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The purpose of this paper is to investigate masculinity in Chinese social media marketing for global luxury fashion brands through two studies.

Study 1 compares physical characteristics of males in visually oriented US (Instagram) and Chinese (Weibo) social media posts promoting global luxury fashion magazine brands (e.g. Vogue, Cosmopolitan, GQ and Esquire). Study 2 examines the prevalence of and Chinese consumers’ responses (reposts, comments and likes) to different masculinities depicted in luxury fashion brand-sponsored Weibo posts.

Male portrayals for Chinese audiences feature more characteristics associated with emerging East Asian hybrid masculinities – “Little Fresh Meat” (LFM) and “Old Grilled Meat” (OGM) – than associated with global or regional hegemonic masculinity (i.e. the scholarly Wén and action-oriented Wu). Wén remains common in social media posts for luxury fashion goods, but LFM and OGM engender more consumer responses.

Chinese luxury fashion marketing depicts masculinity more similarly to other East Asian marketing than to Western marketing. Some luxury fashion brands are struggling for acceptance among Chinese youth. Luxury fashion marketers should incorporate hybrid rather than hegemonic masculinities to prompt more favorable responses among Chinese consumers, especially younger female target markets.

Growing female occupational and consumer power and shifting male employment from blue-collar to white-collar jobs have influenced media portrayals of masculinity. Social media marketing for luxury fashion brands demonstrates the prevalence and appeal of hybrid masculinities in China.

Despite the general presumption in favor of trade liberalization, the question of how to implement it in a way to ensure equitable income distribution and sustainable poverty alleviation in developing countries is at the core of the current trade debate. We build a macroeconomic framework that integrates both market and non-market activities, while distinguishing male and female workers throughout, in order to evaluate impacts of tariffs elimination on men and women in South Africa. Our study reveals a strong gender bias against women with a decrease in their labor market participation, while men participate more in the market economy. This strong result is due to the fact that female workers are concentrated in contracting sectors that were initially among the protected sectors and that benefit little from the fall in input prices. In contrast, male workers are more concentrated in the expanding export-intensive sectors. Female labor market participation drops particularly for Black African women, as they are more concentrated in contracting sectors. As male labor market participation and real wages increase more than for their female counterparts, their income share increases within the household. Women continue to suffer nonetheless from a heavy time use burden given their increased domestic work with trade liberalization.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the role of local labour market conditions and pupil educational attainment as primary determinants of the post-compulsory schooling decision.

Through the specification of a nested logit model, the restrictive independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) assumption inherent in the multinomial logit (MNL) model is relaxed across multiple unordered outcomes.

The analysis shows that the factors influencing schooling decisions differ for males and females. For females, on average, the key drivers of the schooling decision are expected wage returns based on youth educational attainment, attitudes to school and parental aspirations, rather than local labour market conditions. For males, higher local unemployment rates encourage greater investment in education.

The contribution of this paper to the existing literature is threefold. First, a nested logit model is proposed as an alternative to a MNL. The former can formally incorporate the structured and sequential decision-making process that youths may engage with in relation to the post-compulsory schooling decision, as well as relaxing the restrictive IIA assumption inherent in the MNL across multiple unordered outcomes, an issue the authors discuss in more detail in the Methodology section below. Second, the analysis is based on extremely rich socio-economic data from the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, matched to local labour market data and administrative data from the National Pupil Database and Pupil Level Annual School Census, which provide a broad set of unusually high-quality measures of prior attainment. The authors argue that such high-quality data and an appropriate model specification allows identification of the determinants of the post-compulsory decision in a more detailed manner than many previous analyses. Third, the data have the scale necessary to consider whether the determinants of post-compulsory schooling decisions vary by gender, a particularly important issue given the differential education participation rates of males and females (e.g. in this cohort, females are about 10 percentage points more likely to go on to higher education in the UK than males), and the gendered choices of occupation (see, e.g. Bertrand, 2011). The work will, therefore, provide recent empirical evidence from England on gender differences in the determinants of education choices.

