Systematic Overview of Gender in Consumer Research: Foundations and Future Paths

This paper aims to systematically summarize the literature on gender and consumer research to evaluate its foundations and the state of the art of those studies. The literature review used the Scopus database applying bibliometric and content analysis. The content analysis of the most cited papers showed a predominance of quantitative studies. Despite the growing interest in the topic, researchers are still focusing on gender as an independent variable and not a category of analysis. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the complexity and particularities of this phenomenon. Consumer researchers need to focus on gender in a broader perspective, investigating how marketplace practices help create gendered environments that help perpetuate gender disparities. We discussed further new directions for future research and challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic brought to consumer’s life regarding gender

The relevance of investigating gender and consumption can be even pertinent to environmental issues, as previous research has shown that gender inequalities lead to less green consumption (Li, Zhang, Zhang, & Ji, 2019). Furthermore, the social construction of gender helps to develop roles of who men and women should be, thus, the preconceptions of women as more caring than men, while men are socialized to avoid feelings, this can influence people's sustainable consumption, which women are more likely to do than men, not due to genetic factors, but social ones (Bloodhart & Swim, 2020).
Therefore, giving the relevance of investigating gender in the consumer behavior lens and the impact that it poses to the individual's life, this paper aims to systematically summarize the literature available on gender and consumer research to evaluate its foundations and the state of the art of those studies. To do so, we conducted a literature review of the papers available in the Scopus abstract and citation database, performing a bibliometric analysis to assess the literature quantitatively.
Literature reviews can be an important research methodology, for the advances in research led to an increase in the difficulty of identifying the state of the art and to synthesize the results (Snyder, 2019). Thus, this paper is relevant in assessing this literature and presenting the results that will be useful to research in a myriad of fields to trigger new discussions and research to improve our understanding of this phenomenon.

Gender in Consumer Research
Gender is present in the market from institutional practices to consumer patterns (Arsel, Eräranta, & Moisander, 2015). Much was done to reduce gender inequalities, however, there is still inequality that needs to be addressed (Bettany, Dobscha, O'Malley, & Prothero, 2010). It is relevant to state firstly that sex, gender identity, and gender roles attitudes are different constructs (Fischer & Arnold, 1994), and thus should be treated differently by consumer research that need to understand their peculiarities and complexity. Scott (1986) emphasizes that gender is a constitutive element of social relations founded on the perceived differences between the sexes and a primary way of giving meaning to power relations. Even though it seems fixed and coherent something fixed and coherent, it is extremely unstable, which should not be prescribed, but questioned and problematized, since it legitimizes, builds relationships and is directly linked to social, economic, political and power systems.

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Those gender roles attitudes are specially discussed in studies of luxury consumption. Roux, Tafania, and Vigneronb (20017) have sought to investigate how gender could affect the perceptions and motives of luxury consumption using the structural theory of gender and found that gender status and beliefs could affect how people value luxury. Previous research had also confirmed how women have a higher purchase intention of buying luxury products than men and for the latter, those brands give more uniqueness, status, and hedonic value than non-luxury (Stokburger-Sauer & Teichmann, 2018). As luxury consumption tendency increases once the individual has less perceived power (Dogan, Ozkara, & Dogan, 2018), women's higher intention to buy can be explained by the structural theory of gender (Roux, Tafania, & Vigneronb, 2017).
The problem with those traditional views of gender in consumer research as the differences of men and women in consumers is that they see gender as binary, men and women, which ignore social-constructed aspects of these dimensions and they overlook other marginalized groups, such as the LGBT+ community. However, new research has been focusing on those overlooked consumers. Chauhan, Reddy-Best, Sagar, Sharma, and Lamba (2019) sought to understand how apparel consumption in India helps to build an LGBT identity. Furthermore, Kapoor and Belk (2020) explored how systemic discrimination can affect one's life.
Marketing strategies that accept stereotyped differences between masculine and feminine can perpetuate practices that help to maintain gender inequalities (Arsel, Eräranta, & Moisander, 2015). Peñaloza (1994) calls "gender crossings" a metaphor for when occur something that excedes the dichotomy of gender as male and female, thus being complex and challenging those preconceptions of gender as binaty. The misunderstanding of those gender crossings can be expanding by the dualistic perspective that is created about gender (Peñaloza, 1994).
The complexity of the gender crossing can be seen, for instance, in the presence and support of women in football games, spaces dominated by men, and where women have often to adopt a male's perspective to fit in (Pfister, Lenneis, & Mintert, 2013). With men, the phenomenon can be identified in the new shift in the market of beauty products. Maximo and Leite (2020) discussed how men approach vanity, increasing their consumption of beauty products, and although the term "metrosexual" is used to explain the behavior of those men, it has a negative connotation and there is a need to revisit this expression.
Gender issues such as systemic oppression and stereotypes can shape green consumption (Li et al., 2019), and sustainable consumption (Bloodhart & Swim, 2020). The understanding of this phenomenon can help us to understand better the consumer and the practices that shape consumption patterns. However, the fragmentation, as the field is discussed by a myriad of sciences can make it difficult for the sharing of the findings.

