From health, sustainability, and animal welfare perspectives, reducing the intake of animal-based foods has a variety of potential positive outcomes. Nevertheless, meat consumption remains a prominent element of Western dietary patterns, and by all accounts, vegetarians constitute a minority of the populations of most countries (Leahy et al., 2010; “Vegetarianism by Country”, 2024). One of the motivations for the present study was the suggestion that the number of vegetarians has increased recently in many countries (Buchholz, 2022). Although studies that have systematically examined changes over time in vegetarianism are rare (i.e., using the same, well-defined measures of vegetarianism administered to comparable populations), there is some evidence that vegetarianism has increased in some countries. For example, Lehto et al. (2022) found an increase in the percentage of vegetarians and a corresponding decrease in the consumption of processed red meat between 2007 and 2017 in national samples of adult Finns. Although these findings are suggestive, the fact that rates of vegetarianism were higher in 2017 than in 2007 does not provide a strong basis to draw inferences about trends in vegetarianism over time.

Moreover, although studies consistently find that women are more likely than men to adopt a vegetarian diet (e.g., Ruby, 2012), we are unaware of any research that has examined gender differences in changes in vegetarianism over time. As explained below, our working hypothesis was that although increases in vegetarianism may have occurred for both men and women, such increases would be more pronounced among women than among men. Throughout this article, we use the term “vegetarian” to refer collectively to vegans and vegetarians. Although specific definitions of vegetarianism and veganism can vary, as described below in the methods section, we defined vegetarians as individuals who do not eat flesh of any kind, including fish. Vegans are defined as individuals who do not consume animal products of any kind. This goes beyond consuming animal-based food and includes non-food products such as woolen clothes and leather.

Motives to Follow a Vegetarian or Vegan Diet

Understanding rates of vegetarianism requires understanding the reasons why people follow a vegetarian diet. There is broad agreement that people adopt a vegetarian diet for three reasons: concerns about the environmental impact of raising animals for slaughter, concerns about the negative effects consuming meat has on health, and concerns about the ethics of raising animals and slaughtering them for food (e.g., Rosenfeld, 2018). Although the relative importance of these motives varies across studies, they have been consistently found to be the most important.

Changes in people’s awareness and concern about these issues may change over time, and these changes may motivate reductions in meat consumption. It is possible that changes in rates of vegetarianism reflect changes in people’s perceptions of the importance of (1) environmental sustainability, (2) animal welfare, and (3) eating healthfully. Although precise estimates of the changes of such perceptions over the past two decades are not readily available, research suggests that concerns about animal welfare and the environmental impact of meat production and consumption have increased over time (e.g., Alonso et al., 2020).

The research on changes in concerns about the health of diets is somewhat mixed. For example, according to Pew Research, a majority of Americans (54%) believe that “people in the US pay more attention to eating healthy foods today compared with 20 years ago – the same percentage who said Americans’ actual eating habits are less healthy today than they were 20 years ago” (DeSilver, 2016, para 2). Globally, it appears that diets are becoming less healthy (Shaughnessy, 2017), adding to the difficulty in reaching an unambiguous conclusion.

Gender Differences in Vegetarianism

A considerable body of research has found that men view meat more favorably than women do. For example, men consume meat more frequently than women (e.g., Rosenfeld & Tomiyama, 2021a), have stronger implicit associations between meat and healthiness (Love & Sulikowski, 2018), and report stronger meat attachment than women report (Graça et al., 2015). Some research suggests that these gender differences emerge in childhood. For example, school-age and adolescent girls have been found to prefer and consume fruit and vegetables more than boys, whereas school-age and adolescent boys prefer and consume meat products more often than girls do (Caine-Bish & Scheule, 2009).

