University of Glamorgan

I am organising a public seminar to showcase the latest findings on the specific benefits Diversity can bring to organisations.   The all-day event on 20 June will also highlight the specific obstacles to achieving a diverse workforce.   We are fortunate in having as keynote speakers Barbara Wilding, Chief Constable of South Wales Police, and Sally Humpage, Adviser on Employee Relations and Diversity for the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.   Our Dean and Head of Research will be chairing the conference and there will be opportunities for discussion throughout the day.

Topics covered include leadership for a diverse workforce, teamwork in an individualistic society, understanding customer demographics, designing products for diverse markets, mental health issues and ageism.  Click here for a copy of the seminar brochure. 

 If you are interested in details, please e-mail me at gmoss@glam.ac.uk

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I've been researching the extent to which academics in the UK feel isolated.  The first round of the research with Krzysztof Kubacki of Keele University found evidence of extreme isolation and wondered whether this was a factor connected with the individualistic nature of UK culture.  Would academics in a more collectivist culture be more likely to work collectively?  

In this second round of research with Dr Marion Hersh of Glasgow and Dr Rod Gunn of Glamorgan University, we sent questionnaires to academics in Australia (individualistic) and Slovenia (collectivist).   The results showed a statistically significant tendency for Slovenian academics to do more research in groups than was the case for academics in Australia.  What's more, research output per capita was higher in Slovenia than Australia. 

The results are not so surprising since the literature on Knowledge Management says that the best work is done in teams.  The implications?    Those managing the knowledge business in individualistic cultures such as the UK, the US and Australia, need to work hard to overcome the barriers presented by individualism, and create a culture in which more collectivist thinking can flourish.

 Our research will be published in the European Journal of Education and the Journal of Further and Higher Education.   Meanwhile, the Times Higher Education ran a front page feature on it.  The beginning of this is shown here.  More research on the problems of conducting research in an individualistic culture may follow.  One key question is whether real teamwork and trust is really possible in an individualistic culture.    And are women or men more or less likely to be able to engage in it?  If so, is there a case for setting groundrules on the conduct of research in individualistic cultures?  

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Research I've done with Lyn Daunton shows how senior managers can, in an interviews, disregard the criteria in the Job Specification in favour of criteria of their own devising. 

What's more, men may be likely to substitute Transactional leadership criteria for the Transformational criteria prescribed.  It makes sense to ask for Transformational leaders since all the research shows that their results are superior in the long-term for organisations.  The research also shows that Transformational leadership (taken with the Contingent Reward aspect of Transactional Leadership) is the style favoured by women.  So it's not rocket science to see that an emphasis on Transactional leadership will have the twin effect of reducing competitive advantage for organisations. It will also reinforce the glass ceiling for women. 

The positive news, as we found from our research, is that reinforcing the importance of Transformational leadership skills will benefit the organisation and also increase women's likelihood of appointment to leadership positions.   One organisation we studied that had put effort into ensuring that leaders had a mix of Transformational and Transactional skills has a senior management base consisting of almost equal proportions of men and women.

This research has attracted quite a lot of media interest.  See these two articles from the US and Canada:
http://designpsych.weblog.glam.ac.uk/files/CanadaPressHREmphasizingSoftSkills.pdf http://designpsych.weblog.glam.ac.uk/files/PublicityLeadershipValuingWomens.pdf.

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The organisers of Internet World asked me to speak at their big London Exhibtion on 2 May.   I invited my co-researcher, Dr Rod Gunn, to join me on the podium and we will be talking about Gender and Webdesign and sharing our findings on the secrets of appealing to men and women's visual tastes online.  All our research, as well as research I've done previously, suggest that men and women's visual preferences are quite distinct so this talk is a must if you want to discover the Holy Grail of visual impact.  You can see the programme of seminars at    http://www.internetworld.co.uk/ecm.html

Look forward to seeing you there! 

