That is not personal purchase on hobby.
My actual point is this type of discussion doesn't really add anything. It's difficult to prove, and prone to an extreme amount of bias combined with generalizing from a small sample.
Hahah. Sorry, but there's just no way. The entire McMansion industry, the furnishing industry, IKEA, fast fashion brands and high fashion are all driven by women's business.
I agree about the rest though, and I think the McMansion industry bit is an insightful comment. I'll also add giant luxury SUVs to this list.
But I'm thinking that someplace like Bed, Bath & Beyond probably gets more female customers, and would be a preferred place to go for the items you list. That store has fancier stuff than IKEA, and is seriously overpriced; it's not a place you shop at to get a good value. I'd also suggest various mall shops or department stores.
This is anecdotal too, but in my experience women spend FAR more money on unnecessary stuff than men. Here's many examples: - donations to churches - designer clothes - luxury SUVs - jewelry (the conflict diamond trade wouldn't exist without women) - eating at expensive restaurants - McMansions - stuff for those McMansions (e.g., custom-made "window treatments": my Mom just spent $15K on "window treatments" for her new house!) - luxurious vacations (as opposed to, for instance, staying in hostels)
Of course, I'm generalizing, and probably mostly describing the Gen-X to Boomer white American woman demographic, but it's what I've seen the most.
As for men, I work with a bunch of Millennial and younger men, and they spend money on Magic cards and video games, and that's about it. That stuff costs hundreds of dollars, and that's about it usually unless you go really nuts. A woman can easily spend a few hundred dollars on a single article of designer clothing. Meanwhile, these younger men don't seem to really give a shit about cars the way men in older generations did.
And of course the things on my list aren't all exclusive to women; some men like eating at nice restaurants too, some men have BMW SUVs, etc., but in my observation, most of those purchases are either done by women directly, or insisted on by them if they're married.
I can see why you think that women tend not to have "expensive hobbies" the way some men do, but even here you're actually wrong. Here in my metro area, the single women all seem to be members of some kind of exercise class (like Zumba, Barre, Orange Theory, etc.). Those memberships are quite expensive, and easily comparable to men spending money on Steam games. Single women also almost all have dogs, and those can be really expensive too when you account for fancy food, grooming, dog-walking, dog-sitting, etc. The problem is that you're not looking at where people are actually spending money, and you're not counting women's purchases as "hobbies". My most recent ex-girlfriend had two big "hobbies" before I met her: one was her Barre class, which was hundreds of dollars per month. The other was going out to eat: she basically had a hobby of going out every weekend with her girlfriends to some new super-fancy restaurant in DC. That too would amount to hundreds of dollars per month. The other thing I've seen with single professional women is they spend a LOT of money on alcohol: they like to go "out for drinks" a lot, and of course a single drink at a nice DC restaurant will probably run $15. That really adds up over a month. So no, not a lot of women buy 3D printers or fix up old cars, but they do have luxurious things they like to spend $$$$ on.
Think gaming equipment, steam sales for games they will never play, flying, cars, tech, 3d printer and what not.
Compared to that, feminine hobbies are few bucks once in a while.