THE male of our species, especially the young and educated variety, dominates the worlds of information technology and the internet.
Think of baseball caps, rumpled clothing, late nights and diets consisting of pizzas and colas. It's a nerd's world, and nerds tend to be boys.
Women and the elderly are not barred from this arena and they are increasingly carving up pieces of the world wide web for themselves.
In this country, for example, cybercafes were pioneered by a woman and many elderly people are happily wired, using the internet to get a fix on their stocks and shares and e-mailing children and grandchildren in other continents. One way or another, the internet has an enormous and growing influence on our personal finances.
But the two gaps persist. Gucci Monogram Fake Handbags Last week we looked at a company dedicated to electronic grey power.
Today's focus is on female-centred websites such as Handbag, which is co-owned by Boots the Chemist, and Hollinger the publisher (owner of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph).
By way of introduction, Handbag's home page has items on sex and, separately, food and also contains a list of links. These links are the site's 17 channels, from careers and entertainment to technology and travel, with money, news property and much else in between.
These channels are in addition to a set of 14 'essentials', including electronic address books, auctions, chat, free home pages, TV and radio and weather.
One feature on the site, accessible from the home or money page, offers tools to tell you if you're paying too much for your gas, electricity or phone bills and how much you could save by changing suppliers.
Gucci RingIt comes as no surprise that the news channel delivers news and if you were wondering what Hollinger gets out of this partnership, Handbag gets its news from the Electronic Telegraph, part of the Hollinger empire.
Just as Handbag does not have a team of writers compiling the news, neither do they have staff dedicated, for example, to finding properties for sale for posting on the site.
Although Hollinger promotes its own news business, there is no direct link to a cosmetics page but the Boots name and logo are prominently displayed throughout the site. On the shopping channel, the feature article on buying online mentions the Boots online website but it also cites and provides direct links to several others online suppliers of cosmetics.
Many of Handbag's pages and topics of interest apply equally to men and women but the slant is definitely distaff. The female orientation is even more pronounced on a typically over-stuffed American site destined for greater prominence here.
The overfed Yank is iVillage and before I accessed the site directly, I visited the website of iVillage's British partner, Tesco, in the hope of finding an announcement describing their collaboration.
I found potatoes and pretzels but no press releases on a site whose news link jumped not to Tesco news but to real news concerning Middle East peace talks.
iVillage is more demonstrably women-orientated than Handbag, with channels on pregnancy and fertility, baby names, diets, and babies (breastfeeding, sleep, potty training). Although girls and women play football and tennis, no entry or link to sport or athletics of any sort was evident.
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