[thelist] Do women view web pages differently from men?

[deke]

On 6 Apr 2001, at 19:10, Jacob Stetser posted a message which said:

> Furthermore, if you're using the argument that more men are in 
> management than women, explain why that is the case. Shouldn't there 
> be a roughly equal number of women in management positions, 
> considering women now outnumber men in the United States?

Pay for jobs is supply and demand, just like anything else. Salt is
an essential nutrient and scotch is a toxin, so it seems reasonable
to assume that salt is "worth" more, but you pay 25c/pound for
generic salt, $8/pound for generic scotch because salt is plentiful
and easy to get, while it takes 8 years of care and hard-to-get and
expensive licensing to manufacture, distribute and retail liquor.

Women tend to rule out jobs that are dangerous or unpleasant. Men
tend to ignore those factors and choose higher-paying occupations.
The ten most dangerous jobs in the US are almost entirely done by
men - and occupational hazard almost entirely explains the difference
in age expectancy of men and women.

Employers tend to be very aware of perceived sexual discrimination
charges, and they will pay higher wages to attract and retain females
in predominantly male occupations than they pay men for the same
job, despite laws which mandate that pay be equal for the same job
regardless of gender.

And yes, there are more men in management. Men have a different
level of commitment to a job. As Dave Barry put it, "If a woman has 
to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she 
will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there 
are men on base."  A man, on the other hand, will sacrifice his own
personal life in the name of career advancement, even though his
employer has given him little reason to expect career advancement.
His wife will often gripe about this, until he starts to show less 
devotion to earning the money she spends, at which time she will
often divorce him, and the judge will use debtor's prison as a tool
to force him back to long hours of drudgery and reduce him to a
"visitor" in the eyes of his so-called children.

But what does all this have to do with webmastery?  Anyone who
hasn't figured out by age 3 that there is a difference between men
and women is probably incapable of writing HTML.

<tip type="optimum format">
Lines which are too long or too short are difficult to read. The
optimum line length for comfortable reading is about 40-50
characters in most fonts. Design your pages so that lines
get longer than that, and users will view fewer pages, often
without knowing exactly why they are leaving.

In print, fonts with serifs are much more legible - but even a
1440dpi printer cannot quite match the quality of good photo
type. At 800x600, a 15" monitor is only running about 75dpi,
and even if users have 1280x1024 monitors, you only have
about 120 dpi to work with. Consequently, the custom for
print - serif body fonts, sans-serif headlines - is best reversed
for web display.

The notion that all-caps is easier to read is false. The eye
uses the different heights of lower-case letters as an aid to
discrimination. If you need to make type easier to read, make
it larger, or switch to a more legible font, but keep it in mixed
case.
</tip>





















> 
> <tip type="Mac OS X">
> You can sync your Handspring/Palm device in the Classic environment 
> of Mac OS X. Just install the proper drivers in Classic and plug in 
> your cradle and PDA and press the HotSync button!
> </tip>
> 
> ><snip>
> >being the ones whose salaries are discounted by at least 20% as compared
> >with men,
> ></snip>
> >
> >When are people going to stop throwing out this meaningless statistic?? Men
> >and women in comparable jobs are paid the SAME, every single survey says
> >this. What this "statistic" represents is the OVERALL salary averages. Men's
> >overall salaries are higher because there are more of them in higher
> >management and more women work part-time while raising families, thereby
> >lowering their overall average.
> >
> >To quote Mark Twain - There are lies, damned lies and statistics...
> >
> >Thanks,
> >Ron White
> 
> -- 
> <icongarden at icongarden.com>
> 
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> belong to us as well. -Voltaire, philosopher, historian, satirist,
> dramatist, and essayist (1694-1778)
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