Eve Colson-Sihra

When does gender differentiation intensify? Although gender stereotypes affect career and family choices, those outcomes are measured only later in life, making the initial divergence hard to identify. We use food consumption as a high-frequency revealed outcome observable from childhood onward to track gendered culture. Using U.S. household barcode panel data, we document a persistent 20% gender gap in red meat consumption that has not closed in three decades. Engel-curve estimations and supplementary online surveys indicate that this gap is not explained by supply, observables, physiological needs, or information differences. We then show that the red meat gap co-varies with other measures of gender differentiation: self-collected explicit and implicit (IAT) gender-meat associations, and local gender-career and gender-science associations from secondary data. Turning to panel identification, we find that the meat gender gap begins in late childhood, widens sharply during adolescence, and stabilizes thereafter. Overall, consumption offers a tractable behavioral marker of when gender differentiation intensifies, with implications for the timing of gender-equality policies and for environmental and health interventions targeting meat consumption.