Wine, Women, Men, and Type II Error

Abstract

More than forty published works show that women and men differ in their taste preferences for sweet, salt, sour, bitter, fruit, and other flavors. Despite those differences, dozens of state fair and other wine competitions determine winners' ribbons, medals, scores, and ranks by pooling the opinions of female and male judges. This article examines twenty-three blind wine tastings during which female and male judges scored more than nine hundred wines. Two-sample t-test results show that the gender-specific distributions of scores do have similar means and standard deviations. Exact p-values for two-sample chi-square tests show that the distributions of men's and women's scores are not significantly different, and exact p-values for likelihood ratio tests of Plackett-Luce model results show that the genders' preference orders are not significantly different. The correlation coefficient between women's and men's scores is weakly positive in 90 percent of the tastings. On that evidence, indications that the genders prefer different wines are difficult to detect. If such differences do exist, as the nonwine literature implies, the results of this analysis show that those differences are small compared to non-gender-related idiosyncratic differences between individuals and random expressions of preference. The potential for accept-a-false-null-hypothesis Type II error when pooling female and male judges' wine-related opinions appears to be small. (JEL Classifications: A10, C10, C00, C12, D12)

Do Female and Male Judges Assign the Same Ratings to the Same Wines? Large Sample Results

“…The large-sample findings noted earlier are consistent with the small-sample findings in Bodington (2017). If the accept-a-false-null-hypothesis Type II error is made by combining women's and men's scores when judging wine competitions, this article has shown that such error is small.…”

“…What is the cause of the variation in Figure 1 and the SDs in Table 1? Bodington (2017), Corbin (2006, p. 2), and Jackson (2009, p. 87) conclude that non-gender-related differences between individuals are the primary reason for variance in scores. That view is tested here by calculating the distribution of results for 1,000 cases in which men's and women's scores were shuffled randomly amongst each other.…”

“…Bodington (2017) compared the scores assigned by women and men to the same wines in 23 tastings. Four different tests in that article support the null hypothesis that female and male judges assign about the same ratings to the same wines.…”

The 2016 Wines of Portugal Challenge: general implications of more than 8400 wine-score observations

“…Those results imply that women and men appear to assign about the same scores, and award the same medals, to the same wines. Those findings are also consistent with the food-related results in Corbin (2006) and the winerelated findings in Bodington (2017).…”

Introduction to the Issue

“…In a paper entitled “Wine, Women, Men, and Type-II Error,” Jeffrey Bodington examines whether there is a statistically meaningful difference between women and men in wine tasting (Bodington, 2017). Since state fairs and other wine competitions typically pool the scores of female and male judges, the existence of idiosyncratic differences would yield a bias in the overall score.…”