A frequently cited explanation for gender differences in vegetarianism is that consuming meat is associated with masculinity (Rothgerber, 2013). Eating meat is a defining characteristic of being a man, whereas eating meat is not a defining characteristic of being a woman. As a result, compared to men who view themselves as less traditionally masculine, men who consider themselves to be more traditionally masculine consume more meat (De Backer et al., 2020; Rosenfeld & Tomiyama, 2021a), are more likely to view meat as natural, necessary, and nice, and are less likely to consider reducing their meat intake or adopting vegetarian eating habits (Stanley et al., 2023). Moreover, men who adopt vegetarian eating habits are viewed by others as less masculine and report experiencing gender stereotypical treatment reflecting or suggesting diminished masculinity (Adamczyk et al., 2023).

It is also possible that motives for being a vegetarian predispose women to be vegetarians more than they predispose men. For example, women have consistently been found to have more positive attitudes toward animal welfare than men (Randler et al., 2021) and to express more concern about animal welfare than men (Weathers et al., 2020). As discussed above, concerns for animal welfare are an important part of ethical motives for adopting a vegetarian diet. Gender differences in attitudes about animal welfare may reflect women’s greater empathy in general (Pang et al., 2023). There are also gender differences in attitudes about climate change, with women consistently reporting being more concerned about the environment, being less skeptical about climate change than men, and being less satisfied with efforts to combat climate change (Egan & Mullin, 2017; Flynn et al., 2024).

The Current Studies

Research on vegetarianism has used different definitions of vegetarianism and has studied different groups of people. Such variety makes it difficult to estimate changes across time because it may not be clear if changes across time are due to different definitions of vegetarianism, different samples, or other factors that are unrelated to diet per se. Estimating changes across time is best done using the same definition of vegetarianism measured on individuals drawn from the same population.

To examine potential changes across time in rates of vegetarianism, the present study used an archival database of surveys completed by undergraduate students in the United States. From 2008 to 2023, undergraduate students at the same university answered the same question about their dietary habits. Responses to this question provided a basis to estimate if the percent of vegetarians in this population had increased over time. Participants also indicated their gender, which provided a basis for examining changes over time for men and women.

Our general expectation was that the percent of participants who described themselves as vegetarian would increase over time. In addition to this general trend, we were interested in whether following a vegetarian diet would increase for both men and women. Although we are unaware of any studies that have examined this question specifically, we suspected that increases would be more pronounced for women than for men, given that women are more open to adopting a vegetarian lifestyle than men are (Rosenfeld & Tomiyama, 2021a). This may be due at least in part to the fact that consuming meat is more central to men’s identity than it is to women’s, and the association of meat and masculinity may inhibit men from adopting a vegetarian diet despite other influences to do so, e.g., increased recognition of the negative effects of raising meat for consumption on the environment.

We conducted a second study to examine gender differences in motives to adopt a vegetarian diet. This study used the same measures of participants’ dietary habits (i.e., whether they followed a vegetarian or omnivorous diet) and gender used in the first study. Consistent with previous research, we expected that female vegetarians would report that they were motivated to follow a vegetarian diet by concerns for animal rights and by concerns for the environment more often than male vegetarians.

All raw data for both studies are available via the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/d6gnt/?view_only=b0d9e3992e574241b0c507ba855eade8. For both studies, this includes a raw data file in SPSS format, a raw data file in CSV format, and a codebook containing descriptions of the variables and responses. Both studies were approved by the IRB of the co-authors’ home institution, and in both studies, participants provided explicit (electronic) informed consent and had the right to refuse to answer any question without penalty.

Study 1: Gender Differences Across Time in Rates of Vegetarianism

Method

Participants

Participants were 12,828 undergraduate students who took an introductory psychology course at the College of William & Mary in the spring or fall between the spring of 2008 and the spring of 2023. Participants’ dietary habits were not measured in the spring of 2009 and in the spring and fall of 2015 and 2016. This left 25 semesters of data. Individuals voluntarily participated in partial fulfillment of a course requirement. Participants provided informed consent and were informed that they could refuse to answer any question without penalty.

