Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

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No evidence is presented that women are the more valuable market, just that on average they spend more time online and using their devices. Which would you pick: 10 customers that use a mobile phone for 20 hours each vs. 100 customers that use a mobile phone for 3 hours each?

No statistics are posted on how much male usage counts for, saying 17 percent more is a big difference when 100% is 4 hours vs. 40 hours.

> One huge reason is the relative lack of women at major venture capital firms, startups, electronics makers, and Internet companies.

This seems like a strange conclusion, the obvious conclusion is that on average 1 18 - 24 Male (the "most valuable demographic") is more likely to spend money with the advertiser after seeing advertising than a female counterpart, isn't it? They present no evidence disproving the obvious conclusion. I also don't see how tech adoption can be that important to a company like Apple. Maybe if it's 25% more likely a female that owns an iPhone will recommend to a friend and have them purchase it and the chances of a female purchasing vs. a male based on an advert is equal then sure, but if a male is 10x more likely to buy after seeing an advert what value is women causing "adoption", isn't people buying your products adoption?

Not a very good article. I would suggest it's just written to fit the narrative ("not enough women in tech") or it's just really badly written: you can't make assertions without proving them.

Sales = adoption.

"No evidence is presented that women are the more valuable market, just that on average they spend more time online and using their devices."

Perhaps that's because the evidence has already been stated clearly?

Here are the stats:

"Women account for $7 trillion in consumer and business spending in the United States, and over the next decade, they will control two thirds of consumer wealth.

Women make or influence 85% of all purchasing decisions, and purchase over 50% of traditional male products, including automobiles, home improvement products and consumer electronics.

BUT 91% of women say that advertisers don’t understand them."

(via http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/01/24/the-top-30-stat... )

Those aren't real stats. Those are just numbers on a page. That link doesn't include any methodology for how they collected these numbers, doesn't include any references, doesn't included any reason I should believe any of them whatsoever. Some of those numbers are either obviously false or obviously misleading, such as the theory that 51% of private wealth is controlled by women when we know the huge concentration of wealth in the US and know the huge disparity in sexes in the top 1% of earners. This statistic thus is either completely false (perhaps they surveyed a power law distribution or something), or their definition is extremely poorly represented by their choice of words.

Edit: It's probably not a good sign that they have two directly contradictory statistics for the amount of US private wealth controlled by women.

Not really interested in this specific argument about whether or not the OP has real statistics, but I thought this was interesting (and includes sources, which I haven't checked).

http://www.catalyst.org/publication/256/buying-power

http://www.she-conomy.com/report/marketing-to-women-quick-fa...

>Some of those numbers are either obviously false or obviously misleading, such as the theory that 51% of private wealth is controlled by women when we know the huge concentration of wealth in the US and know the huge disparity in sexes in the top 1% of earners.

Whether the top earners are men and the huge disparity on Bill Gates/Larry Ellison level wealth do not matter at all in this discussion.

Advertisers and companies are not competing for THOSE people's money (except if they make private jets and luxury cars), they want the money of the average household. 100,000,000 families have brought Apple products, for example, and all of the top 1000 wealthiest guys just bought another 1,000-10,000 combined.

So, when they say they control 51% of private wealth, that might or might not be true overall, but it is very true for the kind of wealth that matters to companies/advertisers. And it is even more true that women also influence what the family will buy, even more so than men.

Women make or influence 85% of all purchasing decisions

That's awfully meaningless without the partner stat. If you stop and think about it, women and men could both "Make or influence" 85% of all purchasing decisions, at the same time.

Have we forgotten the difference between articles and source/reference material?

I see far too many blog posts and junk articles posted as sources or evidence in this day and age. No references to studies, or exposed facts that were collected by census.

Just someone else who cracked open Wordpress and says 90% of people do something 10% don't.

I don't see that linked from the article.

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