Are the products we promote as impactful for women as they are for men? The answer might surprise you.

By Patrick Guyer and Eyerusalem Mitiku

Are the products and services Bopinc helps bring to market equally satisfactory and impactful in the eyes of women as well as men? As part of our commitment to gender and diversity, we want to ensure that the products and services we support really do work for everyone. So we crunched the numbers from recent consumer insights surveys for female and male respondents to see if there were any differences by gender in customer satisfaction or in the self-reported impacts of these products according to consumers who had first-hand experience with them. What we found surprised us. In almost every case, female and male respondents mentioned similar levels of satisfaction and impact from a range of personal care products, foods and sanitation services, with just a few exceptions. But even more interesting was that products like menstrual pads are strongly appreciated by a group we didn’t expect: male consumers in rural Bangladesh. Read on for more insights below, and our take-aways for what they mean for Bopinc and our ongoing projects.

What do we mean by impact at Bopinc?

Bopinc works with forward-thinking companies in low-income markets to foster bold ideas that work for everyone. We’re working to bring impactful products and services to people who need them the most while supporting micro-entrepreneurs and small businesses to thrive. We’ve measured the consumer-level impacts of projects that bring nutrition and personal care products to consumers in rural Bangladesh, nutritious food products to numerous African markets and sanitation services to booming mega-cities. And the message from low-income consumers is clear: most of these projects are impacting them in ways they value. When we say impact, we mean contributing to a better quality of life, for a large group of consumers, in ways that hold up over time.?

How do we gauge consumer satisfaction and self-reported impact??

Our go-to way of measuring satisfaction with a product or service is to ask consumers whether they are satisfied enough to recommend it to family, friends and neighbours. Those who say they would are considered “promoters”, and those who say they won’t are "detractors." These responses allow us to calculate a Net Promoter Score (NPS) for each product or service. NPS is widely used in consumer research, allowing us to compare and benchmark the performance of different products and services. NPS as used here, ranges from -10 (nobody surveyed would recommend the product or service) to 10 (everyone surveyed would recommend it), and any positive NPS score shows that there are more promoters than detractors.

In this study, the consumer-level impact question we’re looking at asked respondents if they feel their quality of life had changed since they started using a product or service, and if so, whether positively or negatively. We then also asked them to describe in their own words how their quality of life had changed. This is only part of impact as Bopinc defines it (see more on our “3-D” approach to measuring impact here) but this key variable was available across several studies, hence why we feature it in this piece.?

Are there significant gender gaps in product satisfaction??

For the very most part, no. As shown in the figure below, NPS for products and services we’ve studied tends to be quite high, as reported by both male and female respondents. In fact, one of the only significant differences in NPS by gender was for menstrual products, with female consumers being slightly more likely to recommend this product than male consumers. While NPS for most of the other products and services studied differed a bit by gender, probing these data more deeply revealed that these differences were not actually statistically significant. Think of a “statistically significant” difference as one we can confidently say reflects a real-world difference, as opposed to being driven by chance or quirks in the underlying data.?

They really like it: Female and male consumers are equally like to recommend many products and services supported by Bopinc

It wasn’t much of a surprise that female consumers give menstrual pads a high NPS, though it was interesting to see that male consumers were almost as enthusiastic. Men do most of the shopping, including for sanitary products, in rural areas of Bangladesh, where this study was conducted, and comprise a majority of our consumer sample. There can be various reasons why women consistently rate these products highly. Women have a firsthand understanding of the unique challenges and requirements associated with menstruation. They are familiar with the comfort, absorption, and leakage prevention qualities a good menstrual pad provides. Furthermore, women's experiences and conversations around menstrual hygiene are often shared among friends and family, making them more likely to seek advice and recommend the product to others. But it’s clear from these results that male household members are pretty aware of the benefits of this product as well.?

On the other end of the chart, male consumers are quite a bit more enthusiastic than female consumers about energy drinks, the product with the lowest NPS of those we’ve studied. Male respondents gave energy drinks an average NPS of 8.4, while women gave it a 7. Why the difference? Our results don’t provide a definitive answer, but energy drinks tend to be marketed to and consumed more by men than by women. Some studies have drawn a link between energy drink consumption, promotion and masculinity, which may have a role in making male respondents more likely than female respondents to recommend the product to others.?

