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Earlier this week, I went to the Apple store to have a nosy at the MacBook Air. I approached the sales assistant with a couple of questions, and he was friendly and helpful. The problem was, he directed all his answers to my boyfriend, instead of me. Because of course, what would I know about gadgets? (Quite a bit actually, I write for DorkAdore)
A month or so before that, I encountered the same situation when we had a meeting with our mortgage advisor. The mortgage advisor spent most of the meeting talking directly to my boyfriend, and ignoring me. His whole attitude came off as "Why don't you let the men talk, lady".
To add to the frustration, he then spent the next two weeks calling me up with questions I'd already answered in the first meeting, which he'd clearly not listened to.
I'm not the only one that's been at the end of this kind of customer service. Gemma wrote about it several years ago here on Dollymix. Sadly, things don't seem to have changed.
I sent out a little tweet to see if anyone else had experienced a similar situation - and was inundated with replies.
Here are just a few of them:
Both @alice_murphy and @kate_brennen touched on some interesting points. Alice suggested it could be down to shyness. I get that. If it's a young teenage lad, he might feel a little more confident talking to another man, then to a woman. But my gut feeling is that it's more often down to cockiness rather than shyness.
Equally, Kate's point about men being perceived as the more economically powerful one is a valid point. But it's not always true. My boyfriend does earn more than me, but we go 50/50 on shared items, so earning more doesn't mean you make all the decisions.
Generally, I think this behaviour is based on stereotypes. "Men know more about gadgets, men earn more money, men make the decisions"...we've all been confronted with these assumptions at one time or another. And most of us are smart enough to know that they're rubbish.
I'd be interested to see what would happened if I took the boyfriend to a kitchen shop, and approached a female sales assistant. With the kitchen traditionally being the 'woman's domain', as suggested by @boobesque, I wonder whether the situation would be reversed?
Have you had a similar experience?