The purpose of this paper was to examine the difference in the effect on external marketing effectiveness of gender similar boards and gender dissimilar boards in the agro-manufacturing industry in Zimbabwe.

Based on a multi-item construct of external marketing effectiveness, data were gathered from 56 agro-manufacturing firms. The significant differences in the effect of marketing activities designed by male, gender-diverse and female boards on the level of external marketing effectiveness of the firms were examined using MANOVA.

The results suggest significant differences on the levels of external marketing effectiveness between all female boards and all male and gender-diverse boards. Female boards indicated high levels of external marketing effectiveness on customer-perceived value, loyalty, satisfaction, brand performance and symbolic meaning. The study concludes that marketing effectiveness will only be achieved by firms that develop relevant marketing strategies for the female consumer market.

The sample for this research was drawn from agro-manufacturing firms in Zimbabwe. Therefore, the applicability of these findings to other countries should be done with caution. In addition, the sample for the research was rather small, with only a few female boards. If conducted with a larger sample, the results could be different. The developed scale to measure external marketing effectiveness may require to be tested by other researchers in different settings to confirm its applicability in measuring the construct in multiple settings.

Prior research shows that corporate board effectiveness has tended to be measured in terms of corporate financial performance. This research measures board effectiveness from the extent to which its gender composition has an effect on the ability of manufacturing firms to serve emerging needs of female consumers.

This study examines the selection criteria, country preference and people which influence Taiwanese male office workers' business apparel purchases in Taiwan. A partial model by Engel, Blackwell and Miniard (EBM) was used as the framework to indicate that the culture factor directly affects consumers' decision‐making process of purchase behaviour. A total of 232 questionnaires from male consumers in Taipei, Taiwan, were used for data analyses. Selection criteria, country preference and influential people were analysed by demographic variables including age, marital status, education, occupation, and yearly expenditure for business apparel purchase. Overall, the respondents ranked the selection criteria in order of descending importance as: fit, colour, price, style, quality, brand name, ease of care, fibre content and country. The order of country preference was rated first to last as: Taiwanese, Italian, US, French, British, Japanese, Hong Kong, German and Canadian. Individuals who influenced purchases were ranked as: my own opinion, wife or girlfriend, female friend, family member or other relative, male friend and salesperson. This research suggests that if foreign companies want to market to Taiwanese male consumers, they must develop appropriate strategies that help to change the domestic bias of the older males, or choose to appeal to younger males in hopes of developing long‐term brand loyalty. Additionally, the price strategies should be adjusted to be more competitive in Taiwan's marketplace. Meanwhile, fit and colour of apparel products may also need to be altered or modified in order to reach Taiwanese male consumers' demands.

This paper investigates the relative remuneration of migrants and German nationals in paid employment in pre‐unification Germany. Using microdata it shows that migrants typically earn higher wages than comparable German nationals. The paper also shows the distinction between genders and skill levels to be crucial in the determination of wage gaps. Wage gaps are decomposed in the standard Oaxaca‐Blinder way and their development is examined using counterfactual analysis. The paper also shows that conventionally defined wage discrimination works in favour of migrants. Counterfactuals show that, largely, the remunerative advantage of migrants survived the 1981‐1983 recession. However, when employment developments are considered, a much bleaker picture arises. The 1981‐1983 recession destroyed jobs that have been traditionally occupied by migrants (manual and skilled jobs). Post‐recession restructuring generated jobs that went almost exclusively to German nationals (salaried jobs).

The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors affecting the labour market status of females in Greece and the UK respectively and also attempts to explore what accounts for the differences in the employment status between males and females. In particular, the study seeks to assess whether these differences can be explained by employees' endowments or by discrimination in the labour market.

Labour Force Survey (LFS) data are used to examine the impact of observable characteristics on female labour market participation, unemployment, and self‐employment through the use of logit models. An extension of the Oaxaca‐Blinder decomposition technique is used to estimate the gender employment discrimination gap.

Clear evidence of gender differences was found in both countries, although differences are substantially larger in the case of Greece. Evidence of female employment discrimination was also found in both labour markets.

