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Women Buy More Tech Than Men
Computerguy5 writes "According to a Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) study, released at this past Consumer Electronics Show (CES), women accounted for $55 billion of the $96 billion dollar market. 40 percent of women surveyed responded that they were treated better when accompanied by a man. CNN reports on the findings."
"women accounted for $55 billion of the $96 billion dollar market." Do the math.
"For years, I struggled with reality... but I'm happy to say I finally won out over it." -- Elwood P. Dowd
I think you parsed that sentence wrong. He implied that men do get all glassy eyed and impressionable over shiny things. Slashdot is entirely consistent with this conjecture.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
We have a saying around here, stolen from the movie 'The Boiler Room'... and that is Don't Pitch the Bitch.
Crude, but women are such a fucking hassle when you're trying to sell stuff at a higher price than they think its worth. Men are a lot easier to cajole, and don't keep throwing up concerns or calling you every day to see why you didn't do what you promised yet. Men are definitely a lot easier to scam.
My step-father on the other hand, can't change a light globe and when asked by my mother for a Hammer Drill for her birthday, didn't know what one was and I haven't taught him how to use the memories or key-lock on his mobile phone because its too complicated for him.
That said, my father makes an excellent salesman, whereas my mother (when she tried it) was average at it.
Sometimes people don't fit into the stereotypes - sometimes they do - stereotypes can make things easier (the first question asked when getting presents for children is "boy or girl?") but also limit the options you have.
I wonder if the the fact that some women have problems dealing with technology sales people is because most of them are male, and are typically used to dealing with males in technology areas. This is changing, but it won't happen immediately. The stereotypes may be plain wrong, but still take a while to change.
According to Warren Farrell in The Myth of Male Power (an amazing book), the amount of retail space devoted to women's products is SEVEN times that devoted to men's.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
I dunno, when it comes to buying new boxen, every (male) geek friend I know spend endless amounts of time (only online though) on research, comparisons, searching for deals, etc. Although the same goes for the, sadly few, geek women I know. But then, if I was offered a 4.2 GHz, that's an impulse buy right there ;)
668.5
Here is a clue, I have a Master's in Computational Physics and I spend a lot on tech gadgets and computers. Imagine that a 42 year old, little old lady who does something besides buy gadgets for her husband.
I have been so patronized in tech stores I do almost all my tech shopping online now.
"No I do not need a large LCD to draw pictures on, I need it to see physics simulations."
"No I don't need a pop-up blocker, I use Linux and OSX, I out grew Windows when it was on version 3.11"
"No I don't need your over priced warrenty, if it breaks I'll fix it myself."
If it is true that women do most of the spending on tech stuff, then I expect like me they are doing most of it online and these patronizing boys will before too long all be unemployeed.
At issue here is that there are a large group of people that on occasion get at best dismissed and at worst harassed when buying tech products.
Ask me how many times a sales guy can't look me in the eye cause my tits are too distracting, or how many times my product choices are second guessed simply cause I'm wearing a skirt, and I then have to go and recite all the specs of the product from memory IN ADDITION to the competing products to prove that believe it or not, I'm not an impulse tech shopper and fully research and plan all of my purchases. (actually, I enjoy that part, cause the sales 'dudes' then shut up fast and realize they've been outclassed, hopefully learning it's bad sales strategy to have any preconceptions of their customers).
Also fortunate in this sense, bricks and mortars RARELY have the best prices and online stores have yet to discriminate in the least when I purchase all the tech products for my document imaging business and my personal armory of gadgets.
Motivational quote for the day: Try thinking of women as more than brainless bank account draining bimbos and maybe you'll find one that's not.
See? They're not so different...
If it rattles and it shouldn't, then use duct tape. If it is suppose to rattle and doesn't, then use WD-40.
Oddly enough, I didn't find myself wondering that at all. It seemed patently evident.
As a woman, I can attest to the uneven treatment. Women begrudingly learn to live with it at least in part. I live in a medium size town where alernatives to a given establishment might not be plentiful.
That said, many of the male generated responses to this story are symptomatic of the problem, as Aardpig infers. The products purchased really aren't the issue - I can go just about anywhere but the most female-targed businesses and within as long as it takes to fire up my laptop, locate someone willing to treat me in a codescending fashion. Having this happen in a location that parallels my job experience (network admin) is indeed particularly frustrating, but never surprising.
It all revolves around social attitudes - 50 years ago nobody complained about this type of behavior because it was the expected norm - "Now honey, don't you have a husband to help you with that?" We've obviously come a long way, but we have a long way to go. Frankly, I doubt it will be erased in my lifetime, if ever in whole. Men are men - sorry guys, but your need to grunt and proclaim your superiority is inbred or something. 75% of the responses here prove that!
