Marketing to Women

I had an interesting experience over my Thanksgiving break. I've had the same phone for several years now and was due for an upgrade, so while I was home I went to the store to get a new phone. I am not well versed on what new phones are out and which ones are best, so naturally I asked someone at the store to help me out and give me an idea of what phones I should look at based on some preconceived ideas I had of what I wanted. The guy who helped me was very friendly, but at one point, he began telling me about a phone in the store that "girls really love." He kept telling me that "girls love this phone because it's very thin so they can fit it in their supertight jeans." Now if this salesman had known anything about me, he would have known that was the quickest way to piss me off and lose that sale. He repeated that statement to me about 3 or 4 times as I was looking around at other phones, and it made me super uncomfortable. First of all, I was pissed that he was stereotyping young women and me (though I wasn't even wearing tight jeans at the time so okay...). Secondly, I was pissed that he saw me as a female customer and assumed that because of that, I didn't care much about the technology, I just cared about the aesthetics of the phone, because of course no woman in her right mind would be interested in technological details! In fact, to make matters worse, while he told me over and over again about how I might like this phone because I'm a "girl" and the phone is sleek and pretty, he spoke directly to my dad, who was with me at the time, anytime he began to explain the technology behind the phone - because my dad is a man and obviously can understand that talk much better than me, a shallow, feeble-minded "girl". (My dad told me afterwards he could see me silently fuming throughout this whole thing.) Anyway, all of this got me thinking and I ended up doing a google search to see what kinds of information was out there on "marketing to women", and I ended up finding a lot of websites with "tips" on how to market to women as oppose to men. In one webpage (which I'll link below), there is a quote from a writer on how to design marketing websites for women: 

"The female of the species likes and appreciates—you might even say she demands—clean. It’s hard-wired. 'Clean' and 'unclean' register for most women instantaneously. For a majority of the world’s females, Am I in a clean environment? is an intuition, an undercurrent, a sixth sense, a vibe they pick up… Clean matters to women—can I be any more clear?"

This sort of statement might seem harmless, but in reality it just reinforces stereotypical gender roles - women are the ones who do the cleaning in a household, women care more about appearance than content, etc. This kind of thinking perpetuates gender stereotypes, and unfortunately is still a huge part of marketing and business. Anyway, my rant is over.

http://www.web-design-for-women.com/marketing-to-women.html