Are there gender gaps in self-reported product impacts?

Among the products we tested, consumers told us that most of them contributed to positive changes in their quality of life. Digging more deeply into the data showed that there were few differences by gender in quality of life changes attributed to these products, with the exception of menstrual pads.

Quality of life benefits of menstrual pads aren’t only perceived by female consumers

Remarkably, 72% of female participants told us that using menstrual pads had significantly improved their quality of life. One reason for the strong quality of life improvement reported by women was that good alternatives were hard to find before the brand supported by Bopinc came onto the market in rural Bangladesh. When asked what they used previously, 46% of respondents said they had used either cotton clothes or other homemade solutions, though about 34% switched from another competing brand. About 12% of respondents who said their quality of life improved as a result of this product said this was due to better personal hygiene and another 12% said their quality of life benefitted from fewer infections. Other reasons given included good quality and comfort, compared to other alternatives.?

However, it was striking that nearly half of male respondents who shared an opinion about menstrual pads also noted a positive change in quality of life and emphasised the product's benefits for their wives' health. These findings underscore that many men also recognise the value and impact of these products on their partners' health and well-being.

How will Bopinc take this forward?

At Bopinc, our goal is to make products equally accessible, affordable, and impactful for everyone. So it’s positive to see that male and female respondents are similarly satisfied with most of the products and services we’ve studied, and that they feel similarly about the extent to which these offerings contribute to a better quality of life for themselves and their family members.?

We note that these findings are subject to limitations. The samples of data we worked with were designed for the needs of specific projects and are not representative of male and female consumers generally in the markets where we work. We’ve also only gathered insights from consumers who have purchased or used these goods and services; there is no “control group” in these studies to benchmark quality of life changes against. And we’ve looked here only at self-reported product satisfaction and quality of life changes that respondents attributed to the product or service. True impact is broader and doing it justice requires different approaches. We also do not address the environmental impacts of producing and disposing of these products, though we will do so in future research. However, we can still learn a great deal from this study and others like it. We can also build on the strength of these insights by investigating consumer insights for the same products and services in other markets, where reactions may differ.?

Caveats aside, one take-away from the results above is that there’s a real value in doing this kind of gender analysis of consumer satisfaction and impact. Our initial aim was to look out for gaps that might tell us we’re falling short of our goal of supporting products that work for everyone. But what we found was even more nuanced and helpful for our work. Where possible, we will do these consumer insights studies for other products and services we support across markets where we work, and redouble our efforts to recruit robust samples that reflect the diversity of the consumers we wish to reach.?

Another more specific take-away is that we could engage male consumers more on marketing and behaviour change to promote menstrual health products. Before conducting our consumer insights survey in rural Bangladesh, we were wary that consumers, especially men, might not want to talk with us about reproductive health. But survey participation was strong and male and female respondents alike were happy to tell us about menstrual pads' positive impacts on themselves or others in their households. For our future work on menstrual health, men may be a more enthusiastic target for engagement than we thought.?

A note on the data and analysis

Data for this study was collected in partnership with 60 Decibels and Upinion through consumer studies of products Bopinc has supported in Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger and Nigeria. Groups of consumers to target for these studies were identified in consultation with project partners. The dataset analysed contains responses from phone interviews with 765 consumers and from in-person surveys of 422 consumers conducted in 2021 and early 2022. Respondents were selected randomly from customer lists for the phone interviews or sequentially in neighbourhoods or near retail points for the in-person surveys. All respondents had purchased or consumed the product or service themselves and nearly all respondents were from low-income households, based on the consumption threshold of USD 8.00 per person, per day. 78% of all respondents were male, and 22% female. While the authors recognise that gender is not a binary, very few respondents to our surveys chose to self-identify as other than female or male. Therefore this article features only results for respondents who self-identified as either female or male in comparison to each other.

The authors tested for significant differences by gender using single-tailed t-tests and chi-square tests conducted in R, using p < 0.05 as the threshold for statistical significance.