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I was invited as a speaker at a conference in Latvia on 23 March sponsored by the IPMA    (http://www.ipma.co.uk/). The conference title was 'How to improve competitiveness in the labour market' and I discussed the importance of leadership and motivation.  

Unlike many such conferences, the majority of delegates were women.  Probing further, I discovered that women occupy many high-profile positions in Lativa.   The conference organiser, Kristine Smilga, gave me details of positions held by prominent women - could this have something to do with the fact that growth in Latvia is going through the roof?

• President of Latvia  - Vaira Vike – Freiberga
• Minister of Justice – Solvita Aboltina
• Minister of Welfare – Dagnija Stake
• Minister of Defence – Linda Murnice
• Minister of Culture – Helçna Demakova
• Head of Parliament  - Ingrida Udre
• Chairman of the Board of Hansabanka– Ingrida Bluma

Interesting .............  

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Director magazine, the media outlet of the Institute of Directors, carried a feature in its February issue about the webdesign research of Gloria and Rod. (Link to follow soon).   It warned that businesses are alienating female surfers by adopting a 'male aesthetic' in website design.

Let's hope that businesses are sitting up and taking notice.   Please let us know if you see sites that are well suited to their target markets!

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Lots of people could see the implications for the commercial use of websites:

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There are two interesting articles that deal with this issue.

The first one, Gender gap alive and well online examines women and men’s main reasons for using the Internet.

They concluded that men are more likely to use the net to get information about sports results, weather, news, job offers and consumer ratings for goods and services. Furthermore men use the net for recreation and to listen to music, gather information for hobbies and take part in online fantasy sports leagues. They mainly use e-mail as a way to maintain links with organisations rather than individuals.

The report found that women’s use of the internet, on the other hand, is likely to involve greater use of e-mail as well as searches for health and medical information, map directions and religious material. When gathering information women tend to prefer using e-mail exchanges with individuals and support groups. They use the e-mail to communicate with friends and family, to keep in touch and to maintain social ties.

The second publication, Gender Matters (By Nita Rollins) argues that an earlier finding that that women search with single-mindedness, then promptly exiting the Internet, while men surf in an open-ended fashion, does not always hold true. Their investigation (The Gender Agenda) shows that women and men’s online behaviour now closely mirrors their offline shopping preferences, with a few notable exceptions.

Here are their interesting findings:

“1. Women feel empowered; men feel powerful

2. Men’s inner shopper is awakened; women’s inner shopper is enriched

3. Women scan; men dig

4. Men are enticed by product, then lifestyle; women are enticed by lifestyle, then product

5. Women expand the mission; men stick to the mission”

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Today’s Western Mail and the marketing trade magazine, Brand Republic, report on new looks to websites achieved under the guidance of Glamorgan University.

Rod Gunn and myself gave a seminar to staff at Bounty , highlighting features in their then website that might profitably be changed. The site you see today reflects these changes.

We also advised Directski.com on how to maximise the use of their website, providing them with a consultancy report. Their new site can be found at Directski.com and reflects the changes recommended.

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Fascinating new research from Alex Burmaster of Nielsen//NetRatings points to a clear split in website categories visited by gender on a broadband connection. This shows that the sites with the strongest male presence are a different set of sites from those with a strong female presence. So, whereas women are more likely to be visiting sites for fashion, home and holidays, men are more likely to be visiting websites to information linked to the automotive, electronic and finance sectors.

No change over time
Nielsen//NetRatings's fascinating statistics show that three out of the five sites whose broadband audience is most likely to be male, feature mechanical objects, while none of the top sites frequented by women do. Irritating as this may be to those who regard these kind of facts as reinforcing stereotypes, these findings are in fact line with findings from the last century showing that little has changed in men and women's preferences. Back in 1912, Ballard carried out a study of the drawings of 20,000 London schoolchildren aged 3 to 15. In the course of this, he discovered huge discrepancies in the topics favoured by girls and boys:

A decade later, a study by McCarty (1924) studied the drawings of 31, 239 children aged four to eight. The conclusion, back in the 1920s, was that "girls tended toward the aesthetic" whereas "the boys tended toward the mechanical or scientific aspects of life". This was based on the observation that boys were more interested in vehicles than girls, and the girls more interested in design and household. So, what is new?

