5 Ways Women Use Your Website Differently Than Guys

We are on Tumblr. We are on forums. We are on Facebook. We click on pretty stuff. They are on Foursquare. They are on tech pages. They are on Twitter. They click on images of boobs (or anything that might be a boob). We are women and they are men.

Above is the overall summary of Internet usability by a specific gender, in the sense which gender uses something MORE that the other gender. Of course women use Fourqsuare and Twitter, too. Men use Facebook, too. But which gender can be found in greater percentage on different web places? And what makes us, women, angry on the internet?

Pink Treatment is a Big NO

We are not kids. We do not play with barbie dolls any more, so who gives you the idea to paint the whole website in pink or violet, just because you’re targeting women? We consider pink as something silly, and probably offending, given the fact that we are no longer toddlers and our parents do not dress us in “typical gender colours” just to make sure people do not think we are their “sons”, a situation that happens all the time when kids are small and generally cute. Mums put a little pink ribbon on their daughters’ heads just to say to the world “Hey, it’s a girl.”

We don’t need that on the internet.

Pure Text is a Big NO

The fact is, we prefer reading online texts with pictures. Black and white sheets are somewhat “basic”, and probably those mums with pink ribbons made sure we like colours when we are older. “I don’t care about the looks” things is only valid for guys in the real world. On the web – we are the visual type.

Search Twitter, and you’ll find mostly guys there. At least it’s the situation in Montenegro, Croatia, Serbia and the rest of the region that I live in. History repeating itself. The same thing happened 10-15 years ago, when the web was still unavailable to broader audience and those who managed to find the way to connect were mostly men. IRC, the chat of the 90’s, was crowded with men. I liked it, because it meant more attention for us girls, but somehow, over the years, chats are mostly taken by women. Sex chats excluded.

Simply, technology has introduced colours and emoticons, and made editing more friendly. Sometimes I joke that guys only said ‘yes’ to having HTML editors to attract women online. Black and white conversations and writing lines of code just to put a link on the image we had uploaded had been simplified and thus made more accessible. Yes, we like colours, emoticons and pictures. But, do not insult us.

That doesn’t give you the right to treat us like children. You don’t have to have all the hyperlinks in pink, the background image in violet (or presenting a lovely couple kissing), you don’t have to add some glitter, outer glow or put a music on the website just to attracts us. We like reading, a lot. We just like to read it with pictures. Notice the difference?

So, we are no longer 13 and do not insult us with websites designs like that. You don’t want every page painted in blue and with small images of cars.

Do not Think We are All Feminists

No, we don’t like special treatment. Adjusting the languages in the sense that you have to write his/her every single time will only make the text harder to read and make us look desperate to achieve some kind of equality on that basic level. By making those his/her adjustments on websites, you lead a reader to consider us people that care only about the form, not the content.

Feminism is okey. But not all women are feminists, at least not in that eccentric sense. The majority of us really do not care about default settings in languages. History is maybe not “his story” and if “woman” derived from “man”, so what? Croatian feminists clapped their hands several weeks ago when it was announced that women would not be addressed as “Miss” or “Mrs”, but only with one title, like “misters” have. You know what? The majority of women just laughed at that, with comments like “And those are the problems of women?”

So, please do not write his/her in articles. We care more about reading the news, than about gender equality in writing. And please do not install stupid add-ons, like Jailbreak the Patriarchy, that would turn a “male page” into a “female” one.

The bottom line is, if you want to attract a female audience, avoid any kind of special treatment. The fact that we prefer posts with pictures, different topics and platforms, does not make us less worthy online. If you think a male audience is smarter, just force youself to read comments below any sport-related news article and you’ll see how wrong you are. Having that in mind, let’s divide the online world into two parts: women and men.

I risk to fall into a trap of making generalizations, but I want to say clearly that following things are not gender-specific in the sense that, for example, an iPhone is a girly thing. No! The iPhone is both girly and manly, but Android on the hand in more likely to attract men than women who just adore iPhones, so iPhone should be on the women’ side.

When looking at these things, you think. So, what’s new? Nothing. At least if this is not the first article you’ve ever read about content for various sex groups.

But hopefully you now now that we don’t like „pink treatment“ or „the opportunity to be equal to guys“. Because, we are equal or not. No stupid colour or extension is going to change the way people treat us in reality, when we click the X in the right corner of your website.