Gender and Attitude to Fair Trade: Examination of the Mediation Effect by Consumer Social Mindedness

Abstract

Currently many research reported that more and more consumers consider ethical factors as one of the more critical cues in their decision making (Bray, Johns, and Kilburn 2011). This study is interested in one particular area of ethical consumption, purchasing fair trade products.

Fair trade is an alternative business model which is characterized by “direct trade between producers and buyers, relatively higher and fair price for producers, long-term commitment between buyers and producers, reliance on credit system, higher labor standards, and upholding environmental concerns (Golding, 2010). It started as an effort to narrow the gap between the haves (mainly consumers of the northern hemisphere) and the have-nots (small scale farmers and laborers of the southern hemisphere) who have little chance of improving the quality of life in the conventional marketing system. According to Transfair USA, conventional coffee bean farmers receive only two cents from the sale of $3 latte (Fair Trade Federation, 2010).

The basic idea is that producers should earn at least the cost of production and buyers should pay as much even though the price is higher than the market price. Having few middlemen ensures this higher-than-regular market price, which is called the fair price, not very high. For example, typically fair trade certified coffee farmers can earn ten cent premium on top of the per kilo price of coffee beans, according to Fairtrade Labeling Organization standards (Fair Trade Federation, 2010).

As the global sales volume and consumers' awareness of fair trade is increasing rapidly recently, understanding consumers who buy fair trade products gets more important. Previous research which mainly performed in Europe and North America has investigated consumers' purchasing motivation of fair trade products, as well as their demographic characteristics. It is interesting that the effect of consumers' demographic variables, such as gender on the consumption of fair trade products has been mixed. Some research suggested that female consumers were more interested in fair trade products in general and that was in line with the result from the research on other venues of ethical consumption (e.g., Kwong, Yau, Lee, Sin, and Tse 2003) and ethical decision making in business settings (e.g., Bampton and Maclagan, 2009). However, other studies pointed out that there were no gender differences in fair trade consumption (Doran, 2009).

One possible explanation for the mixed results of gender effects might lie with the difference between sex and gender identity of consumers. Typically, in social sciences sex refers to biologically based distinction of male and female, and gender is more about the psychological aspects related to sex (Fischer and Arnold, 1994). It has been argued that gender identity has more explanatory power than sex and should be used in consumer research instead of the default sex as a variable (Fischer and Arnold, 1994). One way to operationalize gender is using consumers' masculine/feminine value orientation, which individuals internalized growing up in their culture and might or might not be consistent with ones' biological sex (Hofstede, 2001). While not directly deals with the focal topic of femininity, Doran's study of consumer values and their influence on fair trade consumption indicated that consumers of fair trade products tend to exhibit higher concerns of the welfare of out-group members, that is, fair trade farmers. Thus, it is suggested that consumers with higher level of femininity, who care more about other people's welfare, will be more interested in welfare of poor farmers in faraway countries. Thus, hypothesis 1 is proposed as below.

H1a. Female consumers will show more positive attitude toward fair trade.

H1b. Consumers who are more feminine (masculine) in their personal value orientation will show more (less) positive attitude toward fair trade.

As mentioned earlier, several fair trade research showed the mixed results when consumer demographics were concerned. For this discrepancy, some argued that demographic differences between consumers and non-consumers became negligible when other more important variables were considered (Doran, 2009, 2010). Doran (2010) indicated that the value of universalism was related with fair trade consumption. Another study also suggested that the level of ethical consumerism influenced consumers' attitude toward fair trade (Kim et al., 2009). These studies illustrated that some higher order variables could influence consumers' socially responsible behavior, such as more positive attitude toward fair trade.

In addition, the next hypothesis suggests that the consumer social mindedness may mediate the relationship between consumers' gender orientation and their fair trade attitude. The rationale for this assumption lies with the fact that masculinity/femininity value orientation is a relatively broad in its range and it includes many other concepts, such as gender equality, which are not directly related with the present research topic (Minkov and Hofstede, 2011). Therefore, instead of influencing consumers' attitude directly, consumers' masculinity/femininity value orientation may work along with more genre specific value. Thus, the following hypotheses are suggested.

H2. Consumer social mindedness is positively related to consumers' attitude toward fair trade.

H3. The relationship between consumers' feminine (masculine) value orientation and consumers' attitude toward fair trade is mediated by consumer social mindedness.

To test the hypotheses, students from a mid-size university in Korea were asked to participate in in-class self-administered paper-and-pencil survey. The questionnaire included Hofstede's Masculinity-Femininity scale (2001) and Nijssen and Douglas's Consumer Social Mindedness scale (2008) to measure independent variables, and three questions to measure the attitude to fair trade as a dependent variable. Age, gender, and the amount of monthly allowance were also asked. Hierarchical regression analysis results supported Hypotheses 2 and 3. However, contrary to Hypothesis 1, consumers' femininity was related with their attitude toward fair trade in an opposite way. In other words, consumers who were more masculine tended to be more positive to fair trade than consumers who were more feminine in their value orientation. Thus, Hypothesis 1 was not supported, while the biological gender was not significantly related to fair trade attitude as expected.

According to a series of marketing research, consumers of high level of masculinity value orientation wanted to demonstrate their success and achievement (de Mooji and Hofstede 2002, Steenkamp et al. 1999, Tsikriktsis 2002). It could be inferred that in this study consumers with high masculinity would have shown more positive attitude toward fair trade since using the fair trade products might symbolize that they were successful and could show interests for the less fortunate.