically subjugating women and bolstering men’s social standings (Adams, 1990). Compared to women, men tend to exhibit greater social dominance orientation (Pratto et al., 1997, Whitley, 1999), and this stronger preference for power-based social hierarchy has been linked to humans’ biases against non-human animals (Dhont, Hodson, Costello, & MacInnis, 2014). Hunting has historically been a masculine tradition characterized by dominance over nature, aggression, and the ability to successfully provide for one’s family (Fiddes, 1991, Loo, 2001, Sobal, 2005). Essentially, meat may equate to masculinity because feeling superior to animals by eating meat can satiate the need for social dominance hierarchy among men, affirming core values of masculinity (e.g., strength, power) and social roles (e.g., provider for one’s family). Differences in moral attitudes toward animals between men and women, thus not surprisingly, may also play a role in the gendered nature of meat consumption and avoidance. Compared to men, women express greater support for animal rights and welfare (Broida et al., 1993, Eldridge and Gluck, 1996, Graça et al., 2018, Knight et al., 2004, Kruse, 1999) and are less likely to endorse speciesism—the notion that some species of animals are less worthy of moral consideration than others are (Caviola, Everett, & Faber, 2019). As such, it is unsurprising that gender differences exist in how people respond to the meat paradox, or the cognitive dissonance of eating meat yet caring about animals (Loughnan, Haslam, & Bastian, 2010). One strategy for alleviating meat-eating dissonance is to dissociate meat from its animal origins (Rothgerber, 2012). Upon being exposed to the life of an animal raised for meat—and thus, entering a state of heightened dissonance—men report increases in meat attachment whereas women report decreases in meat attachment (Dowsett et al., 2018). This divergence is in accordance with research on gender differences in meat-eating justification strategies: Men are more likely than women are to justify eating meat directly and unapologetically (Rothgerber, 2012).
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Learn More »Gender differences exist not only in how people think about their own decisions to eschew meat but also in how they think about other people’s decisions to eschew meat. Compared to omnivorous women, omnivorous men are more bothered by vegetarians and are more averse to dating a vegetarian (Judge and Wilson, 2018, Ruby et al., 2016). Just as meat-eaters have varying attitudes toward vegetarians depending on their own gender, so too do meat-eaters have varying attitudes toward vegetarians depending on the vegetarian’s gender: People exhibit stronger biases against vegetarian men than against vegetarian women (MacInnis & Hodson, 2017). Thus, being the targets of divergent attitudes, vegetarian men and women may internalize the same eating behavior in different ways. Interpersonal interactions can reinforce gender roles in eating by making people who violate such roles susceptible to social rejection. For example, men who eat plant-based diets are judged to be less masculine and more feminine than are men who eat meat-based diets (Bradbury and Nicolaou, 2012, Ruby and Heine, 2011), and men are rated more unfavorably for being vegetarian than are women (MacInnis & Hodson, 2017). These evaluations line up with Adams (1990) theorizing that eating a vegetarian diet transgresses dominant gender role dichotomies, with vegetarian men particularly violating the expectation of how masculinity ought to be enacted (Nath, 2011). In terms of a gender display perspective (Goffman, 1976, West and Zimmerman, 1987), a man who refrains from eating meat at a social gathering can symbolically fail to express a masculine identity and thus opens himself up to be categorized as feminine (Nath, 2011). To practice vegetarianism as a man carries a different meaning than does doing so as a woman. In contrast to the well-developed literature on gender differences in attitudes toward meat and vegetarianism, far fewer studies have examined how vegetarian men and women may construe their diets differently. The limited evidence in this domain, however, is promising. Eating in a way that is stereotyped as feminine, vegetarian men may be more susceptible to facing diet-based gender identity threats. Vegetarian men are more likely than vegetarian women are to be marginalized due to their food choices, imposing on them the need to make greater efforts to strategically manage the intersectionality of their gender and vegetarian identities (Sobal, 2005). One strategy vegetarian men employ to uphold a masculine identity is to explain their decision to eschew meat as one grounded in rational, logical, and scientific reasoning (Greenebaum and Dexter, 2017, DeLessio-Parson, 2017, Mycek, 2018). That is, they uphold a gender-binary notion of maleness as rational and femaleness as emotional (Mycek, 2018), using impression management to foster congruence between their gender and vegetarian identities. Evidence also exists to suggest that, even when they follow the same type of meat-reduced diet, men are more resistant to identifying as vegetarian, whereas women are more open to doing so (Rosenfeld & Tomiyama, 2019a). Identity phenomena, thus, may impart direct effects on how people construe vegetarianism, over and above actual eating behavior. Such reasoning is supported by research showing that meat-eaters’ gender is a unique predictor of their openness to becoming vegetarian, over and above their current pattern of meat consumption, dietary identity variables, dietary motivations, or other demographics (Rosenfeld, Rothgerber, & Tomiyama, 2019a). Based on these findings, and meat’s association with masculinity, it is likely that gender intersects with vegetarian identity and ultimately leads men and women to construe meatless dieting divergently. The current research seeks to advance the current literature on gender and vegetarianism by investigating whether gender associates with how people express identity around vegetarian food choices. That is, do vegetarian men and women construct and rely on different senses of self when it comes to forgoing meat? Moreover, do vegetarian men and women have different motivations for following their diets, judge meat-eaters with different degrees of harshness, and adhere to their own diets at different levels of strictness? In this investigation, I employed Rosenfeld and Burrow (2017a) Unified Model of Vegetarian Identity (UMVI)—a theoretical framework that conceptualizes vegetarianism as a social identity—to test for psychological differences between vegetarian men and women. The UMVI outlines eight latent variables that characterize how vegetarians think, feel, and behave with respect to following their diets, which include variables related to central aspects of social identity (i.e., centrality, private regard, and public regard), moral judgment and dietary motivation (i.e., omnivorous regard, prosocial motivation, personal motivation, and moral motivation), and dietary adherence (i.e., strictness). Within vegetarian identity, centrality, private regard, and public regard constitute core features of social identification that are common across various identity domains (Luhtanen & Crocker, 1992). Centrality refers to the extent to which one views being vegetarian as a predominant feature of one’s self-concept; private regard refers to one’s personal feelings toward vegetarians and toward being vegetarian in terms of positive–negative valence; and public regard refers to one’s feelings about the way in which meat-eaters and the larger society view vegetarians (Rosenfeld & Burrow, 2017a). Based on previous research, predictions could be made for gender effects in either direction for these three variables, such that there are reasons why men may score more highly than women or why women more highly than men. One the one hand, men who abstain from eating meat may feel as if their diets define them to a greater extent. The gendered nature of their diets (i.e., eating a “feminine” vegetarian diet) would be incongruent with their gender, which may become recurrently salient to them personally and publicly within social contexts. The gender breakdown of the vegetarian population—that more women than men are vegetarian (Rosenfeld, 2018, Ruby, 2012)—may also play a role in establishing social norms that influence how people engage in social comparison (Festinger, 1954). Vegetarian men may be more likely to socially compare themselves to other men, feeling like more of a minority within their gender category, which in turn may cause them to view avoiding meat as more central to their identity. Still, on the other hand, women generally face greater social pressures regarding body image and exhibit higher rates of dieting than men do (Rolls et al., 1991, Wardle et al., 2004). Thus, if dieting in general is more strongly intertwined with gender among women than men, then women may be inclined to view vegetarian dieting as a more defining self-attribute in order to affirm gender norms and achieve greater self-consistency. With these conflicting perspectives, it seemed unclear whether vegetarian men or women would exhibit higher centrality. The extent to which gender may influence how vegetarians feel emotionally about being vegetarian also seemed unclear. On the one hand, women are judged more critically for their food choices in general than men are (Chaiken & Pliner, 1987). Facing this greater degree of criticality and greater social pressures related to body image and dieting (Rolls et al., 1991, Wardle et al., 2004), women may feel as if they are under constant scrutiny for whatever food choices they make. Evidence exists for this view in the realm of vegetarianism: Women are more likely to report hostility from family and friends for becoming vegetarian than men are (Merriman, 2010). At the same time, if women are socially rewarded for restricting their food intake (Mooney, DeTore, & Malloy, 1994), then they may also receive positive feedback for following any diet (including a vegetarian diet). Adding to this potential elevating effect for women, associations of meat with masculinity and vegetarianism with femininity may lead men to feel particularly stigmatized for being vegetarian. Negative attitudes toward vegetarians are common (Kellman, 2000, Minson and Monin, 2012), and research has found that men are rated more unfavorably for being vegetarian