The Acceptance of Women-Centric Websites

Abstract

Cyberspace has shown a growing number of websites that are meant for female visitors. This paper studies the acceptance of the appearance of such gender-specific service based on an extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). In other words, this is a study of TAM as affected by women-centric sites. An online questionnaire survey of Internet users who have visited women-centric sites was conducted. Six factors were extracted from the design features of women-centric websites, forming 3C30 constructs: context, content, community, orderliness, originality, and outreach. It is concluded that context, content, community, and orderliness are the four key factors that affect users' perceptions on the sites. The originality of themes and the outreach of service, however, present no significant benefit to forming positive perceptions. The results further show that TAM and the extended TAM are subject to modification in the women-centric context. Perceived usefulness no longer contributes to the intention to visit. Furthermore, perceived ease of use is less important compared to perceived usefulness and perceived playfulness. This is distinctively so for the male visitors, as the path between perceived ease of use and the attitude toward women-centric sites is statistically insignificant.