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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."
If you have not done so yet, get a woman in your product design team.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
And you sold those things to them, right?
we DO spend more time shopping and finding sales [/gross generalization]... and buying technology isn't like buying cars... it's not like there's a lot of haggling going on, so I'd think it's fair to say they'd get the same bang for their buck. I don't walk out of best buy feeling cheated, although I have experienced the "oh, you're a girl, you don't know what it MEANS when I say 4.2 GHz or DDR or anything FANCY like that... here let me show you the pretty PURPLE computer..." phenomenon. Trick is... ignore the sales-people, or bring a male for decoy-work.
As a consequence Lego will now ditch the silly little colored blocks and design more Adult like products. Inflatable dolls for dad and longer more sturdy colored artifacts for mom.
Help fight continental drift.
"Nearly three-quarters of women surveyed by the industry group complained about being ignored, patronized or offended by sales people when shopping for electronics."
Probably three-quarters of men would complain about the same thing.
"40 percent of women surveyed responded that they were treated better when accompanied by a man."
Does that mean that 60 percent were treated better when they weren't accompanied by a man?
sig's not here
Well isn't that some sad, stereotyped shit(?) According to the article, women complained about being patronized in tech stores. But what the hell kind of image of women do the tech manufacturers have?
1. "Well, these 'women' are always in the kitchen, right?!"
2. "True dat, so why not refit our gadgets so they match kitchen cabinets and stuff!"
3. "We've got it! Profit!"
What's the word I'm looking for
668.5
His point is that it means that women spent more money on tech, not that they bought more tech.
:)
You do the math
I've just had a quick scan through the initial (100 or so) responses to this story. It seems there is little variation between the responses; most of them fall into one of the following categories:
None of these responses really makes any serious attempt to address the issues behind the story. Instead, they appear to regard the story as an attack on their technical savvy, and by association an attack on their manliness. This may explain why so many responses proceed to trash either the figures quoted, or women themselves. Is it any wonder why so many men on /. complain about not getting laid?
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Is that I am more of a tech nerd than 95% of the guys I know, and every time I walk into a computer store, jiffy lube, or hardware store, the people there treat me like a slobbering 2 year old.
I swear this conversation happened about 3 weeks ago:
[sales rep-tile] "Can I help you?"
[me] "Nah, I'm just looking for a network card."
[sales rep-tile] "This is a good one, and we can put it in for you."
[me] "Oh, I'll just put it in myself."
[sales rep-tile] "Now sweetheart that's very complicated, are you sure you should try that?"
Sometimes it's difficult to refrain from telling them to kiss my ass.
- Kate
"DNA is life. The rest is just translation."
But WTF cannot contractors respect the pover of the the chequebook (checkbook) and DO WHAT THEY ARE PAID FOR!
They are. You are enabling their behavior. You could fire them, or you could just let them screw up and refuse to pay them, or most effectively, chew them out for ignoring your wife and refuse to repeat it. If they want it repeated, let her repeat it.
Anything that is more than twice as powerful as what you could get for the same money three years ago. Alternatively, anything that costs less than half what it did three years ago.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
The stereotypes may be plain wrong, but still take a while to change.
That's if they're wrong. Exceptions don't disprove stereotypes -- they are noteworthy because they are exceptional.
Holy moly is this place awfully sexist or what?
Don't get me wrong. I have a sense of humour, and I enjoy jokes about the stereotypes that are associated with men AND women, but I'm suprised at how unsympathetic most people posting here are.
When my girlfriend goes out and gets treated poorly at a computer or electronics store, it pisses both of us off. It's totally unreasonable. We both make a living as programmers, but she's the one with the Master's degree in CS, while I have a lowly Bachelor's. There's no reason to treat us differently. She knows as much as I do. (More, obviously, given our educational differences.)
I've never really understood how people can put up with widespread sexism. These women are our wives, daughters, mothers and sisters. When they get treated poorly, I get angry about it. Don't any of you care that if/when you get a girlfriend, some retarded drone that works a low-paying retail job in some warehouse store thinks that he's so much better than the person that you've decided is a worthwhile human being that you like to spend time with that he's going to insult her intelligence?
C'mon. Stop with the 'go make me a sammich, beyotch!' jokes. They're an insult to men and women alike.
Women are the more substantive consumers over man. Who do you think they're buying the "tech" for?
Who in here tells their significant other to get them anything but gadgets as gifts?
I my world a gift giver has two options.
1) Get me something electronic.
2) Get me gift certificate to an electronic store.
-----
One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
I don't know about your house, but at mine, the woman buys all the gifts. Christmas, birthday, weddings, etc. And since I'm a geek, a lot of my friends are geeks, too. So tech stuff is a good bet when it comes to gifts. I imagine that women do BUY more tech, but I would like to see a survey on who USES more tech!
--If you don't test it, it won't work. Guaranteed.
I'd say 100% of customers (male and female) at Fry's Electronics would report at least one of those responses from sales people.
Hmm, and I've had rude sales people at Radio Shack, Circuit City, Best Buy, and pretty much all of em. I'm sure that sales people are more likely to be patronizing to a woman buying technology - but I think the 75% mistreatment number is a bit of misleading hyperbole because it fails to account for the fact that low level retail sales is generally carried out by surly teens who hate their job.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
It's clear that more or less, you're an idiot. A sexist one at that. It would take too long to respond to the massive amount of drivel that you clearly spent a lot of time typing, but I will correct one particular point.