Gender was measured by asking participants to select one of the following: female, male, transgender, other, and prefer not to respond. Given the small number of participants who did not identify as either female or male (approximately 1%), we limited our primary analyses to participants who described themselves as either female or male. We conducted a separate analysis of the dietary habit of the 121 individuals who did not indicate that they were female or male. Excluding participants who did not select female or male and did not answer the question about diet, left 12,707 participants for the primary analyses (mean n for semester: M = 508, SD = 109, 7451 women, 5256 men).

Measure of Dietary Habit

From the spring of 2008 to the fall of 2020, participants described their dietary habits using a measure presented by Forestell et al. (2012). In the spring of 2021, the category ‘plant-based dieter’ was added to these habits. The dietary habits included vegan (a person who does not eat or use any animal products, including food, clothing, cosmetics, etc.), plant-based diet (a person on a plant-based diet), lacto-vegetarian (a person who eats dairy, but does not eat eggs, fish, seafood, poultry, or red meat), lacto-ovo-vegetarian (a person who eats dairy and eggs, but does not eat fish, seafood, poultry, or red meat), pescatarian (a person who eats dairy, eggs, fish, and seafood, but does not eat poultry or red meat), semi-vegetarian (a person who eats fruits, vegetables, grains, dairy products, eggs, seafood, and chicken but no red meat), occasional omnivore (a person who occasionally eats red meat, white meat, seafood, eggs, dairy products, fruits, vegetables, and grains), and omnivore (a person who regularly eats most meats, seafood, eggs, dairy products, fruits, vegetables, and grains).

We created two dummy-coded variables to represent dietary habit. One, which we refer to as ‘veg,’ was coded 1 for vegans, plant-based dieters, lacto-vegetarians, and lacto-ovo-vegetarians, and was coded 0 for omnivores, occasional omnivores, semi-vegetarians, and pescatarians. The second measure, which we refer to as ‘vegpesc,’ was coded 1 for vegans, plant-based dieters, lacto-vegetarians, lacto-ovo-vegetarians, and pescatarians, and was coded 0 for omnivores, occasional omnivores, and semi-vegetarians. We created the vegpesc measure because of an increased interest in pescatarianism (Nezlek et al., 2023; Rosenfeld & Tomiyama, 2021b). This also reflects the beliefs of some that pescatarianism is a type of vegetarianism because pescatarians do not consume red meat or poultry.

Results

Overview of Analyses

We treated the data as a hierarchically nested data structure in which participants were nested within semesters, and we conducted a series of multilevel modeling (MLM) analyses using the program HLM (Raudenbush & Congdon, 2021). We analyzed the data using MLM rather than ordinary least squares (OLS) regression because individual-level observations across semesters were not statistically independent, i.e., all students in the same semester shared the characteristics of student-life unique to that semester. This lack of independence violates one of the fundamental assumptions of OLS regression. Moreover, although we had samples of a few hundred in each semester, MLM estimates parameters using “precision weighting.” This meant that the percentages estimated for each semester reflected the number of observations (students) in each semester, and the consistency of responses in each semester.

Analyzing the data using a traditional, single-level OLS regression in which students were the unit of analysis would have confounded within- and between-semester variances and would not have provided an appropriate basis to examine changes across time in means. Using the percent of individuals following a certain dietary type based on an aggregate for each semester would not have taken into account differences in the number of observations across each semester. See Nezlek (2023) for a discussion of the use of multilevel modeling in psychological research.

Because our outcomes were binary (Bernoulli), we used a logistic model. The basic model is below.

Within-within (Level-1): Prob(Dietij = 1|βj) = φij.

log[φij /(1 - φij)] = ηij.

ηij = β0j.

Between-semester (Level-2): β0j = γ00 + µ0j.

In this model, the outcome is Diet (following a specific diet or not), and there are i participants nested within j semesters. A probability is estimated for each of j semesters, and these probabilities are converted to log-odds, which are then analyzed at Level-2 (the semester level). Because the outcome is categorical, by definition, there is no Level-1 (within-semester level) variance, and the variance between semesters is estimated at Level-2 (the between-semester level, i.e., the variance of µ0j).

