You *can* use statistics anytime you want, it’s just that you might very well have an important finding that just isn’t statistically significant (and, honestly, vise-versa!). I would suggest that you look at the pattern of women’s and men’s responses and graph them. Do they look different? Is there a story behind them being similar or different? What percent different are they?

For example, if you found that men more often said they learned more from a male speaker, but that men and women equally learned from female speakers. If people, overall, generally learned the same amount from both speakers, then that would suggest you’d maximize learning by having female speakers. This would be true and important regardless of whether the difference between men’s and women’s learning was statistically different.

Does that help?