Yakkety Yak, Men Talk Back On Mobile Phones
from the sounds-familiar dept
Sounding almost identical to last year's findings, Cingular has come out with this year's version of their study saying that men spend more time on their mobile phones than women. While this appears to go against the stereotype of women being the chatty phone-types, it's really not that surprising. First, it's worth remembering that many years ago, a study found that many men believe that showing off their mobile phones works as a bizarre modern mating call, as if demonstrating just how important they are. Related to that, the study found that men used their mobile phones much more for business purposes, once again, perhaps as a way of showing how self-important they were. I once worked at a company where the QA guy - who really only needed to be sitting at his desk making sure our products worked, would only use his mobile phone at work instead of his desk-phone. In fact, he would then take the phone and wander the office, to make sure everyone could see he was "working." When viewed in such contexts, it's less surprising that the male half of the species spends more time on mobile phones. It's our modern way of showing off.
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showing off and annoying too
Like we go to conferences and always enjoy hearing cell phone users drowning out the speaker we paid to hear.
And no, they dont raise their voices because the reception is bad, that excuse is obsolete these days. They do it to show off.
Like we are so impressed that some idiot has a cell phone and someone to talk to. Usually while ignoring their date. So cool.
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going one step further...
Women still tend to work noticably less in most countries: they often have either part-time jobs, or are housewives (the hardest job of all, IMHO). This typically leaves them with access to a land line phone for the vast majority of the day, which is still cheaper in most (all?) places. Men on the other hand are more likely to be out at work, where a cellphone is the more reliable option for personal phone calls (e.g. all my friends have my cell phone number; almost none have my work phone number).
Add to that the embarassing fact that men tend to have higher paying jobs. That means more money to spend on a cell phone, and a greater likelihood of getting a cell phone from work.
These explanations seem to me to be a whole lot more obvious than a male urge to show off, which undoubtedly also exists.
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