Basic Models

The first analyses were ‘unconditional’ models, i.e., no predictors at either level of analysis. Such models estimate the basic descriptive statistics for a multilevel analysis: means and variances. For the veg measure, the mean log-odds (γ00) was − 2.94, corresponding to a mean of 5.02% across all semesters. The semester-level variance (the variance of µ0j) was 0.040, which was significantly different from 0, χ2(24) = 49.35, p < .01. For the vegspec measure, the mean log-odds (γ00) was − 2.54, corresponding to a mean of 7.89% across all semesters. The semester-level variance (the variance of µ0j) was 0.042, which was significantly different from 0, χ2(24) = 60.13, p < .001. The significance of these error terms indicates how generalizable differences across the semesters are.

To examine trends across time the mean log-odds for each semester was regressed onto a linear trend representing the semesters the study spanned. This linear trend was taken from Anderson and Houseman (1942). The between-semester model is below. The linear trend predictor was entered uncentered.

Between-semester: β0j = γ00 + γ01 * Linear + µ0j.

The results of these analyses were clear. Both the percent of vegetarians excluding pescatarians (the veg measure) and the percent of vegetarians including pescatarians (the vegpesc measure) increased over time: veg measure, γ01 = 0.009, t = 3.48, p < .01; vegpesc measure, γ01 = 0.007, t = 2.56, p < .02. In light of the gender differences described below, we do not discuss the probabilities these log-odds represent, although for the sake of thoroughness, they are presented in Table 1.

Table 1 Estimated percentage of women and men who were vegetarians by semester
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Gender Differences Across Time

Our primary interest was in gender differences in changes in vegetarianism across time. Such differences were examined with analyses that included two Level-1 predictors, one for women and one for men. These predictors were dummy-coded (0, 1), and they were entered uncentered. The intercept was dropped, resulting in the model presented below. Such a “no-intercept” model estimated a mean log-odds for each gender for each semester. This type of analysis is described in Nezlek (2011, pp. 27–28). As in the previous analysis, changes across time were modeled at the between-semester level with a variable representing the linear trend.

Within-semester: ηij = β1j (women) + β2j (men).

Between-semester: β1j = γ10 + γ11 * Linear + µ1j.

β2j = γ20 + γ21 * Linear + µ2j.

The results of these analyses were clear. For both the veg and vegpesc measures, the linear trend for women was significant and the linear trend for men was not significant. For the veg measure: women, γ11 = 0.013, t = 4.34, p < .001; veg men, γ21 = 0.005, t < 1. For the vegpesc measure: women, γ11 = 0.009, t = 3.110, p < .01; men, γ21 = 0.004, t < 1. Over time, the percent of women who described themselves as vegetarians (in terms of both the veg and vegpesc measures) increased, whereas the percent of men who described themselves as vegetarians (in terms of both the veg and vegpesc measures) did not increase. The estimated percents for each semester for women and men for each measure are presented in Table 1 and are depicted graphically in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Estimated percentage of women and men who were vegetarians by semester. Note. Panel 1A contains the percentages of women and men who adopted vegan, plant-based, lacto-vegetarian, and lacto-ovo-vegetarian diets. Panel 1B contains the percentage of women and men who adopted vegan, plant-based, lacto-vegetarian, lacto-ovo-vegetarian and pescatarian diets. For semester, F indicates the fall academic semester, S indicates the spring academic semester. These graphs do not include individuals who did not select female or male (n = 121)

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Moreover, these analyses provided the basis to compare the linear trends for men and women. This was done by examining the impact on the model fit of constraining the two slopes (the γ11 and γ12 coefficients) to be equal (Nezlek, 2011, pp. 25–28, 92–93). The results of these tests of constraints indicated that the linear trends for women were stronger than the linear trends for men for changes in the percent of vegetarians excluding pescatarians, χ2(1) = 7.70, p < .01, and for changes in the percent of vegetarians including pescatarians, χ2(1) = 6.82, p < .01.

