Sounds too feminine? Blind tastings, phonetic gender scores, and the impact on professional critics

Abstract

We shed light on assessing product quality in blind tastings and their potential (gender) biases. We study how phonetic traits of grape varieties suggest product attributes in the context of professional reviews. This study aims to close this research gap and analyze how product variety and phonetic name traits affect expert ratings. We obtained data on 18,609 wines and their ratings from Wine Enthusiast Magazine between 1997 and 2016, yielding a sample of 31,058 observations. We suppose that the gender of the taster needs to be considered to understand what affects tastings and ratings, as women and men might be attracted differently to masculine or feminine names. This study shows that masculine names receive higher evaluations than feminine ones. This phonetic gender gap is driven by lower ratings for white wines by female reviewers and lower ratings for red wines by male reviewers. In addition, white wines are rated lower overall by both men and women.