Why Are There More Female Than Male Vegetarians?

Source: sheftsoff/123RF

The Baltimore-based Vegetarian Resource Group has, for 30 years, periodically commissioned national polls on what Americans eat. In 1994, 1% of their respondents said they did not eat any kind of animal flesh. By 2022, the percentage of Americans who were vegetarian or vegan had jumped six-fold. A new study suggests that women have almost entirely driven the shift toward plant-based diets in the United States in recent years.

John Nezlek and Catherine Forsetell conducted the research, and their results were published in an article in the journal Sex Roles. Their paper described the results of two studies. The first study tracked gender differences in dietary shifts among 13,000 students at the College of William & Mary over 15 years. The second study focused on gender differences in the reasons their subjects had given up meat.

Study 1: Gender Differences in Giving Up Meat?

The participants in the first study were students taking introductory psychology courses nearly every semester between the fall semester of 2008 and the spring semester of 2023. The subjects included 7,451 women, 5,256 men, and 121 students who chose not to identify their gender.

Source: Graph by Hal Herzog

Not surprisingly, the percentage of students who were vegetarian or vegan nearly doubled between 2008 and 2023. This increase, however, was entirely attributable to women—the percentage of female students who identified as vegetarian or vegan jumped from 4.3% to 8%. In contrast, the percentage of men who stopped consuming meat dropped from 2.5% to 1.8%. This pattern of gender difference remained when pescatarians—"vegetarians" who consume fish—were included in the analyses. (See Do Fish Qualify As Meat?)
(One hundred twenty-one individuals, however, did not indicate their sex on the survey. For unclear reasons, they were twice as likely as women and four times as likely as men to be vegetarians or vegans.)

Study 2: Do Men and Women Differ in Their Reasons for Going Vegetarian?

In the second study, 121 male and 239 female vegetarians were asked about the most important reason they had stopped eating meat—the options were “ethical reasons,” “environmental reasons,” or “health reasons.” Again, the researchers found substantial gender differences. The women were more likely than men to have become vegetarians primarily out of ethical concerns (46% versus 30%). The men in the study were twice as likely as women to give up meat primarily for environmental reasons (30% versus 15%). Forty percent of both men and women were mostly motivated by health concerns.

Source: Graph by Hal Herzog

Why Are Women More Likely Than Men to Give Up Meat?

Why are there more women vegetarians than men vegetarians in the United States, and why does this gender difference seem to be growing? Nezlek and Forestall point out that women are more concerned about the welfare of animals than men. They are, for example, more likely to be involved in the animal rights movement and to be opposed to animal research. Women donate more money than men to humane organizations, and there are 10 times as many female than male researchers in the field of anthrozoology—the study of human-animal relationships. (See Women Dominate Research on The Human-Animal Bond.)

Are these gender differences a matter of nature or nurture? The answer is both. On the nature side, gender differences in concern for animals seem to be culturally widespread, if not universal. In a 2021 cross-cultural study of university students, women in every one of 22 countries scored higher than men on scales measuring concern for other species. In a paper in Scientific Reports, Christopher Hopwood and his colleagues reported that men consumed more meat than women in 20 of 23 nations. (The exceptions were China, Indonesia, and India).

Behavior genetic studies have also found that individual differences in the desire to eat meat reflect the complex dance between heredity and environment. A large study of twins in Finland found that genes explain about 50% of differences among women in preferences for meat compared to 25% of individual differences in men. And a study of Dutch twins reported that genetic influences explained 75% of the variation in decisions to become vegetarian.

Do Effective Anti-Meat Campaigns Differ for Women and Men?

Nezlek and Forestell correctly point out that Americans are no longer joining the vegetarian movement en masse. Indeed, the percentage of vegetarians and vegans in the United States has hovered between 5% and 6% for two decades. Further, per capita consumption of meat in the US has gone substantially up since 1975 when Peter Singer published his groundbreaking book, Animal Liberation. The inability to wean Americans off meat is, arguably, the biggest failure of the animal protection movement.

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These results are based on the dietary decisions of college students, and the degree they can be generalized to larger adult populations is unclear. The implications of the research, however, are important. Nezlek and Forestell suggest that effective interventions aimed at reducing meat consumption might differ for men and women. Campaigns focusing on the environmental costs of carnivory may appeal more to men, while women could be more affected by ethically-oriented information. This is an interesting hypothesis, and it is easily testable.

As the saying goes, “More research is needed.”

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