Women Into Tech, But Not Into Tech Jargon

from the don't-talk-tech dept

Tue, Sep 7th 2004 1:07am — Mike Masnick

While there have been some stories in the past suggesting that women are just as into gadgets as men, a new study in the UK suggests that even if that's true, they're not as on top of the gadget jargon as guys. Nearly all women in the study (96%) said they "lacked confidence" when a discussion turned technical, and most claimied they had no clue what words like kbps, ISP and googling meant. Only half of the women surveyed knew that 512kbps was approximately 10 times faster than dialup, while nearly 80% of the guys did. Of course, it wasn't so much lack of knowledge, but lack of concern. When asked about their broadband connection, women generally said: "It works, it's fast - that's all I need to know."

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

4 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

dorpus, 7 Sep 2004 @ 4:56am

Funny thing
I'm in a biostatistics program, a math-centered field. During orientation, I counted the new students in the program; 20 are women and 8 are men. If you talk to the average IT male about mathematics, they usually get bored quickly.

[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Mattb, 7 Sep 2004 @ 5:17am
  
  Re: Funny thing
  ZZZzzzzzzz..... hmm you were saying? ZZZzzzzzzz.....
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - Matt, 7 Sep 2004 @ 7:14am
    
    Re: Funny thing
    no...it was a Funny thing...the topic said so
    [ link to this | view in chronology ]
    - dorpus, 7 Sep 2004 @ 11:55am
      
      Re: Funny thing
      That's right, men are into shallow things like sports cars, cologne, and the amount of RAM on their PC, while women are into more important things like math.
      [ link to this | view in chronology ]