Car sellers refine pitch to women, according to Wall Street Journal.
On a recent hot summer night outside Detroit, a 62-year-old woman sat in a chair watching the Telegraph Cruise, a classic-car parade on Telegraph Avenue in Taylor, Mich., when a stranger approached and began asking questions.
What kind of car did she drive? Why had she chosen that automobile? What did this choice say about her identity?
The stranger, it turned out, was Chris Lezotte, a Ph.D candidate at Bowling Green State University, in Ohio, who was doing ethnographic research for her dissertation on the relationship women have with cars.
Ms. Lezotte is one of a small army of researchers trying to get inside the heads of women who need transportation—”to uncover the various meanings women ascribe to cars in a variety of contexts,” as she puts it. The University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute put out a study in 2012 showing that the number of women drivers in the U.S. had surpassed that of men, 105.7 million to 104.3 million, as of 2010.