Technically, it's women on top

The facts are clear. The scent of a woman has become the ascent of women. If the glass ceiling has been broken and the business boardroom is no longer a male precinct, now, even the final frontier — technology — has put ladies first. The findings of an annual study, Embracing the Information Age: A comparison of women and men business owners, commissioned by IBM, indicates that women are better at adapting to new technology than men.
Now, for the specifics. Among the sample population covered by the study, 23 per cent of female-owned businesses have homepages, as against 16 per cent of male-owned ones; 51 per cent of women use e-mail frequently, compared with 40 per cent of men; 22 per cent of women use the Internet frequently for research versus 14 per cent for men; 9 per cent of women use the Internet to review opportunities or to make contract bids, juxtaposed with 3 per cent men. The clincher? Seventeen per cent of female business-owners say that the most important reason for using new technology is to "explore new strategies for growth" versus 10 per cent of men. What''s more, the study reveals that female business-owners will increase investment in hardware and software by 51 per cent over the next year.
"Female-owned businesses tend to be younger. Technology, if leveraged properly, allows these businesses to catch up with more established ones," says Bruce Rosenthal of NFWBO, which conducted the study.
For all the talk of men being from Mars and women being from Venus, down-to-Earth facts show that She clicks with technology better than He does. From among the respondents to the study, women score over men even in the way technology is used to assist business: responding to customers (39 per cent compared to 32 percent); speeding up product introductions (28 per cent versus 23 percent); and improving marketing efforts (24 per cent as against 17 per cent).
So, is there a message here? Yes, according to psychiatrist Samir Parikh, MD. "Women are more flexible when it comes to adapting to new circumstances. While it is proven that women are the psychologically-stronger sex, this holds true for adapting to technology."
Simply put, there might be a lesson here for men. As Joan Steltmann, an IBM market executive focussed on woman-owned businesses, puts it, "Women take decisions after securing more varied information, from more sources than men. Consequently, they reap the benefits of certain technologies earlier."
Interestingly, a study commissioned by Avon Products reveals that 75 per cent of the women surveyed attribute a recent advancement at work to how well they used technology. It''s a man''s world out there? Well, that was a millennium ago.