Some time ago I started to notice we were building, upgrading and fixing more gaming computers for female gamers than ever before. When I say female gamers I’m not talking about Tetris or Minecraft, I’m talking first person shooters like Doom, Overwatch and Call of Duty. We’ve had some major systems come through our door specifically built for female gamers.
I thought I had the whole thing down, guys know exactly what they want and women have less of a clue. Turns out I was completely wrong and it took me all of about 20 seconds to figure that out. Basically, guys like the lights and extras and women come in knowing exactly what they want. Women, turns out, do a ton more research and truly pick better components.
We’ve always catered to DIY builders, either helping them choose components or bailing them out when they screw up. Guys for some reason like to dive right into their build. Women, well, already have an idea if it’s something they want to tackle. I have no scientific background to explain this, but it’s kind of like making a rational choice versus an illogical one.
My daughters are 19 and 22 and I’ve always encouraged them to try different things. From the time they’re little girls, women are pushed to play with dolls and not do boy things. I feel building a computer is perceived to be a boy thing because it involves screwing things together. Over the years I’ve noticed that women are more likely to hang out and get dirty than men when invited to help build their own system.
Repairs kind of follow the same funkiness. Men will pull up their pants, puff their chest and try to make a repair. Many times the repairs are done wrong – but at least they’re done (sort of). Women, on the other hand, know when to stop trying to make the repair and admit defeat. That logical approach sometimes saves expensive repairs. I guess that explains why our customer demographics are mostly women.
Speaking of demographics, we’ve been working with women from teens to adult for quite some time. Even though it’s normally Mom who pays for the kid’s computers to be fixed or built, it’s generally the young gamer who accompanies them and explains what’s wrong. Funny enough, the young gamer articulates the problem better than Mom every time.
More and more we’re building machines specifically for Twitch. Most of them are for female gamers who use the online gaming site for either their primary income or as a side hustle. I’ve had one male customer out of dozens (for Twitch machines) ask me to build a machine for broadcasting games. It’s not that guys don’t Twitch, we see those machines after they try and configure them on their own.
This last one probably won’t surprise you. Men’s machines are almost always more cluttered with junk files than women owned computers. Female owned gaming machines are for gaming and male gaming computers are for gaming and everything else available on the internet.
(Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. www.LocalComputerWiz.com.)
