Abstract
In recent times, the changes occurring in the social role of women and men have been observed. Traditionally, the dominating social role of the woman was as housewife, and that of the man was focused on work and family maintenance. Nowadays, the social role of women is evolving in the direction of taking a profession, while increasingly men are taking care of the household. The main goal of the studies presented here was to verify how the activation of different social roles (traditional or non-traditional) may be reflected in women’s financial and consumer choices. Three experimental studies were conducted. In the first study (n = 195 females), three different social roles of women – professional (non-traditional), housewife (traditional) and neutral (control) – were activated. The results showed that activating women’s non-traditional social role increased their tendency to invest and decreased their propensity to save money compared to the activation of the traditional or neutral social role. The goal of the second study (n = 196 females) was to check whether, despite there being no differences in the level of consumption in the first study, can any differences be observed in the preference for the type of products chosen for consumption. The results showed that activating the non-traditional social role raised the propensity to spend funds on products and services for individual use and reduced the willingness to buy goods for collective use (shared with other members of the household). The purpose of the third study (n = 90 females) was to examine how different images of women appearing in advertisements may affect women’s judgments of the advertised product. Women who watched the ad with woman in the non-traditional social role estimated the product quality, look, color and price higher that participants exposed to the advertisement presenting the woman in traditional or neutral social role. The present studies give some evidence that the new, non-traditional social role of women that is often presented in the media may affect women’s everyday financial choices and judgments of products.
Highlights
The traditional social roles of women and men have remained unchanged for many years (Barska, 2005; Diekman and Goodfriend, 2006)
It was expected that exposure to the non-traditional social role would make women more prone to invest their money, while the activation of the traditional role would increase the participants’ tendency to save money in safe financial instruments
We hypothesized that the activation of the non-traditional social role would increase women’s propensity to spend their money on the hedonistic products from the appearance category of consumption and services related to relaxation, while the activation of the traditional social role would increase the women’s tendency to spend money on functional consumption like food and hygiene products or equipment for the family
Summary
The traditional social roles of women and men have remained unchanged for many years (Barska, 2005; Diekman and Goodfriend, 2006). The traditional social role of women is that of the lady of the house, taking care of the family, being focused on children and their happiness. Traditional occupational roles attributed to women are related to caring. Men occupy the roles related to leadership (e.g., manager), which are associated with agentic characteristics (e.g., independent, competitive) (ibidem). The traditional gender social roles are consistent with stereotypical traits attributed to men and women. In the last two decades, along with the deepening social and economic changes, the social roles of women and men began to undergo vivid modifications
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