Dietary Habits of Individuals Who Did Not Identify as Male or Female

Initially, participants were given three options to describe their gender: female, male, and prefer not to respond. Over time, more response options were added to this question, e.g., transgender. The number of participants who selected an option other than female or male was very low, regardless of the available options. On an exploratory basis we analyzed the dietary habits of the 121 respondents who selected an option other than female or male. Due to small samples and the inconsistency of the response options across time, these analyses could not examine changes across time.

Analyzing the sample as a whole (i.e., without regard to semester), these analyses found that respondents who selected an option other than male or female were more likely than men or women to follow a vegetarian or pescatarian diet: vegetarian, 11.6%, vegetarian + pescatarian, 14.0%; women, vegetarian, 6.7%, vegetarian + pescatarian, 10.0%; men, vegetarian, 2.6%, vegetarian + pescatarian, 3.4%. Paired comparisons of men vs. other were significantly different at p < .01. Paired comparisons of women vs. other were significantly different at p < .05 for percent vegetarian and were not significantly different for percent vegetarian + pescatarian.

Study 2: Gender Differences in Motives for Following a Vegetarian Diet

Method

Participants and Measures

We examined gender differences in motives for following a vegetarian diet in a sample of US adults recruited by Qualtrics, a professional survey company. Participants described their dietary habits using the same measure used in Study 1. As part of another, larger study, we aimed to have a sample of 500 vegetarians and 500 non-vegetarians, and the final sample consisted of 517 vegetarians and 541 non-vegetarians.

We limited our analyses to vegetarians. Due to a programming error, 158 participants were not asked about their motives for following a vegetarian diet, and some respondents chose not to answer this question. Gender was measured using the same item used in Study 1, and three participants selected other or chose not to respond, and these participants were excluded from the analyses. This left a sample of 360 vegetarians, 239 women and 121 men. All of these participants had at least a high school degree, and 84% had more than a high school degree (including vocational school). Their average age was 44.7 years (SD = 13.7).

Participants described their motives for following a vegetarian diet by responding to the following question:

Broadly speaking, most people become vegans or vegetarians or reduce their consumption of meat for three reasons. (1) Ethical reasons, including beliefs that it is wrong to kill animals to produce food and other products and that animals that are raised for slaughter are treated inhumanely. (2) Environmental reasons, including beliefs that the negative impact of raising animals to produce food and other products is too great to justify doing this. (3) Health reasons, including beliefs that eating animal flesh and animal-based foods is not as healthy as eating plant-based foods. Please indicate which of these reasons is the most important to you, and which are second and third most important.

Results

We examined gender differences in the most important reason for following a vegetarian diet with a 2 (gender) by 3 (reason) χ2 test. This analysis found that the percentage of the three reasons differed across gender, χ2(2) = 16.06 p < .001. The percentage of women and men who selected each reason as the most important reason for following a vegetarian diet are presented in Table 2.

Table 2 Most important reason to become vegetarian for men and women
Full size table

To examine these differences in more detail, we conducted a series of analyses in which we compared the percentage of women and men who endorsed each reason as the most important reason for adopting a vegetarian diet. Ranks of each of the three reasons measures were coded as selected as most important or not (coded 1, 0 respectively). These analyses found that women selected ethical concerns as the most important reason more often than men did, χ2(1) = 9.76, p = .002, and that men selected environmental concerns as the most important reason more often than women did, χ2(1) = 12.75, p < .001. There was no significant gender difference in the selection of health concerns as being the most important reason for adopting a vegetarian diet χ2(1) < 1.

General Discussion

Among the American university students we studied, the percentage who identified as vegan or vegetarian increased from 3.4% in 2008 to 5.8% in 2023, percentages that are similar to estimates of vegetarianism in the general population in the US. Importantly, this increase was limited to women. The percentage of women who were vegetarians increased from 4.3 to 8.7% from 2008 to 2023, whereas the percentage of men who were vegetarians did not change from 2008 (3.2%) to 2023 (2.7%). These trends occurred whether pescatarians were included as vegetarians or not.