'Materialism' is a desire to have physical things - materials. 'Material' is derived from the latin 'materialis' (and the french 'materia') meaning 'stuff'. 'Mater' means 'mother'.
That's the problem with people like you. You never actually do your research, and are content to merely blather on mindlessly with no idea of what's actually going on.
I'll leave you and your misogeny alone now.
Stereotyping is a fact of life. GET OVER IT!
Stereotyping, or prejudice, as you're describing it, isn't the same as the situation the parent was describing.
Assuming that someone speaks English in a predominantly-English speaking area/country/store/whatever is a reasonable prejudice (in the classic sense of the word). It is not reasonable to ask each person what language they want to use before using it. It is also reasonable to treat people who walk into your store as potential customers, and probably reasonable to treat strangers on a dark street with some caution.
On the other hand, failing to hear someone because of what they look like is a non-functional prejudice. It's not that they *ask* him and not his wife because they assume he will know and she won't. It's that she *tells* them something and they simply ignore it until he repeats it. It's like assuming that someone does *not* speak English because they look Asian, and not noticing when they talk to you in a perfect American accent.
women ARE generally less competent than men when it comes to construction.
Based on...? When it comes to how they want a house extension to work, women usually have a *much* better idea of what will work for the family than men do. They spend more time in the house and have to use a greater percentage of it. Most men have no experience with construction, and sometimes will *pretend* to understand or know things they don't to protect a macho idea that they're supposed to know this thing.
They discriminate as a matter of efficiency and accuracy not to serve their egos.
It is not more efficient to have to get instructions twice, the second time from someone who is not there in front of you.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
In my experience, the normals ask geeks for tech buying advice to reach out to geeks, not to get help. Most people are so intimidated by tech that when they finally feel confident enough to bring new gear into their lives, it's a breakthrough. So when they talk to a geek about it, they're trying to get social acceptance in what they think are the geek's own terms. "Should I get X?" really means "do you like me now that I like X?". Geeks typically don't decode short sentences, especially when the immediate meaning is simple among geeks. So we talk about the tech, when the normals are really talking about the people. Combine that with the common geek insecurity when talking about people, and it's no wonder these conversations go nowhere.
--
make install -not war
I've been a long time (like over a year+) slashdot lurker, and this topic has so moved me to create an account and post.
I am a female, I have a network of four linux-loving computers, and comparatively, my boyfriend (bless his little lovely heart)... is largely computer illiterate. But I really need him at times to be taken seriously, both at stores and with phone tech support. I order all my computer parts online now. The one recent purchase I've made at a store, I became very hostile with the salesman at Best Buy who was treating me like a child, despite my repeated firm protestations of "I know exactly what I'm looking for, please back off already." He finally backed off only when my bf who had been in the game section turned the corner and asked, "Hon, have you found what you were looking for yet?" The attitude women reported in the article is very much obvious with tech support too. I've had harrowing experiences with tech support over a lemon laptop. Ironically, in all the months it took that to be straightened out, the only time I was taken seriously was by a woman tech support person (although a few years back I had a dead sound card, told the male tech support person exactly the problem and how I arrived at it, and he simply said, "I love people like you, we'll send the replacement out today"). Now, even when dealing with tech support I make my bf take the phone and he tells them what I say, because they tend to take him more seriously than me saying the exact same thing. Having me sitting next to him relaying my commentary rather than being on the phone myself makes that significant of a difference. And I resent it. I know as geeks we all hate dealing with tech support and pushy electronics store people... let me tell you, it's a thousand times worse and more insulting when you are a female and they treat you like a baby because of it. After dedicating so many years of my life to developing my computer skills, that treatment infuriates me. I seriously like to live by the philosophy that there is more difference within the sexes than between them. Unfortunately, that view is not held by most of the world... particularly men when it comes to women in technology.
I read slashdot. I care about Linux and SCO issues. I build my own computers, link my PDA to the wireless network I've set up in my house, and argue kernels with men.
I DON'T watch anime, play Counterstrike, download pr0n, or try to out-class my fellow geeks by way of computing power or unnecessary bandwidth. These tend to be, though not always, hobbies of male geeks. I DO like jewelry, shopping for shoes, romance, clothes, cooking, chatting, and cute guys. Because of these traits, many people underestimate my technical knowledge.
One nice thing about the liberation of women is that I can appreciate technology without trying to be your typical male geek. I can go try on sixteen pairs of shoes, then come home and program my heart out.
I don't see that in many of these replies. What I see is that because we like to buy things other than technology, or because we like to use technology as a means to socialize or have fun (as with cell phones), we can't possibly be as tech-savvy as you slashdotters assume YOU are. I can see the brain waves now. "Oh, these women! They must be buying little TVs for their kitchen, pink vibrators, presents for their geeky boyfriends, or electronic beepy collars for their fuzzy kittens!" Why? Why can't you accept that we see technology just as you do? That we're out there looking for the newest video card or USB hub?
Watch out, guys, the boundaries of geekdom are expanding. Women are discovering the utter coolness of technology. We can afford it. We can buy it for ourselves. And we can understand how to use it.
Honestly, I'm embarassed. I thought the slashdot community was more enlightened than this.