As a female nerd I bought my ZX Spectrum for £99 (16 KB version as I couldn't afford the better 48KB version), at an Ideal Home show in the '80s in London and might have seen Sinclair there as he had just started selling it. I also bought the printer with the black print on silver paper and the tape peripherals to go with it eventually.
The fun was making your own programs and there were many magazines and much tearing out of hair when I couldn't get the game to play properly and found out later that it was a magazine misprint. Those spiral bound books were the best to copy codes out of as they lay flat. I learned a bit of Sinclair BASIC, played Jet pac and Pac man
I ended up with a whole ottoman full of games, manuals and peripherals and gave away the lot to a charity some time ago.
The main problem with it was having to fight for access to the television when my brother was home and broken or scrambled tapes and I eventually defected to the BBC micro at work, the Atari. and then a Compaq laptop where I favoured the Adventure 'what do I do now' types,
The best thing about being in at the (almost) start was that it gave me great kudos at work at the time I remember! :)
I agree that few females were much interested at the start but I didn't worry about that and, yes, I did see The Sims as a kind of dolls house as I never had one of my own as a child and bought it immediately it came out.
