Trouble with Sex on the Internet

Attempts to design websites suited to men or women are misguided because they rely on social stereotypes, according to a recent study. Rather than focusing on gender, the study’s authors suggest that designers should optimize their sites for different character traits: personal autonomy, selfishness, compassion and for whether a person is a hunter or a social user, irrespective of biological sex.

Web designers have recently begun to look at how to optimize websites for male and female users. Unfortunately, making a male-female distinction panders to the stereotype of men as autonomous, self-interested and goal-oriented hunters and of women as understanding, compassionate nurturers keen to build social bonds. However, such stereotypes, as is always the case with stereotypes apply only very loosely and at worst are debilitating fictions that lead to prejudice and the marginalization of parts of society.

Many men are self-reliant and independent, but so too are many women. Lots of women are expert at developing interpersonal relations and creating social harmony, but then so are many men. Likewise, as far as the Web is concerned, the stereotypical male, is an independent hunter, seeking information relevant to him and minimizing effort whereas women are more interested in using the internet as a tool for maintaining social bonds. Both stereotypes fail miserably to account for the behavior of the vast majority of us of whatever sex or gender.

Maureen Hupfer and Brian Detlor DeGroote of the School of Business, at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, have looked closely at studies of sex differences and how this impacts website design and use and found the received wisdom to be sadly lacking. As part of their research, they carried out an online survey, which asked questions about preferred type of website navigation, breadcrumbs, dropdown menus, notification agents, saved searches and the like.

The survey collected website feature importance ratings and measured “Self-Orientation”, whether the user was more stereotypically “male” regardless of actual gender, and “Other-Orientation” whether they were more social in behavior and so more stereotypically “female”. They found that measuring these personality traits was a much better predictor of web behavior and the success of a given design as opposed to the user’s actual biological sex.

The implications of these results for web designers, marketers and e-commerce are immense. Rather than focusing on whether a visitor is a man or a woman, companies could engage and serve their customers far more effectively if they were able to understand the individual’s “Self” and “Other” orientation. Indeed, companies that “get” this concept will “enjoy an important strategic advantage”, the researchers say.

Unlike conventional media and distribution channels, web-based communication and retailing allows marketers to engage with their customers at a one-to-one level, albeit usually only in the virtual sense. Companies that understand the difference between their users regardless of gender can present web features that meet their individual information gathering and processing styles.

Maureen E. Hupfer, & Brian Detlor (2009). Sex, gender and self-concept: predicting web shopping site design preferences Int. J. Electronic Business, 7 (3), 217-236