Barriers to the Adoption of Vegetarian Diets

The demonstrated advantages of a vegetarian diet over an omnivorous diet in terms of individual health and sustainability beg the question: Why has vegetarianism not increased more dramatically? To some extent, this may be due to the fact that these advantages are unrecognized or undervalued (Corrin & Papadopoulos, 2017). People may simply not understand that consuming animal-based protein can present a risk to one’s health and to the health of the planet. This may be particularly true for young adults who may not fully grasp the long-term consequences of their actions.

The possibility that people do not appreciate the health risks of eating meat is understandable given the nutritional advice people have received. For example, over the years, the US government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) have emphasized the importance of animal-based foods (seafood, lean meats, poultry, and eggs) as part of a healthy diet. Vegetarian diets were first endorsed in 2015 (Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, 2016) and in 2020 the DGA started to include guidance for vegetarian diets beginning at 12 months of age (Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, 2022). Young Americans (and their parents) have grown up during a time when leading authorities were recommending the consumption of animal-based food as being part of a healthy diet. It will probably take some time for evidence-based information about the nutritional sufficiency of plant-based diets to influence dietary habits in both men and women.

There is also the issue of dietary habits and traditions. People have been eating meat for millennia, and eating meat may simply be part and parcel of people’s everyday lives. Such possibilities are inherent in constructs such as meat attachment (Graça et al., 2015). Consistent with the idea that men are more attached to meat than women are, Graça et al. found that men had higher scores than women on the Meat Attachment scale. It should be noted that women’s scores were not close to the minimum on this scale, suggesting that although meat attachment may be a stronger influence on men’s resistance to adopting a vegetarian diet than it is for women, it is likely to influence women’s resistance also.

What Might Explain Increases in Vegetarianism Among Women but Not Men?

Overall, women are more likely than men to follow a vegetarian diet, something that has been true for some time, perhaps since the advent of the modern vegetarian movement in the middle of the 19th century (Standen, 2023). Although the reasons for this are not entirely clear, two possibilities seem likely, and these explanations may also provide a basis for understanding the trends across time we found.

As noted previously, women tend to be more concerned about the ethical treatment of animals than men are (Randler et al., 2021; Weathers et al., 2020), which may partially explain higher rates of vegetarianism among women than men. Moreover, it appears that concerns about animal rights have been increasing over time among the general population (e.g., Riffkin, 2015). Taken together, these two trends suggest that increases in vegetarianism should be greater for women then they are for men. Women are more sensitive to animal rights as a social issue, and animal rights are becoming a more important social issue.

A parallel argument can be made regarding concerns about the environmental impact of consuming meat. There is little doubt that producing meat for human consumption contributes meaningfully to increased greenhouse gas emissions (e.g., Oreskes, 2022). Moreover, it appears that women are more concerned about the environment than men are (Flynn et al., 2024) and that concern about the environment is increasing over time (e.g., Saad, 2022). Taken together, these trends suggest that increases in vegetarianism should be greater for women then they are for men. Nevertheless, we found that men’s vegetarian eating habits were more likely to be motivated by environmental concerns than those of women. We are at a loss to account for this discrepancy.

Although other studies have assessed motives for following a vegetarian diet, most have not focused on the motives of vegetarians per se (e.g., Hopwood et al., 2020; Rosenfeld & Tomiyama, 2021a; Schenk et al., 2018). That is, studies have asked non-vegetarians what they think of vegetarian diets. In contrast, our study examined the motivations of vegetarians. Nevertheless, consistent with our results, Schenk et al. (2018) and Hopwood et al. (2020) found that although environment, health, and animal welfare concerns were all important reasons for people to consider flowing a vegetarian diet, health was the most important reason. Additionally, Rosenfeld and Tomiyama (2021a) found that men who had a weaker traditional gender role identity were more open to becoming vegetarians for environmental reasons than men who had a stronger gender role identity. These findings suggest that motives to adopt a vegetarian diet are likely to be expressed within a context that is informed by gender role expectations, something that may have implications for future trends in the adoption of vegetarian diets.

