Gadget girls

Tradition has it that men and cooking don?t go together. At the same time, the finest chefs in the world happen to be men.

Tradition has it that men and cooking don’t go together. At the same time, the finest chefs in the world — whether in a Michelin star restaurant or in a dhaba — happen to be men. It seems that the same general rule now applies to women and technology. The men might be the ‘technologists’, but girls are getting into the geek mainstream. A new US study has found that the technology gender gap has virtually closed, with women owning, on an average, 6.6 tech devices compared to 6.9 owned by men. And one isn’t only talking about the washing machine, hair dryer and microwave oven.

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Four out of five women surveyed felt comfortable using technology with 46 per cent doing their own PC trouble-shooting. But what will definitely make men look up from the Blueberries is the news that les femmes would rather buy a tech item than a luxury one. But does this revelation reveal more about today’s preferred tech devices than about changing ‘feminine taste’? Seventy-seven per cent of the women surveyed preferred a plasma TV to a diamond solitaire necklace. Can we be sure that the lady with that terracotta... thing... round her neck doesn’t view that giant TV as a luxury item? Or that her opting for the digital camera over a pair of designer shoes isn’t actually a reflection of how celebrity magazines like Hello pay good money if you click a celebrity couple in an interesting moment?