Method
A bibliometric analysis was conducted to identify, describe, and summarize the scientific production of gender and consumer research. This methodology was undertaken to identify trends, journals, main authors, most important papers, and thus helping the systematization of this research topic, in addition to identifying gaps that can be further explored in future research.
The multidisciplinary database Scopus was used once it is the largest database of abstracts and citations of peer-reviewed literature, with more than 22,000 titles and more than 5,000 publishers worldwide. Also, Scopus had the largest number of articles published on the topic in the analyzed period.
To conduct the search, we applied the search terms "Gender" AND "Consumer Behavior OR Consumer Research" in the fields of title, abstracts, and keywords. With these search criteria, 1,163 manuscripts were found until May 2020. However, after this initial search, two more filtering criteria were added to better meet the objective of this research: i) only articles and reviews, due to the peer review process, thus assessing the quality of the papers and ii) works published in the English language, to evaluate the international research, mainly find in English. Therefore, concluding our database with 1,001 documents. Figure 1 summarizes the search process.

Figure 1 -Search Process
After obtaining the database, two methods were used to analyze the articles. Firstly, a bibliometric analysis was conducted, with the use of Microsoft Excel© software, where the quantitative evolution of scientific production per year was evaluated, the journals in which the articles were most published (Bradfords' Law), and the authors who published the most (Lotka's Law).
Supported by the VOSviewer © software, version 1.6.15, a tool developed by Nees Jan Van Eck and Ludo Waltman for the construction and visualization of bibliometric maps, some networks were constructed: i) the coauthorship network, a map that demonstrates the relationship between the authors and co-authors of the database; ii) keywords network, a figure that presents the relationship between the keywords most used by researchers in their work (Zipf's Law); and iii) co-citations network, a design that exposes the relationship of when two references are cited simultaneously by a third. The second method used was an analysis of the content of the most important documents, using 200 citations to define so. Furthermore, the papers with Brazilian authors with more than five citations also passed by an analysis of the content.

Findings and Discussions
The first analysis conducted was the historic evolution of the 1,001 documents in our database. It should be noted that even though the first publication was in 1982, the discussion on gender gained more space in consumption studies only almost 20 years after this work. The oldest document in the base is titled "Three Field Experiments on The Effects of Violations of Conversational Distance", written by Judde K. Burgoon and Lynn Aho. The paper analyzed the effects of interpersonal reward and violations of expectations of conversational distance on the behavior of salespeople, among the discussions, the effects of gender were also addressed and pointed as significant. Despite the article presenting itself as a pioneer in the analyzed theme, it does not stand out at the list of high citation rate articles (n = 79).
There is an increasing evolution of the theme from the year 2010. With 2019 being the highlight year with the largest number of publications, 119 in total, and 2014 as the year that presented a drop in the evolution of published works (n=46), as shown in Figure 2. The two most cited articles of 2019 have 15 citations each. One of them was the result of a partnership between the Russian authors I., Confente I., Scarpi D., and Hazen BT, "From Trash to Treasure: The Impact of Consumer Perception of Bio-Waste Products in Closed-Loop Supply Chains", the researchers sought to understand purchase intentions for bio-based products. The findings pointed out that reactions to bio-based products are not affected by gender, but by green self-identity, age and past shopping experiences for ecological products. The second paper was written by Wang X., Lin X. and Spencer MK and it is called "Exploring the Effects of Extrinsic Motivation on Consumer Behaviors in Social Commerce: Revealing Consumers' Perceptions of Social Commerce Benefits" and identified that gender moderates the impact of behavior in the benefits of social commerce.

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Food Waste", which assess the risk of food waste by Polish consumers and identify the effect of demographic characteristics on the behavior of individuals in relation, with gender being an influential variable in food management. The second was written by Rivaroli, Lindenmeier, and Spadoni, and they investigated the influence of gender on craft beer consumption in Italy and Germany, the results show that there is no marked difference in beer consumption between gender and that in Italy this behavior presents itself as an opportunity for women to negotiate their femininity in a historically masculine space.

Most Productive Countries
Our sample includes studies from 89 different countries, Figure 3 shows the collaboration network between countries with ten or more publications. It should be noted that a single document may be related to one or more countries, depending on the number of co-authors and the nationality of the organizations to which they are linked.

