Women business owners love their hardware

Posted on | June 20, 2007 | Comments Off

The Center for Women’s Business Research will released a new study today of women business owners and their use of technology. Among other things, it ought to help solidify the myth-busting about women and technology.

For starters, they very definitely use the stuff and they are not significantly less likely to make use of technology in their businesses or to adopt new technologies than men are. In fact, women business owners spend $38 billion annually on IT.

Put that in your software startup pipe and smoke it.

Women business owners are online in significant numbers, too. In fact, that’s a bit of an understatement. According to this survey, 93% of women business owners are using e-commerce:

They use the Internet to buy goods and services, seek business opportunities, sell goods or services on hosted sales sites, submit bids for business or perform such business administration tasks as recruiting employees or hosting web-based meetings.

If you want to sell your IT goods and services to this bunch, crank up the viral marketing machine. Like a lot of other small business owners, women make their IT purchasing decisions with the help of advice and recommendations from friends and family first (74%). Another two thirds of them (68%) count on information they get from sales reps and 44% hire specialists and consultants.

Two things about this market stand out. First, their top concern in their IT purchases is security, interestingly enough. And second, they are primarily interested in reliable technology that will help increase efficiencies in their business.

Are you taking notes? There will be a quiz at the end of the week …

[tags]Center for Women’s Business Research, women business owners, information technology, e-commerce[/tags]