An investigation into the influence of gender on crowd exit selection in indoor evacuation

Abstract

Identifying how pedestrians make exit choices in an emergency is a critical topic related to safe indoor evacuation. Personal characteristics can influence the exit choice behavior of pedestrians. In particular, the gender factor is often used as an essential variable in indoor safety evacuation studies. However, the role of gender has not been explored in depth. The paper assumes that the following behavior of pedestrians depends on gender. Therefore, three essential factors are identified: the gender factor, crowd flow patterns, and exit width size. For the paper, a virtual experiment was conducted with 196 participants, and they had to decide whether to follow the crowd or not in the presence of capturing these different factors. The findings show that pedestrians prefer the same gender following, i.e., men are more likely to follow men to make exit choices, and women are more likely to follow women to make exit choices. We refer to this change in exit choice behavior depending on the influence of gender as the ‘gender effect.’ Furthermore, it was found that pedestrians have an innate preference to avoid the majority exit. However, when the width of the exit increases, pedestrians tend to choose the more comprehensive exit. But when the flow of people at larger exits increases, pedestrians choose to avoid the broader exits and choose smaller exits with fewer people, and the effect of the gender effect between pedestrians is diminished. These findings provide greater insight into pedestrian exit choice behavior and may be helpful for pedestrian evacuation management. In addition, they highlight the importance of gender effects and provide a basis for future research.