Bringing these studies further up to date, Hargreaves (1977) studied the way Durham school children (71 boys and 64 girls) with a mean age of ten and a half completed the ‘circles test’. A test in which you had to add something to a circle, to turn it into a picture. Hargreaves found that the girls were statistically much more likely to draw animate objects and boys much more likely to draw man-made machines.

These and many other studies contain vital lessons on the themes that interest the average male and female of the species!

Ballard, P.B. (1912). What London children like to draw, Journal Exp. Ped. 1, 3, 185-197

McCarty, S.A. (1924). Children’s drawings: a study of interests and abilities, Baltimore, Williams and Wilkins Company.

Hargreaves, D. J. (1977), Sex roles in divergent thinking, British Journal of Educational Psychology, 47, 25-32.

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interview with Gloria Moss    

Gloria Moss combines a background in HR with a unique understanding of the impact of nationality and gender on graphic, product and web design. She currently holds the position of Senior Research Fellow in the Business School at Glamorgan University, and Visiting Professor at ESG Paris. 

Previously, Gloria has held senior positions at Courtaulds Acetate and Eurotunnel. Her clients have included M&S, BT, Bounty and Corporate Edge.

1. You've recently conducted some research into the importance of gender in web design, which seems to have been pretty much ignored as a subject. What prompted you to conduct such a study?

Several things. For many years, I have been researching men and women's design aesthetics, examining what I call their production and their preference aesthetics. All of this started about ten years ago when I made the surprise discovery that all the paintings I preferred in an exhibition of paintings by men and women, were in fact produced by women. 

I wanted to get to the bottom of whether this was a chance event, related perhaps to my quirky tastes, or whether this was a more general phenomenon that would apply to other men and women. It did not take long to discover that no one else had published anything on this topic, so the only way to get an answer was to do the research yourself.

I used some pretty rigorous statistical techniques and published the results in papers from 1995 to 2002. These showed that there was strong statistical evidence of differences between the production and preference aesthetics of men and women. My focus up to that point had been graphic and product design, and what the results showed was that - in terms of production aesthetic - there were significant differences in the way men and women used colour, shape, detailing and thematic material. 

In terms of preferences, there was a very significant tendency, statistically speaking, for each sex to prefer designs produced by people of their own sex. I called this phenomenon the self-selecting phenomenon. 

It made sense to extend the study into the field of web design for two reasons. Firstly, men and women are moving to a position of parity in terms of web usage, and increasing proportions of women are now engaging in e-commerce.  It became essential to understand whether the preferences of men and women in terms of web design were similar or different. As you rightly say, nobody had done this research before.

2. What methodology did you use? What did you seek to find out?  

The selection of an appropriate methodology has been key in all of this work, and I was very fortunate in the web design work to have Dr Rod Gunn, mathematician and statistician, as co-researcher. We did four things. 

Firstly, we established whether the production aesthetics of men and women in the UK differed and if they did in which ways. Secondly, we looked to see whether these differences across national boundaries, examining websites in France and Poland as well. Thirdly, we measured the aesthetics used in different industry websites, from beauty websites, with a predominantly female target market, to University websites with a market consisting equally of men and women. Last but by no means least, we measured the preference aesthetics of men and women.

It is vital in work of this kind that the statistics are beyond reproach. To guarantee this, we used decent sized samples of students with 30 male and 30 randomly selected female students whose personal websites we rated against 23 criteria. These spanned the three areas of navigation, visual elements and linguistic elements. We repeated this in each of the countries we were interested in, and then used the using the chi-square test of association (with p < 0.05 considered as the threshold for significance) to compare the ratings given to the male and female-originated sites.


