Report finds single women enthusiastic about technology, single men enthusiastic about single women
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted April 16th 2009 7:14PM
posted April 16th 2009 7:14PM
A new report, entitled "The Single Female Tech Buyer: Cast Aside Myths And Embrace This Target Segment" may read like the latest Tom Clancy techno-thriller (okay, not really) but its message is crystal clear: "cast aside myths," it says, "and embrace this target segment." In its study of one thousand single men and one thousand single women residing in the United States and Canada, Forrester Research uncovered a slew of facts you can use to sell single women stuff that they probably don't need. Behold: When asked about their next computer, the vast majority of women (forty-seven percent) said they were planning on buying a laptop, while most of the men (again, forty-seven percent) said they'd be buying a desktop. Clearly, laptop makers should be concentrating hot-to-trot models like the Vaio P (or, for the budget conscious, the Vaino), while desktop manufacturers should concentrate on superhero or vicious animal-themed desktop rigs. But that ain't all! Ownership amongst bachelors and bachelorettes were darn near equal for things like gaming consoles, handheld games, and digital cameras. If you can't wait to dip into what is sure to be a real page turner, make sure you hit the read link -- the report can be yours for a mere $749.
[Via CNET]
[Via CNET]
Yeah I always wondered how you guys had came up with him bush as a president.
This explains a lot thanks Engadget, once more my understanding of this great country that are the United States of America has improved reading you.
I seriously hate this research. It just means more female targeted ad campaigns which, by definition, are going suck badly. Also, chances will shrink that i am going to be able to buy a decent laptop in a couple of years. And by 'decent' i mean 'Thinkpad'.
Wow, nerds are pathetic! Reading through the comments here, I'd say that probably half of the comments posted have been so sexist they were removed. Either that or there's a lot of random "comebacks" to nothing.
Can't we conclude half those comments were made by women? Or at least 47% :)
It's weird how companies let stereotypes get in the way of their profits. In the US, women make approximately 80% of all consumer purchases. It drops down to somewhere between 54% and 65% of consumer purchases for stuff like cars, consumer electronics, fast food and beer-- which you'd never guess by the ad campaigns for those categories.
That makes sense, men cant masturbate with laptops.
We really need to see the data before we start making conclusions one way or another. Not the summaries of the data, but the actual data. There's also the factor that very often, the data that isn't presented is more important than the data that is.
Besides, is it really that surprising that women would like laptops and digital cameras? I never thought the stereotype against women was that they didn't like laptops or cameras. Hell, in my cavemanlike ways, I just naturally assumed that women would be more likely to own cameras and sleek laptops, whereas men would like the giant desktops that they can play Counter-strike with and wouldn't be interesting in sharing photos.
The interesting thing is the console games. One question: are we counting single people without children or just single people? That could make a major difference in the gaming category. I'd imagine that most people that own gaming consoles own them for their children (myself and the various readers of tech-related blogs excluded; we're outliers.) In that case, what we claim to be the "female gamer" category could actually be mostly single mothers, and the fact that they are roughly equal could just mean that the single mother population roughly equals the gaming single male population (as the single father population should be relatively small, but again, this needs to be checked from the data, which we don't have.) But then there's divorcees to deal with. In fact, if we include divorcees, one can imagine that we're picking up both mothers and fathers that have video game systems for their kids when they come to visit, and if the divorcee rate is relatively large in the data set, that could be the bulk of the so-called "gamer" catagory.
In summary, this post is everything that's wrong with scientific reporting. By summarizing the data down to the point where you can explain the entire thing in one paragraph, you've basically lost all meaningful results, and what is reported tends to be less about the actual study and more about the writer's preconceived notions of what the study ought to say.
best headline ever
Great headline! XD