The Role of Gender in Evaluating Athletes' Endorsements of Corporate Social Advocacy Initiatives

When considering that athletes are becoming more vocal about their beliefs related to social justice initiatives, the role of an athlete's gender could have an impact on how sports fans view that athlete. When deciding to support or oppose a corporate social advocacy initiative, it can be argued that an individual's perception of an athlete's or team's stance towards social justice can be influenced by elements of one's social identity. Therefore, the current study expands on this idea by exploring how gender affects the perception of the credibility of an athlete as an endorser of CSA initiatives, considering both the gender of the participant and the gender of the athlete. Using both NBA and WNBA athletes, this experiment manipulates a league CSA initiative and players' endorsements of the initiative to determine if (a) the participant's reported gender and (b) the athlete's gender will impact the perception of the athlete's credibility. Results provided evidence that gender plays a significant role in that evaluation, such that the NBA player was perceived as more credible regardless of respondent gender, and while female respondents recorded no difference, male participants perceived the NBA player as more credible than his WNBA counterpart.