Belinda Parmar
Lady Geek has become like an itch- I can’t seem to stop thinking about it. I really believe there is so much brands can do to empower women to feel inspired by technology and games rather than daunted and intimidated which is what a group of women I spoke to currently feel. My vision is that women dream about their 37inch HDTV before they go to bed. That technology makes a women’s heart beat faster….in a good way, not gradually sends them into the depths of despair because either the retail experience is so dire or the products and marketing are so Barbiefied.
To paraphrase Jean Paul Sartre, for many women, hell on earth is shopping for a HDTV or a new digital camera. And when you think about what you are buying, something that is going to transform your living room or capture images or those dearest to you, why should it be so god damn awful?
Mmh…the choice between some Jimmy Choos at £200 or the Xbox 360. At the moment, women are not swapping their Choos for the Xbox. I want to change that.
We launched in the press yesterday and got great coverage ranging from Wired to the Independent to PC Pro. It’s clear that there are very few companies within the tech space who are effectively targeting women. Those that do fall in to the clichés and stereotypes and end up pinking up and dumbing down their products and end up as one woman said, ‘treating them like a special needs case.’ Those that don’t even have any communication strategy targeted at women are missing our on £600million that is just going begging for the taking. Hello boys!
Belinda Parmar is a Planning Director at Saatchi & Saatchi
belindaparmar@googlemail.com
Elisabeth Kelan is an academic scholar focusing on the intersections between work and gender. She currently works at the Lehman Brothers Centre for Women in Business at the London Business School and also has her private consultancy Athena Associates.
Elisabeth has focused in recent years on gender relations in high-tech businesses, gender representations in popular management literature, gender in management education and the so-called “glass-ceiling”. She is an expert on gender, stereotypes, leadership and organisational culture. Her specialism is in the use of qualitative and ethnographic methods, which she applies to the study of gender and identity in organisations, gender and technology and performative gender theories. Elisabeth has presented her research internationally, published widely, and has received various awards for her research. Previously Elisabeth worked at the University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology as well as at the London School of Economics and Political Science where she also received her PhD.
http://www.elisabeth-kelan.net
Nikhil Shah is a Futurologist specialising in technology. He has always been a geek, though not officially a lady. According to gender tests available on the internet, however, he is 43% female, which he is quite proud of. His real insight into women and technology comes from the geeky world of trends consultancy, of which he is a part thanks to the Future Foundation, who pay his wages and allow him to immerse himself in data about (among many other things) our changing relationship to technology, whether male or female. The best bits end up on ladygeek, along with assorted musings about why technology is gendered, and why that may or may not be a problem. He’s also currently finishing off his masters at the London School of Economics, specialising in quantitative research methods, in particular on mapping out social and cultural spaces using web 2.0 data.
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