Limitations and Future Directions

To the extent our results are generalizable to other populations, they suggest that recent increases in vegetarianism may be due to changes in women’s diets, not changes in men’s diets. Of course, the critical issue is estimating that extent. The present sample consisted of students at a selective public university in the United States. Although the percentage of vegetarians in our sample was comparable to estimates of the US population, our sample may have differed from the general population in ways that are related to gender differences in the tendency to adopt a vegetarian diet.

There is also the general issue of whether rates of vegetarianism are increasing. For example, based on Gallup polls, it appears that the percentage of vegetarians in the US has been stable (5% +/- 1%) since 1999 (Gallup, 2023). Nevertheless, it is possible that these overall rates obscure changes in specific groups, e.g., younger women. In terms of future directions, the present results suggest that gender remains an important factor to consider for understanding the adoption of vegetarian diets or meat reduction. Unfortunately, many articles we consulted about various aspects of meat reduction (interventions, attitudes, and beliefs, etc.) did not report analyses using participant gender. In terms of promoting the reduced consumption of meat, reporting that men have more positive attitudes toward meat does not say anything about whether the effectiveness of an intervention to reduce meat consumption varies as a function of gender. We believe that in studies of vegetarianism, meat reduction, attitudes toward meat, and so forth, researchers should report gender differences in their findings, absent compelling reasons not to do so.

We also examined how health concerns, environmental issues, and animal welfare influenced vegetarians’ decision to adopt a vegetarian diet. These reports were retrospective, and it may have been difficult for participants to remember their initial motivations for adopting a vegetarian diet. We also did not assess other factors that may affect or constrain people’s decisions to adopt a vegetarian diet such as their liking of meat and the convenience (or lack thereof) of maintaining a vegetarian diet (Schenk et al., 2018).

Practice Implications

There is a growing body of research that suggests that adopting a vegetarian diet leads to increased physical health (You et al., 2022), and there is a growing body of research that suggests that the production of meat has deleterious effects on the environment, effects that can be mitigated if more people followed a vegetarian diet (Eisen & Brown, 2022). This research has led numerous scholars to examine how to increase the likelihood that people will adopt a vegetarian diet, or at the least, eat more vegetarian meals and reduce their consumption of meat. In their review of interventions to reduce meat consumption, Kwasny et al. (2022) concluded that “…linking meat to living animals or to the humanness of animals activates negative emotions and, thus, reduces meat consumption. Further, increasing the visibility and variety of vegetarian dishes in food environments decreases meat-eating. Also, educational courses on how to shop and cook vegetarian food are effective in reducing meat consumption. There is less evidence on the effectiveness of interventions addressing socio-cultural factors such as social norms” (p. 1). Unfortunately, Kwasny et al. (2022) did not provide a summary conclusion regarding sex differences. Nevertheless, the present results suggest that it might be more effective to design different interventions to reduce meat consumption for men and women rather than rely on a one-size-fits-all approach.

In our sample of Americans, women were more likely than men to indicate that ethical concerns constituted the primary reason they became vegetarians, whereas men were more likely than women to indicate that environmental concerns constituted the primary reason they became vegetarians. Interestingly, we found no gender differences for health concerns, which was the most important motive for approximately 40% of men and women and was mentioned more often as a primary motive than either ethical or environmental concerns. The greater importance of health concerns we found in our study, in combination with previous research, suggests that if an intervention needs to be limited in its focus, focusing on the health benefits of vegetarianism may be the most effective, whereas appealing to environmental concerns may be effective for encouraging men to reduce their meat intake.

Conclusion

Our finding that women were more likely than men to follow a vegetarian diet is consistent with much previous research, at least research conducted among residents of Western, industrialized countries. The primary contribution of our study is to suggest that if rates of vegetarianism have increased over time, which is the subject of some debate, this increase may be limited to women. Such a possibility may have implications for designing interventions to reduce meat consumption that appeal more specifically to men and to women.