Figure 3 -Coauthorship of Countries Network
The United States of America is the country responsible for more than 32% (n = 324) of the scientific production of gender and consumer research, followed by the United Kingdom with just over 10% (n = 104) and Australia with 9% (n = 89). From Brazil, 18 papers were found, that is, less than 2% of the articles available. The United States is the country w hich has more collaboration with the other countries in the network, except with Portugal, Greece, Malaysia, Finland and Belgium. Brazil, in turn, presents collaboration only with the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. The papers analyzed are divided into 471 journals, but only 14 have more than ten publications. Table 1 shows the journals with the highest number of publications. Based on the dispersion theory developed by Bradford, a small portion of the journals carry the largest number of published articles, while a large portion of the journals presents a small number of articles. It is noted that the 14 journals represent approximately 25% (n = 247) of all articles in the database and 457 other journals comprise 75% (n = 754) of the remaining articles. Note: **CiteScore The Journal of Consumer Marketing addresses contemporary and emerging issues in the field of marketing, focusing their publications on works that combine consumer with managerial issues of marketing. This journal has the largest number of papers in the database, with 34, eight of which were published in 2010. Table 2 shows the most productive authors, according to the number of articles published. Only authors with 3 or more works on the theme of gender and consumption were considered, and more than 100 citations added to the three works. The database comprises works by 2759 authors and co-authors, of which only approximately 0.6% of the authors met the two filtering criteria. It is worth mentioning that most of these authors are linked to the institutions of the United State.

Main Authors
The author Bruwer J. has the largest number of articles but does not have the highest number of citations. His most impactful work, with 120 citations, was a collaborative production with Saliba A. and Miller B.F., which received the title A coauthorship network analysis was conducted with researchers with three or more published works and at least 50 citations in VOSviewer ©. This type of analysis allows us to relate the number of studies produced and their collaborations by the authors. However, the results indicate a small number of collaborations among the most productive authors, where only three works carried out in partners were found, shown in Figure 4. The authors are represented by circles and divided into clusters according to their collaborations. The first cluster is constituted by Thach L. and Bruwer J., their paper was published in 2013, has currently 36 citations and it is entitled "Wine Tourists' Use of Sources of Information When Visiting a USA Wine Region". The research aimed to establish differences or similarities between visitors in terms of the sources of information they use to plan their visit to a wine region and how situational and sociodemographic variables relate to them. The results showed no difference in the sources of information by gender, except that millennium women presented word of mouth and pamphlets as significant sources.
The second cluster consists of two collaborations between Park J. and Kim J., the first was published in 2005, has 91 citations, and it is named "A Consumer Shopping Channel Extension Model: Attitude Shift Toward The Online Store". The goal was to examine the extension of the consumer shopping channel, with a focus on changing attitudes from the offline store to the online store. The findings showed that the attitude towards the offline store was a significant predictor of attitude towards the online store and that the search for information in online environments aroused the purchase intention more than the search for information in the offline store. The second, "Are US Consumers Ready to Adopt Mobile Technology for Fashion Goods?: An Integrated Theoretical Approach", was published in 2009 and has currently 57 citations. This article sought to explore the effects of the ease of use, utility, pleasure, and subjective norm on the use of cell phones by American consumers with mobile communication, mobile commerce, and the intention to use mobile technology. The results showed that the variables analyzed are significant predictors of attitudes towards mobile communication and mobile commerce, as well as mobile technology uses the  Página67 intention to make purchases. Both works showed that the samples are slightly biased towards the female gender, so, they need more specific future research.
Finally, the third cluster is constituted of Jayawardhena C. and Karjaluoto H., with the paper "Antecedents To Permission Based Mobile Marketing: An Initial Examination" of 2009, with currently 72 citations. The authors examined the influence of four antecedent factors (personal trust, institutional trust, perceived control, and experience) on consumers' willingness to participate in mobile marketing with permission. In assessing gender, the authors identified that the perceived control differs between genders, being a determining variable for men and not for women. Table 3 shows a content analysis of the main papers found in Scopus database, considering those with more than 200 citations. There is a predominance of quantitative studies and a significant increase in the number of citations according to the year of publication, thus, the oldest is at the topmost cited papers. Also, two papers address the topic of compulsive buying and gender. Objective: This study aimed to develop a post-structuralist analysis to analyze lifestyles and analyze the pattern of consumption in postmodernity. Method: Qualitative; Results: The author described five fundamental principles of the analysis of poststructuralist lifestyle (contextual cultural frameworks, consumption practices, lifestyles as symbolic boundaries, lifestyle as a collective construct and lifestyle as social constructions), and these principles can help to unravel the social pattern of consumption according to important social categories, such as social class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and generation; 421 Thompson C.J. (1996) It is noted that the most cited studies seek to analyze the variables that influence consumer behavior and the factors that affect purchase intention of different markets. The oldest study among them (Thompson, 1996) addresses a central issue for several other works in the database, debating on symbolic expression, its reproduction and its potential for transforming social collectivities, where they are discussed as the principles of post-structuralist lifestyle influence and help to understand the pattern of consumption according to social characteristics.