The paper explores the factors affecting the labour market situation of females and, for the first time, assesses the level of gender employment discrimination in Greece and the UK analysing the differences between the unemployment rates of males and females.

Applies four market segmentation criteria to the homosexual population. Determines that the homosexual community does not yet sufficiently satisfy these expectations in many product markets and that it is unlikely that any marketing changes will occur in the near future. Yet suggests that marketers should consider homosexuals as part of their contingent marketing strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to research lesbian fashion consumption in order to draw conclusions on the attractiveness of the lesbian target segment for the fashion industry. So far, lesbians’ fashion consumption behaviour has hardly been researched. However, an evinced lesbian stereotype exists which describes doctrinal feminists with an antipathy against consumption in general and fashion shopping in particular. In contrast, gay men have been identified quite contrary as an attractive market segment and marketers have started to particularly target this so-called “dream market”.

First, qualitative semi-structured interviews (n=18) were conducted to gain first insights into fashion consumption behaviour of lesbians. Second, a quantitative online survey (n=879) was carried out to generate more detailed findings. Due to the difficult reachability of the homosexual consumer target group, the segment’s high online media affinity was used and data collection was conducted through popular German homepages targeted to homosexuals (esp. “queer.de” and “lesarion.de”). The research investigated fashion-consciousness, willingness to pay, brand-affinity, and openness to homosexual marketing. In addition, influencing factors – such as the affinity towards the homosexual scene, career orientation, income, age, status of coming out, and number of inhabitants of the city of residence – have been researched.

Results prove that lesbians are an equally attractive and financially interesting market segment for fashion marketers as gays. Lesbians have a similarly high fashion-consciousness and willingness to pay, and an even higher brand-affinity – but a lower openness to homosexual marketing than gays. Especially scene-affine femme lesbians with a high-paid professional career are a highly attractive market segment. The study proves the attractiveness of the lesbian target segment for fashion marketing and debunks the myth of the consumption-averse lesbian stereotype.

This paper provides evidence on the attractiveness of the lesbian market segment for the fashion industry. Due to its size and financial attractiveness, the question whether to target lesbians with a specifically adopted marketing mix should be raised.

Research on lesbians’ fashion consumption behaviour in general is very scarce and on fashion consumption behaviour in particular is almost non-existent. This study is a first attempt to analyse the major areas of fashion consumption for the German market.

The purpose of the paper is to explore gender variations in entrepreneurship and internationalisation from the perspective of the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm; in particular, the paper explores how differences in the personal idiosyncrasies of both males and females in part account for the variations in export internationalisation.

The study draws on extant literature on the critical success factors in entrepreneurship and internationalisation research (e.g. foreign market knowledge, firm-level technology and firm age) as the conceptual framework to explore the issue. The study is based on 21 male and 17 female export entrepreneurs from Ghana and uses a descriptive research design (i.e. frequencies and chi-square test) to analyse the results.

The results show that the perceptions of male and female exporters differ on key internationalisation success factors based on extant literature. Implicitly, whilst both groups shared a similar degree of basic knowledge on a few export success factors, across most of the other key export success factors, the male counterparts demonstrated a more expanded view compared to the females. The results support the assumption of the RBV theory applied in this study to argue that to account properly for the internationalisation outcomes of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the personality characteristics of the owner entrepreneurs are critical resources which cannot be ignored.

In terms of limitation, the study is exploratory study based on non-probability sampling methods using descriptive frequencies tables and analysis of chi-square test and so readers must bear this limitation in mind in interpreting the results to improve on future studies.

The paper contributes to the empirical literature by offering a unique perspective regarding how women and men perceive and interpret export success factors and how that impacts on the internationalisation outcomes of women and men. The paper responds to calls by researchers (e.g. Terjesen et al., 2011; Ratten and Tajeddini, 2018; Kuschel and Labra, 2018; Javadian and Richards, 2020) to populate studies on the topic to deepen the present understanding. By using data from Ghana, West Africa, the study sheds a fresh insight on the topic from an under-studied and under-researched geographical context.