On the Deep, Surprising, and Persistently Gendered Dynamics in Complex Music Tastes

Popular and sociological intuitions tell us that men and women ought to have manifestly different cultural tastes. Yet empirical results do not always agree: scholars have often found surprising between-gender homogeneity when it comes to aggregate cultural tastes. Why? In this article, the author argues that such homogeneity is ultimately an artifact of our reliance on affective preference as the first approximation of taste. Building on Bourdieusian work on the unity of taste and data from a nationally representative survey of U.S. residents in 2024, the author shows that there is a deep, surprising, and persistent gendered dynamic to tastes that emerges only when we account for the multidimensional complexity of taste. These gendered dynamics are deep in that they are hidden when taste is approximated in unidimensional form. They are surprising in that they provide only inconsistent support for standing theories on gendered differences in cultural tastes. Finally, these gendered differences are persistent to the accumulation of cultural capital.