ATTITUDINAL DIFFERENCES WHEN COMMUNICATING IN ENGLISH TO THE TWO GENDERS
ATTITUDINAL DIFFERENCES WHEN COMMUNICATING IN ENGLISH TO THE TWO GENDERS

Summary/Abstract: According to Ford Motor Co., women have influential buying power. Females influence 80% of all purchases and have 95% veto power regarding automotive purchases. This is a fact which, in certain cultures can be proven, and in others just empirically confirmed by folklore. In either case, the role of women in the process of buying a car cannot in any way be denied. What makes the difference is the way the transaction takes place and the communication between the client – or the woman behind the client – and the sales staff. In the case of Romanian market, the technical details that the sales staff – mostly men – would provide for a woman may vary sensibly from the ones provided for a man interested in buying a car. In addition, even the attitude towards a female customer might be different. The paper presents a research performed on 55 students of the Technical University of Cluj Napoca. The experiment aimed to test the attitude of future engineers when relating to potential clients both men and women. Their responses have been evaluated by means of document analysis. The results show that the information provided to female potential customers differs from the one provided for a potential male customer. Moreover, even the attitude is most of the times different.

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