Just one five-star stay with a host of the opposite gender can kill 80% of a woman's bias toward only renting from other women on Airbnb.
March 24, 2026
Original Paper
Positive Cross-Gender Contact Attenuates Gendered Trust Asymmetries: A Field Experiment on Airbnb
SSRN · 6391739
The Takeaway
On peer-to-peer platforms, women typically show a strong 'safety' preference for female hosts that ignores standard reputation signals. This field experiment proves this trust gap isn't a fixed trait, but a malleable default that a single positive cross-gender interaction can almost entirely reset.
From the abstract
On peer-to-peer platforms, demographic in-group favoritism varies by gender: women weight similarity more heavily than men, relying less on reputation signals in the process. Is this asymmetry a stable preference or a malleable default? Using a field experiment on Airbnb in which 5,674 users played a two-phase trust game six weeks apart, we compare 5-star cross-gender trips against 5-star same-gender trips, holding quality constant. At the most demographically distant profile, where two randomiz