Computer Tech Support Calls - Are women clients treated differently than men?

As most people who know me will vouch, I don't play the woman card nor do I generally think that interactions I have are based on anything more than how one person reacts to another personality wise. But after today I find myself asking the question if women are regularly treated differently than men when they make a tech support call because it is assumed women won't know as much about their issues.

I had a simple question when I called my computer manufacturer today along with all of the collected data leading up to why I was asking the question. Since an unwanted update last night, I have been experiencing the blue screen of death on all but safe mode and spent hours diagnosing to come down to finally a question about which out of about thirty five options of motherboard driver files related to my model I should download to attempt to fix it. It seemed like a simple straight forward tech call.

After going through everything from the cause to what I researched to find a cure including the results of the blue screen viewer report and other diagnostic reports, all of that information was completely ignored and I was sent on a wild goose chase that included every thing I already tried, including a crawl under my desk to unplug things and numerous restarts, to end up right back where I started from when I made the call. Guess what, every thing I told him was where he led himself back to in order to answer my very simple question, which of these files do I download to re-install the driver needed. There wasn't one new thing discovered along the way and it was exactly one hour later that he answered that question for me.

If he had just listened to me in the first place and given me that answer, which he could have easily, it would have saved us both a lot of time and frustration. Why not just answer the question and if that didn't work I could always call back and then we could do the tour of the replecation to diagnose? 

So then I couldn't help but wonder, are women assumed not to know what they are talking about to the point that a straight forward question will not even be answered without first attempting to recheck every single thing that has already been done? What prevented him from listening to the details and going to that motherboard driver page to look at the options and answer my question when I first called? (Again, remember not one thing I hadn't already told him was discovered along the hour process he put me through.)

Obviously if this was the first time such a thing happened to me I would write it off as just a fluke with this particular person but it isn't. Being I could get myself to that technical depth of diagnostics, which I am sure not everyone could regardless of sex, then why wasn't that taken into consideration of my own tech ability to begin with? So, I'm wondering what others think, do women who make tech support calls get the same trust from the techie on the other side to know what it is they are talking about as men do? 

*PS Yes I was right about what I needed to do to fix it.