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I'm talking strictly usability, not UX as a whole: Is there a measurable difference between men and women? Can it happen that elements of a website work well for men but don't work for women or vice versa?
Please note: I'm aware that there are several similar questions on ux.se but this one is strictly about usability, not gender specific preferences like speed vs. ease of use etc.
Here is a brief synopsis of a paper I found which says NO
Background
A bricklet is a smallwindow with specific useful information that makes the navigation faster and easier for a user (e.g., important notices and/orlinks to frequently visited website). The main purpose of bricklets is to bring important information to the attention of a user.
The Hypothesis :
While many factors can influence the effectiveness of bricklets, in this study we focus on the effects of background color and image and investigate whether these factors can affect the noticeability of bricklets by male and female users
H1) Female participants will notice bricklets with pictures of people more than males.
H2) Female participants will notice bricklets with a light color background more than males.
The findings
The analysis of the self report survey showed that male users found the bricklets withpictures significantly more appealing than those without pictures. The paired t-test did not show a significant difference in thevisual appeal of the bricklets with or without pictures for women. Similarly, the pair t-tests did not show a significantdifference in self reported noticeability of the bricklets with or without pictures for men and women. These results do notsupport hypothesis one
Hypothesis two proposes that female users, more than male users, will notice the bricklets with the lighter background color.The paired t-test did not show a significant difference in fixation (stares longer than 300 ms) between male and female users looking at the bricklets with dark and light backgrounds.
Conclusion
The results did not show any significant difference between the genders with regards to the number of times they fixated on the bricklets. Nor did the results of fixation analysis show any significant differences between men and women in regards to bricklets with different background color
However In a recent usability survey, researchers from Southern Illinois University found that after ease of use, men prefer fast download speed to easy navigation. Women prefer ease of use, easy navigation, and accessibility. The researchers hypothesize that these different usability criteria are due to differences in how men and women use the Web.
I've found a counterexample which suggests that there can be differences between genders. This MIT study suggests that font choice in an automobile user interface can have knock-on usability effects which vary with gender.
This demonstrates that there can be occasional usability differences between men and women. I would hypothesise that these differences might be due to psychological and physical variation (very broad brush here, with the standard caveats that there will obviously be exceptions and that I'm talking about aggregate/average users).
The only answer that can reasonably be given to this question is: There might be differences depending on the situation - you will need to test with your users.
I've found this, it might be interesting http://blog.kissmetrics.com/gender-and-color