than women are (MacInnis & Hodson, 2017). Thus, vegetarian men may in turn hold their vegetarian identity in lower regard. With these conflicting perspectives, the current study sought to clarify this association as well as to test whether gender would show unique links with private and public regards distinctly. Beyond core social identity dimensions of centrality, private regard, and public regard, the current study further considered vegetarianism as it relates to dietary motivation, adherence, and moral judgment—factors that may inform one’s sense of self as a vegetarian. A great deal of research has centered on what motivates people to follow vegetarian diets (Rosenfeld, 2018, Rosenfeld and Burrow, 2017b, Ruby, 2012), yet reports of gender differences in motivation are sparse to null. According to the UMVI framework, three motivational orientations—prosocial, personal, and moral—exist to capture facets of why vegetarians follow their diets. Prosocial motivation refers to the extent to which a desire to benefit something beyond oneself is a reason for vegetarian dieting; personal motivation refers to the extent to which a desire to benefit oneself is a reason; and moral motivation refers to the extent to which beliefs about rightness and wrongness is a reason (Rosenfeld & Burrow, 2017a). Previous findings that women express greater support for animal rights and welfare (Broida et al., 1993, Eldridge and Gluck, 1996, Knight et al., 2004), report lower endorsements of speciesism (Caviola et al., 2019), and are more likely to believe that meat consumption harms the environment (Mullee et al., 2017) suggest that women may be more prosocially and morally motivated to follow a vegetarian diet than men are. Still, these findings reflect ideological differences between men and women, which do not necessarily reveal direct insights into what actually motivates people to make certain food choices. Ideologies may stimulate motivation, yet it remained unclear whether different reasons propel men and women to adopt a vegetarian diet. Another construct within the UMVI framework is dietary strictness, or the extent to which one adheres to one’s vegetarian diet (Rosenfeld & Burrow, 2017a). Many vegetarians violate their diets and eat meat from time to time (Barr and Chapman, 2002, Kwan and Roth, 2004, Rosenfeld and Tomiyama, 2019b, Rothgerber, 2017), which poses an intriguing matter for research on how individuals construct identity around eating: Vegetarians who eat meat directly violate their social group norm and thus may face social identity threat, being denied vegetarian identity status. The possibility that one can be a vegetarian without truly eating a vegetarian diet may instigate within-individual and intragroup processes as individuals seek to maintain a positive sense of self (Plante, Rosenfeld, Plante, & Reysen, 2019). Gender differences in food attitudes and dieting may predict higher dietary strictness among vegetarian women than men. Women view their food choices as more important to them, exhibit greater restrained eating, and exhibit higher rates of dieting than men do and are judged more critically for their food choices than men are (Chaiken and Pliner, 1987, Kiefer et al., 2005, Wardle et al., 2004). These factors, coupled with greater acceptance for women to be vegetarian, may cause women to place a greater importance on following a vegetarian diet strictly and men to violate their diets more willingly when doing so avoids their being labeled as feminine. Still, whether or not a gender effect would emerge for vegetarian dietary strictness remained unclear, as the moral psychological and social identity factors surrounding vegetarian dieting adherence (e.g., Rosenfeld, 2019d, Rosenfeld, 2019d) may make it markedly distinct from other forms of eating behavior. A remaining latent variable within the UMVI framework is omnivorous regard, or how one feels about other people eating meat (Rosenfeld & Burrow, 2017a). Although vegetarians are generally not judgmental of meat-eaters’ food choices (Minson and Monin, 2012, Rosenfeld, 2019c), within-group heterogeneity does exist, such that some vegetarians evaluate people negatively for eating meat. No prior perspectives or empirical research, to my knowledge, have reported theories or findings that can directly inform predictions concerning whether vegetarian men or women would differ on omnivorous regard. Documenting such a gender difference, though, can be meaningful. Vegetarians with low omnivorous regard, who judge people negatively for eating meat, may grapple with the recurrently induced psychological burden of feeling moral outrage—anger at the violation of a moral standard (Batson et al., 2007)—in a society where their view of eating meat as morally impermissible contrasts the status quo. Moreover, given that meat-eaters denigrate vegetarians when they think vegetarians are judging them for eating meat (Minson & Monin, 2012), low-omnivorous-regard vegetarians may be at elevated risks for interpersonal conflict and social rejection. Such processes may explain in part why vegetarians are an often stereotyped and stigmatized social group (Kellman, 2000, MacInnis and Hodson, 2017).
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