Is Your Website Accidentally Sexist?
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Terry Price
Drew McLellan
@Mike Bannan: The watch word in the title is not ‘sexist’, but ‘accidentally’. You’re right that people design sites to an audience. The very point of this article is to consider accidental sexism that might creep into a design and prevent you from doing that effectively.
If you want to design sites to be deliberately sexist, that’s your call, but be deliberate about it.
Mike Bannan
I tried to see what the author background and found nothing here so clicked over to LinkedIn and found her. ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/suwcharman/ ) I did see that she has some recommendations for social media skills. So let’s say she is sort, but not really, right. The article appears to me to tell me that political correctness is a must when designing, building and running a website. I say WRONG.
The article discusses that women have a great direction where their consumer dollars are spent, and I agree. Then it further delves into fonts and text types (boring) that men like but women may not. I think this article was written to get another post in by the year-end. Why else would the author not show references sources or statistics to back up and prove her point? Probably because the author has an agenda which is women. It’s OK to have an agenda, but why not spell it out upfront? Be honest and say that you are a proud woman that wants to see things change in marketing to women?
The probable reason that she took the tact she did was that she doesn’t understand that people design websites and marketing promotions to their intended audience. Here is an excellent article from Wharton that talks about the differences in men and women shoppers. ( http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/men-buy-women-shop-the-sexes-have-different-priorities-when-walking-down-the-aisles/ ) So was your article accidentally sexist?
While this article is well intentioned, I do find that the opinion is itself stereotypical and does not offer anything new other than a blue and pink view of the world.