A recent survey that revealed women to be more astute at dealing with technology than men has prompted a response from an expert in the industry.

The survey looked at 75,000 calls to phone assistance services provided by gadgethelpline.com between September and October, discovering that women demonstrate improved patience and superior listening skills, spending 32 per cent longer on the phone than men.

Maggie Berry, director of womenintechnology.co.uk, explained that it was a notably interesting survey.

However, she noted that a lot of it may be down to generational differences, commenting that many young people are coming through with technology as standard.

Ms Berry continued: "It's going to be much more normal in their lives as opposed to when I was at school and we had one BTC Master between five of us."

She also hopes small businesses in IT will provide more of an "open shop" in terms of using technology for women as well as men in future months and years.

In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were guaranteed response times and allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues.