No abstract

Research informed by evolutionary theory has suggested that, all else being equal, men are expected to take greater risks than women. This has been evidenced in a range of domains, including health prevention behaviours. In this study, gender differences in mask wearing were recorded at three locations on a University campus (n = 1,435). Logistic regression and Bayes Factor analyses demonstrated that the data do not support a gender difference in mask wearing. This led us to supplement our findings with a mini-meta-analyis, synthesising the gender difference reported in ten papers (n = 73,493) observing mask wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic. This analysis is supportive of a weak effect whereby women are more inclined to wear a mask than men (OR = 1.54, 95% CI = 1.26 to 1.88). However, the mini-meta-analysis also suggested a considerable amount of heterogeneity. Our research calls for further work assessing the factors explaining this heterogeneity in the observed gender difference in mask wearing.

Research informed by evolutionary theory has suggested that, all else being equal, men are expected to take greater risks than women. This has been evidenced in a range of domains, including health prevention behaviours. In this brief paper, we observed gender differences in mask wearing at three locations on a University campus (n = 1,435). Using logistic regression and Bayes Factor analyses we found that our data do not support a gender difference in mask wearing. We supplemented our findings with a mini-meta-analyis, synthesising the gender difference reported in ten papers (n = 73,493) observing mask wearing during the COVID-19. This analysis is supportive of a weak effect whereby women are more inclined to wear a mask (OR = 1.54, 95% CI = 1.26 to 1.88). However, the mini-meta-analysis also suggested a considerable amount of heterogeneity. We call for further work to assess the factors explaining this heterogeneity in the observed gender difference in mask wearing.