Yeah, they suck as oil rags. But they're good for applying wood stain.
I'm a Unix Sysadmin and a woman. And being a female Unix Sysadmin is not a rare encounter where I come from. There are 10 other women Unix admins in my department of 30. At my last job, there were 4 women Unix admins and 1 man, it was definitely a "Girl's Ghetto". You want DNS, NIS, NIS+, SAMBA, NFS, iPlanet web/app/directory server, MQ, Squid Proxy, VCS, Oracle, EMC Timefinder with SRDF, Websphere, Policy Director setup for ya'?? Hey, I'm your girl, I can fix you up right. You want that on a Solaris Starfire, HP-UX SuperDome, or AIX p690? No need to look any further, here I am, laying it down, ifconfig'ing it up.
I'm a wife. I'm a geekgrrl. I've been a tech-head from practically the cradle. I played Pong at age 5. Pacman at age 10. I hounded my single-parent mom for a Commodore 64 with 1541 disk drive and phone cradle modem (Q!) at age 12 and used it all the way into college using Broderbund word processing software and GEOS to write my papers (BTW it still works and my husband and I play Radar Rat Race on it for kicks every once in a while). I loved Macs in high school and when I could afford it, I traded up to a Mac Centris with 28.8 Hayes modem mid-college and loaded that puppy with Adobe Photoshop, Infini-D, and muchos mejores. Post-college I bought a Umax S900, which is currently on our network running a hacked version of Mac 10.2 OS X.
I research and buy all my own tech goodies, like my Sharp Zaurus Linux PDA, except for when they're given to me from my wish list, like my Logitech RF rechargeable mouse/keyboard. I build my own Win XP (for my Win only games and for work) and Linux machines and hack my own kernel for specialty apps like AirSnort. I have an Axis 2100 network cam running Linux with add-on external microphone speakers setup so that I can watch and bug my cats into action from afar. I DIG TECH. And me being a woman shouldn't make one diff to you other tech heads. I could very likely kick your butt or very likely give you a run for your money in a match of Killer Instict as Maya. I love my Gamecube and my Xbox. I play online MMORPG's like Star Wars Galaxies. I GET TECH, all on my little girly own.
I am kind of apalled at all the sexist shopping jokes this thread has taken. If you'd ask my husband, he would tell you that he probably fits the description of a metrosexual. He has more jackets, shoes, shirts, cologne, hair product than I do and he's a tech-head for IBM doing mail, network and server administration.
If you're a man or a woman out there making sexist stereotypical jokes about who buys what, knock it off would you?! Quit insulting the intelligence of all your fellow tech-heads.
Grab some enlightenment, sit down and shutup...and wow, it was hard to train the MCSE guys I worked with to try listening to what they called "the ditzy secretaries" for a change. My tickets went down and my sector of 1500 computers+ was measurably quieter. All from listening and doing 5-15 minutes of training.
I currently shop online not just because the prices are better, but because I'm sick of dealing with the MCSE techs at Best Buy, CompUSA, etc, who think just because I'm there with my husband discussing specs, they need to contribute to the conversation. But to my husband's credit, he's good about laughing in their face and turning back to me when they are being obnoxious. I'm also the one walking up with the box to the cashier--little pet peeve of mine.
What -I- run at work:
Several iSeries mainframes
Several Suns
Several HP-UXs
Several AIXs
Several Linux
LOTS of Wintels
What we have (collectively) at home:
An AS400 (mine)
Several Suns
A DEC Alpha
A wireless network
Various PCs with various OS's
C64
I think the real problem here is sales people. Face it, they know jack shit about the product they're trying to sell but have to sound knowledgeable anyways. I can't begin to count the number of times that I've dealt with sales people where I already know about the product and just spute a bunch of BS just to make a sale. They're notorious for doing this at future shop where all the sales people are paid by commission, and if you don't make enough sales then you are fired. Plus with the rare chance that they actually hire someone thats knowledgeable in a sales position. It just doesn't make sense sometimes. We're closer to the world of dilbert then anyone realises.
Dunno, I can't say as I've ever felt like I was being treated like a moron just because I'm a chickie-boo. Not even when I ACTED like a dumb little chickie-boo doing undercover work to scope out the competition for the computer company I work for. OTOH, there have been several times I've wanted to throttle the shit out of some noodlehead at Circuit City, Best Buy, Nobody Beats The Wiz, etc. because they didn't know SHTML from shinola...