Food

Our study is to see what gender walks into Panera more often, males or females? Some variables we cannot control in our experiment are weather the Panera location we are collecting data from is having a meeting with a predominant gender or whether any kind of sale is going on inside the Panera location we are at.

We couldn’t find any research that was in our topic exactly but we found a project by Donald C. Persaud. He studied gender differences and fast food preferences of college students in the United States. His hypothesis was that males will eat food more masculine like meat and hamburgers more frequently than females but females will eat more feminine food such as salad or yogurt more frequently than males. He split his sample population which were students from USF and split them into two groups. The first one was quantitative findings from a research survey while the other was qualitative information from a survey of randomly selected students. The quantitative survey of 1000 people had 163 people respond with 49 of them being male and 114 of them being female.  He found a correlation that males have a higher BMI than females. He also found out that there is a correlation that males eat from fast food restaurants more often than females do. During his interviews he tested what foods are most likely to be ate by each gender. He found out that males and females choose meat or fish just as equally but when it comes to non-meat dishes female are more descriptive with certain foods while males just generalise as vegetables. But he didn’t find any conclusion of gender preference for food from fast food restaurants.

<http://anthropology.cos.ucf.edu/main/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Persaud_Donald.pdf >

In our research we found another study relating to our topic was by David J. Moore and Lingling Zhang looking for gender differences in food preferences. They collected data from eighty adult shoppers and asked questions about their gender, food preferences, and emotional state. They found out that women have less resistance to eating fast food compared to men. They then studied the resistance to eating “irresistible” foods. They found that women have a much harder time resisting foods that they want at that time. Another part of their study was comparing food cravings to gender. They surveyed sixty woman and sixty men with a picture of a juicy hamburger and a questionnaire at the bottom of the page. They found a higher increase in craving from men than in women. This helps support the study by Persaud saying that some foods are “male” foods and other foods are “female” foods.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Journal-Academy-Business-Economics/261081010.html