When I used to work as a Customer Care representative in a mobile phone company in my mid-twenties I remember that when receiving calls regarding technical issues and the customer was a male eight out of ten calls the customer would ask me to talk to a male representative, before they had even considered explaining the technical issue to me.
When asking them why they wanted to talk to a male representative instead, most of the time they would tell me that they weren’t sure that since I was a female and the issue was technical, that I would know how to help them or even be able to talk to and explain to them about technical issues.
In the beginning, I was very surprised by this, since it was in 2005, and male customers of different ages, not only middle-aged men as you might have thought.
Lisa De Matos, Receptionist, Foundever Denmark