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The papers presented in Table 3 also address a more critical perspective of marketing relationships, concerning groups and consumption practices that are generally marginalized in research (eg mothers working with juggling, consumption of genetically modified foods). Finally, it is possible to identify a demand for emerging themes compared to the year of publication of the works, where subjects such as technology and internet use, at the beginning of their expansion, are explored according to social variables. Table 4 shows a content analysis of the main papers with Brazilian authors from the database, with more than 5 citations. No Brazilian author stands out with more than one work. Most articles are quantitative. Objective: This research aimed to describe the places of purchase of food consumed outside the home, to characterize consumers according to the places of consumption and to identify the foods purchased by place of consumption; Method: Quantitative; Results: Male consumers showed higher frequency values of purchase of food outside the home when compared to women. Analyzing the places of shopping, women were more frequent in the purchase of street food and less frequent in restaurants than men. Table 3, the articles with Brazilian authors were published in a more recent period, present more contemporary perspectives and more comprehensive samples, where are pointed out as the purchase intention and the consumer behavior vary in different nationalities. Consumption habits, such as the purchase of foreign products and the purchase / consumption environments for goods and services are also highlighted among these works. Diverging from the others, the study by Davies et al. (2016) has children as the target audience, evaluating how this audience responds affective and cognitively to the consumption of cartoons designed for video games and how the gender variable influences these responses. It is worth mentioning that the most fruitful works presented in both tables prioritized binary gender analysis. Figure 5 shows the keyword co-occurrence network, words with at least 40 occurrences were considered. It is worth mentioning that the words indicate lines of research in the field studied. They were grouped in a cluster and the size of the circles on the graph indicates the number of occurrences of each keyword in the base.

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Figure 5 -Keywords The first cluster (blue) is composed by words which indicate methodology strategies to gather data, as surveys and questionnaires. In the second group (green), the research addresses issues such as the influence of the internet on consumer behavior and marketing management practices. The third cluster (red) relates to research in the field of psychology to the influence of sex, age, and other factors on purchasing behavior.

Final Remarks
The goal of this paper was systematically summarizing the available literature on gender and consumer research to evaluate its foundations and the state of the art of those studies. To do so, we conducted a literature review, applying bibliometrics and content analysis techniques.
Our main findings show that the most cited paper is "Poststructuralist Lifestyle Analysis: Conceptualizing the Social Patterning of Consumption In Postmodernity" (Holt, 1997) and the journal that publishes most papers on this topic is Journal of Consumer Marketing. The country with the biggest number of papers is the United States. The content analysis of the most cited papers and the key-word co-occurrence network showed a predominance of quantitative studies.
Despite the results, some limitations of our study need to be addressed. First, our main analysis focused on quantitative aspects, thus leaving behind other information that could help us to understand this field even further. Moreover, although the Scopus database has a significant number of papers, there is a need to increase the database by collecting studies from other databases. Other types of studies such as conference paper could also help us to access more deeply the state of this field.

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The results of the analysis show that consumer researchers need to focus on gender in a broader perspective, investigating how marketplaces practices help to create a gendered environment that perpetuate gender disparities. Transformative Consumer Research and Transformative Service research could reinforce gender as a fundamental element to consumer well-being. There is a need to identify how those government programs help to put these women in the consumer market and how it affects their behavior.
Future studies could further explore how socio-cultural norms affect the consumer domains seen as male (i.e., technology and sports) and female (i.e., fashion). The socially constructed view of beauty affects more hardly women, having very negative impacts, such as eating disorders. In this "woke culture", feminism has a significant space and women often do not care to comply with this socially constructed view, this phenomenon can help us understand even further nonconsumption issues and how the decisions of those women help them to construct their self. How the perception of toys as male and female help to mold the sociological view that people have of women's roles in society? How the increase in media consumption help to create specific views of consumer' needs in men and women?
Gender is still being investigated mainly by the differences between men and women, when in fact the concept is more complex and harder to understand. There is a need to discuss even further what gender means to consumer research and how does gender affect consumption's life daily. Moreover, it is necessary that companies on the market to be aware of the issues regarding gender inequality and discrimination because they can act to improve those consume's wellbeing and the sense of self (Chauhan et al., 2019). Therefore, researchers need to be partners of organizations and the public sphere to improve the life of these consumers that suffer from systemic discrimination.