The sex of the service provider: Does it influence perceptions of service quality?

This work builds on recent streams of research on both service quality and the relationships between consumption and gender. It explores whether the sex of the service provider should be regarded as art element of the servicescape that influences perceptions of service quality in the contexts of fast food restaurants hair cutting salons, and dental offices. For each setting, two possibilities were explored. The first was that men might believe male servers provide higher quality and women believe female servers did, due to in-group bias or homophily based perceptions. The second was that consumers' ''server stereotypes'' concerning which sex does a better job of serving in a particular setting would interact with the sex of the service provider to influence perceived quality. Across the three settings studied server stereotypes were found to interact with sex of server and/or sex of consumer to affect ratings of some dimensions of service quality. The reasons for and implications of the inconsistent effects of stereotypes are addressed.