Women are Scared of Search? Or Simply Pragmatic?

Of course, any survey analysis is as good as the people who construct it. I did quite a bit of it in my youth, and I was very good at it, so I'm very critical of sloppy work. And since most people aren't very good at survey analysis, they certainly produce some incredible howlers - especially about women and technology.

I just finished reading a Just An Online Minute... Sponsored Results Naïveté article and I fell over laughing at the "results". What do they conclude? Simply that women aren't as "confident" of their search ability as men, despite being just as successful (or not) in their searches as men? And somehow this humility reflects on women badly?

What nonsense. It's obvious that women are more concerned about bad results then men, and consequently more honest about unsuccessful or bad results. Women must be more concerned, since they often are judged much more harshly in the workplace if they provide incorrect or incomplete information. It's too easy to take them out.

And since when have men had less than a "higher opinion" of themselves in anything they do, no matter what? Are they going to admit they might be wrong in writing, because that's what the survey is asking them to do. They're simply measuring bravado - not objective results - here.

Is a woman's realistic understanding that searches can produce trash results as often as valuable information really a negative? After all, all search engines are is a collection of webpages - good, bad, and ugly - with no ranking as to editorial quality or balance. Online information sources are still substantially smaller than off-line information, especially with respect to archival sources. Online searches have the proper use, but wouldn't it make sense to go directly to respectable sources of information, online and off-line, as well to provide a more accurate case?

Sounds like more women are just using good common sense and well-established diverse research methods to obtain the best information possible. And don't you want to deal with people who are skeptical of results and careful of information, instead of people who are uncritical and careless? Seems like an easy answer to me.