How gender differences affect drivers of consumer perceived value in attending academic conferences: Mitigating the impact of institutional bias

Abstract

This paper aims to determine which key attributes of academic conference attendance lead to perceptions of value for potential attendees, based on gender differences. There has been growing interest by researchers in exploring gender differences in socially constructed tourism attitudes. At the same time, we address growing calls by scholars for the issue of institutional bias in measurement to be addressed in gender-based studies. The inclusion of consumer perceived value as the dependent variable to measure conference attendance attitudes mitigates this embedded bias. While previous studies have examined consequences of consumer perceived value in the academic conference context, this study is the first to examine gender differences in antecedents of consumer perceived value and the trade-off between costs and benefits. Three potential benefits and two potential inhibitors were tested for their impact on consumer perceived value. An online survey was administered to a convenience sample of 456 potential attendees of academic conferences. Ordinary least squares regression analysis was used to investigate which factors had the most influence on consumer perceived value. Results indicate that in overall terms, conference attractiveness, scheduling convenience, organization support, opportunity costs and travel risks significantly influenced potential attendees’ perception of conference value. However, impacts varied markedly for males and females. In particular, health and safety risks and scheduling convenience were highly significant factors for females but not males. In contrast, organization support and opportunity costs were rated more highly for males than females. The finding that males were more likely to be influenced by opportunity costs is an unexpected effect and contrary to most gender-based studies. The findings extend knowledge in general about drivers of conference-related attendance, but particularly knowledge about nuances in gender differences. The study discusses implications for host organizations, event planners and venue management.