As a woman do you get slightly nervous and uncomfortable when you have to enter a Dick Smith Electronics, JB HiFi or other electrical/technology store? Do you have difficulty explaining what you are after and worse still, trying to decipher the tech-speak of the male sales assistant?

You wonder whether you are being pushed into buying a certain product that the store wants to shift, rather than the best one for your needs.

While there is no research to back it up, it seems in the categories of home entertainment, gaming, audio, accessories and IT, we still find predominately male sales staff on the retail floor. Perhaps that’s because anecdotal evidence has shown it’s mostly males who are purchasing these type of products.

Acting Executive Director of the Australian Centre for Retail at Monash University, Andrew Cavanagh has some thoughts on this: “I think it’s probably a reflection of the customer base…but it’s a bit of a chicken and egg dilemma. Are females alienated about going into the stores because they are seen as male domains, or are males mainly purchasing products in this category regardless?”

Workforce trends
However Cavanagh has noted that in other electrical product areas there is a definite trend toward employing female staff, as research points to the fact that women are making the final decisions when it come to home improvement product categories. He says this shift is also underpinned by a broader trend - the increasing casualisation of the workforce - and it tends to be women who mainly occupy part-time and casual.

Cavanagh has been in meetings with store owners of various Good Guys stores throughout Victoria and he says he has noticed a shift in the retail chain towards more female owners, in the region of about 15%.

If you’ve seen a Good Guys TV commercial lately you’ll also notice that there are a lot of female represented as staff, this may also be a way of trying to attract more women customers.

While this is encouraging for women, this hasn’t necessarily carried over to other product categories. “The tech- hardware area is still very much a boys club,” Cavanagh said. “There are increasing numbers of females in the retail workforce, but there are some areas where they are under-represented, and that would be in the home entertainment products sector,” he added.