I have often mentioned that most of my senior clients are women. One could assume this is because men do not live as long as women in general, and therefore the senior population has more women than men. The demographics of aging are certainly a contributing factor, but that is not the whole story.

Some of my clients are senior couples. Of these, almost all of the major contacts are with the woman of the family. Men will sometimes call me for specific issues, but women are more likely to call for tutoring. On occasion a woman will ask for help on something and then call her husband in to show him how to do whatever it was that had been bothering both of them.

The distribution in users groups and formal classes is almost the opposite. I have attended several users groups catering to seniors and found they attendance is primarily men. The same holds true to a lesser extent in classes. One exception is digital photography class in which women again dominate.

None of this is scientific. These observations are only my own anecdotal reporting of one set of observations.

All this is old territory, but this week I have another observation that I should have noted before. Instead of looking at the students, look at the tutors. I have met and discussed issues with several tutors and they tend to be male. But the people who teach formal classes are more evenly divided between male and female. Again, I do not claim this observation is generally accurate for the whole population of tutors, but still it gives pause.

The males I have worked with also have an interesting distribution. A surprising number of them are retired military personnel.

I would be interested in learning if these observations and other parameters of the senior student population are characteristic of other groups. If you have tutored or run a self-help class or users group catering to seniors, please send me you observations. If enough come in to extract some patterns, I will feature the results in a later column.

This is not a formal survey. I could make a formal checkoff sheet and ask specific questions. That might come later, but at this early stage in the investigation, I am really seeking your thoughts and observations upon which I might build a more formal study.

Click here to read about my new tutorial on helping seniors. The new version has grown considerably over the original. It has more topics and anecdotes, and fewer typos. While you’re at it, check out my expanded tutorial on decision theory.

[tags]senior learning, senior computing, adult education[/tags]