The results? In the UK, 13 out of the 23 features showed up as significantly different between the male and female websites, and twelve emerged as significant when the results of all three countries were pooled. We were fortunate in doing this work with a Polish marketing expert, Krzysztof Kubacki, who analysed the Polish websites. The results showed that the gender differences crossed national borders.

A subsequent step was to measure the extent to which certain industry sector websites used the masculine or female web aesthetic and this was done by rating a random sample of websites against the twelve or so features that emerged as significant, and ascribing them a gender coefficient. In all cases, the overwhelming majority of websites emerged as being rooted within a masculine design paradigm.

Finally, in order to compare male and female preferences, a mixture of male and female students (67 in all) were asked to rate a number of male and female-produced websites. It was an exciting moment when the results of this test emerged. What they demonstrated was an extremely strong tendency towards own-sex preference, with men rating the male-produced sites much more highly than the females, and vica versa for the females. In statistical terms, in fact, the effect could not have been stronger.

3. In the offline world we know that men and women shop in different ways, whether zigzagging supermarket aisles or responding to colourful product displays, so it follows that perceptions of web design also differ. What do the genders look for in a good website?

Quite different things really. Men look for linearity, formality and a not too colourful look while women look for more colour, more informality and less linearity. The language they use is also different, and the sites women create also have more links than the men's. 

From the evidence of the men and women's sites across three countries, it is quite clear that men and women part company on many different features! Take a look at http://designpsych.weblog.glam.ac.uk/ our blog and you will see examples of male and female-designed websites.

4. Your study suggests that male web designers predominantly design for men. Can you elaborate? Do women design for women? Any ideas on the ratio of male to female web designers? Can men learn to design for women, and vice versa?

People have a tendency to design what they find appealing so in that sense, men will tend to design in the male aesthetic and that will tend to appeal most to men. I have carried out several surveys of the web design industry in the UK, and have consistently found that men constitute about 74-78% of designers.

Can they be taught to design for women? That is a difficult question since it presupposes some understanding of the reasons for the differences. If you assume that the differences are rooted in society and the way that boys and girls are socialised, then you could expect that the differences could in fact be taught. 

If, however, you assume the differences to have some sort of biological origin (which I believe has an influence together with socialisation), then it might be more difficult.

5. Are web designers being taught to consider gender? If not, then I guess this is a big part of the problem?  

All this work on gender and aesthetics is pretty new, so only the most enterprising colleges will be teaching it. It is important that these findings are passed on to next generation of designers. At the moment, I imagine that the notion of parallel design paradigms is not a hot topic although nothing would give me greater pleasure than to be proved wrong!

6. The research seems to prove that there is no one-stop shop approach to web design. So presumably you are suggesting that web design needs to begin with a close look at a prospective target audience, as much as anything?  

Absolutely. Our preference tests show clearly that what appeals to one group may be wide of the mark for the other. So, information on the gender constituency of the target market is therefore essential to successful web design. 

Let me give you an example. Women are the main market for Beauty websites and yet the majority of these sites are designed using a male-production aesthetic. Lots of straight line, boxes, serious images and few colours. From a design point of view, they are not having the impact on their target market that they could have.


7. How important are the visual aspects of a website in driving e-commerce? Is look and feel as vital as, say, intuitive navigation?

The literature emphasises the centrality of non-price mechanisms of differentiation and the fact that the perceived visual attractiveness and content of the website can influence perceptions as to the site's usefulness, enjoyment, ease-of-use and satisfaction. Relevant factors are likely to relate to technical issues (eg speed of loading), content or form. 

Where the visual element is concerned, graphics is listed as one of ten factors causing dissatisfaction with users in the US and The Netherlands, leading Human Computer Interaction (HCI) specialists to attempt to understand the elements (visual and content) in web design that are valued and those that currently produce a deficit between expectations and experience.

