My website designer friend related a really interesting tale to me this week.
He designs websites for all sorts of businesses including consultant surgeons but was confused. He’d checked the traffic to all his client’s websites and the numbers were good. Curiously though, the traffic to some medical websites indicated a significant difference from those of other medical websites. He couldn’t understand why.
The second pair of eyes
That night he mentioned this to his wife and asked her the question of why. Took her all of 10 seconds to notice that traffic to the website for gynecologists was higher than that of the others. And therein lay a clue to the answer apparently. In her view, women were much more likely to check out their consultant’s websites than we males. Really??
Later that week, I asked my better half the same question. And got exactly the same reply (and a bewildered look for not spotting the obvious too)
Empirical evidence
So an exercise first undertaken some years back was repeated. The patients of the various consultant surgeons were asked if they had looked at the consultant’s website. Sure enough, women – regardless of the specialism – were shown to be significantly higher than men when it came to reviewing the consultant online.
Then my friend and I both made a fatal mistake.
We both asked our respective partners if that was due to women being more curious than males? BAD move!
We were both, “politely advised” it was more likely to be because women generally speaking take much more of an interest in their health and weight than we males, etc.
Sexist but true??