There are analogies with traditional retailing where the form and content of store atmospherics has become an established field of research study. There is wide acceptance of the importance of the retail environment and physical form of a product in creating certain effects in buyers. Where products are concerned, research shows that products perceived as pleasurable are preferred and used more often than those not perceived as pleasurable, leading to enhanced purchasing.  

8. You analysed 300 UK retailers and found that they are very masculine-focused, yet we know that e-commerce is fairly evenly split between men and women. How big is the potential upside, if gender-orientated e-tailers redesigned their sites for men/women?

The upside is potentially massive. At the moment, the vast majority of websites are employing a single type of aesthetic (the male production aesthetic) and completely ignoring the existence of another type of aesthetic (the female production aesthetic). The same applies in many areas of graphic and product design as well. It is a bit like restricting yourself to a diet of carrots and potatoes. If you didn't know that apricots and bananas existed, that would be one thing but once you knew of their existence, you'd be crazy to ignore them wouldn't you?

9. Do you have any shining examples of good / bad practice? Have many retailers actually implemented gender-orientated design?  

This is early days, and the vast majority of sites are designed within the paradigm of the male production aesthetic: lots of straight lines, squares and rectangles, serious language and few colours. There are only a few exceptions at the moment using vibrant colours, varied shapes, detail, and a more lighthearted approach. The Accessorize website used to be a good example of this, but I noticed it's been changed recently.

10. For a site like Amazon, which encourages users to log in and promotes personalisation, should it consider tweaking the look and feel on the fly, in accordance with gender?   

User statistics show that just over half the people buying books online in the US are women. Action to introduce a non-masculine element is therefore pretty essential in order to maximise the effectiveness of the site.

11. Despite all the talk of cultural differences across Europe, your studies seem to prove that men and women act in a similar fashion whether in Poland, France or the UK.

Absolutely. We've a paper coming out in the International Journal of Applied Marketing that shows this. I had the good fortune of working with a Polish Marketing expert, Krzysztof Kubacki, and he sources and analysed the Polish websites. 

12.  I've previously compared persuasive design to one of those kid's books with multiple choice endings. What are your thoughts on persuasion, and how can design influence the customer journey to achieve business goals?  

That's a nice analogy. I agree with you that one needs to be humble and put oneself in the shoes of the user. All the research I have done over a ten year period persuades me that the designs people produce are mirror images or X-rays of themselves, and people will respond most positively in the presence of designs that offer them images of themselves.

Let me explain. There is a whole body of work in the field of Art Therapy and psychology that analyses mood and personality from the colours and shapes that people draw. From this you can perhaps see that people's graphic productions are X-ray images of themselves. There is even work showing that 9 times out of ten, when asked to draw a person, most people will draw someone of their own gender. What we draw is, in many ways, a version of ourselves.  

When it comes to selecting a design we like, there is a lot of research that tells us that we select something to express ourselves. In design terms, that means that the product must express a language of colours, shapes and themes that is the visual equivalent of the personalities of the target market.

This is perhaps a new idea to many designers and marketers - that there is a language of graphic expression that can be learned and applied. I have come to perceive this largely because I trained and practised for many years as a Human Resources professional and was fascinated by projective tests. I learned then that art therapists could encode someone's character from the shapes and colours used in their doodles and paintings. From there to commercial products is just a short step, but one that can radically impact on profitability. I explain all of this in the in-house seminars I run, details of which can be found on our http://designpsych.weblog.glam.ac.uk/ weblog.

13. How come you haven't been stifled by the Politically-Correct Thought Police? 

It is true that there are certain groups who are hostile to arguments about sex differences. You can't really argue with the facts though can you? And in terms of motivation, it must be said that the notion of difference only stands to empower men and women since it places a premium on having a male and female perspective at senior levels. Only the most antediluvian of companies will rely on a single way of seeing now that there is evidence of a multiplicity of views.


Gloria Moss was interviewed by Chris Lake (chris@e-consultancy.com),
editor of E- Consultancy.com.

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