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Gender and the semantic web

Caveat: I’m not entirely sure I understand the semantic web, but I do think it’s a fascinating idea and that there is some great work going on in this area laying the foundations for what promises to be a fantastically exciting development for the web. Despite my relative lack of knowledge, I’m going to express an opinion anyway. Please do correct me if you can.

So the semantic web is a mix of technologies which essentially aim to make the web more readable by computers. In order to do this, coders are trying to come up with technologies that go beyond HTML’s description of content to a description and classification of things themselves. For example, there will be defined, in this semantic web, an entity named “Barack Obama”. It will have attributes, such as gender and party affiliation, and various elements of his life history too. Crucially, it will also have relationships. So the web will know, for example that <Barack Obama><is the husband of><Michelle Obama>, and <is the 2008 presidential candidate of><the Democratic Party> and so on.

Much of the power of the semantic web comes from defining what kinds of these triples (<object> <relationship> <object>) exist, and from filling out the definitions of things so that computers can search them. The object is to come up with a system in which, for example, I could ask my computer to find out who I am meeting in three weeks time, when their birthday is and what the company they are working for is currently up to that I should know about. While much of this information is available to people searching the web, computers are much worse at interpreting the text form in which it currently resides and so we have to do the legwork of looking for it ourselves. The semantic web aims to make more of the web machine-readable.

After that long introduction, here’s the problem. A researcher from Austria believes that the semantic web is in danger of becoming gendered because of the gender of people who are building it. As I have noted before, men are way more likely to get their fingers dirty with the business of tinkering with hardware, writing code etc. And so it is that the semantic web community who are setting out the relationships, entities and protocols that will define this new web are mostly male.

Are the male and female points of view so different that the basic ontologies we give to computers to make sense of the world might be inadequate if only one gender contributes? I am struggling to think of ways in which this might actually make a difference, but then I am somewhat handicapped by my (60%) male brain. Perhaps someone can enlighten me?

It does, however, moderate my earlier optimism that the new web would be female-friendly and easy to use. For all that coding is no longer as important for the average user, it still builds all the technologies we love. Perhaps women will find it just as easy to use as men, but the fact that they are routinely not involved at design time may mean that gendered ways of thinking are hardwired into new technologies.

(This obviously applies to other groups who are excluded from the design process. There is a lot of interesting work on how basic philosophical concepts, such as ‘knowledge’, differ between ethnic groups. The same arguments as applied to men above may well apply to north Americans, or white people (not that most programmers are white, but you get the idea, hopefully). This blog is about gender, though, so I’ll stick to the point for the time being.)

R4, the taboo technology that downsizes your DS

There’s no name more feared by the makers and vendors of video games than the “R4″, the cheap, popular add-on to the Nintendo DS that allows gamers to load approximately 100 illegally downloaded games onto a single ‘cart’.

Naturally for some, the allure of this technology is the ability to get something for nothing. There are others who claim that they only use this technology for legitimate ‘homebrew’ software. I think there’s another really good reason that gamers like these things:

As you can see from the demonstration above, the DS is not quite as portable as it’s makers claim. Users of R4 cards have the advantage of combining many games into a single package, effectively allowing them to carry an entire collection in a tiny handbag.

The thing that Nintendo seem not to have noticed is that the pirate product really is delivering a better user-experience than the legit product sold in shops. The R4 cards and their many imitators have freed DS gamers from constantly needing to swap easily lost game-carts.

As a gamer whose happy to spend money on games but really appreciates not having to carry a load of crap with me, I’d like to see Nintendo respond to this threat not by the usual litigation and threats to ban products which hurt their business model. How about some innovation?

Nintendo needs to release it’s own R4 killer. Imagine an official game-download service like WiiWare for the DS that allows affordably priced games delivered directly to the hand-held, plus it should allow a large number of games to be stored on one cart.

That would kill my R4 envy and make room in my over-filled handbag, which would be a real bonus for many women, considering the average woman’s handbag is now 40% heavier than 5 years ago.

The end of male geekery

A conversation I was having with my girlfriend’s father sparked a thought about how computing structures can lead to gendered outcomes. He was an engineer in Germany, and for his undergraduate dissertation, he programmed a computer to play a game that sounds like a cross between connect-4 and Go. He did it on punch cards. We talked for ages about the virtues of Fortran versus machine code, C versus Pascal and other geeky things I pretended to understand.

I would describe myself as a novice programmer at best, but like many guys I know I spent significant portions of my youth in the 1980s tinkering with IBM compatible computers that mainly ran MS-DOS. The first thing the computer would show was not a friendly desktop with windows and icons, but a prompt:

c:\>

There is something about this blankness that means you have to begin to get under the hood of your computer, and have a dim idea of how the bits work and communicate with each other. And in fact it encourages you to tinker and tweak. I may have messed up my father’s computer so badly it needed an engineer to come over and spend half a day fixing it, but I learnt a lot. Now, this sort of thing is clearly gendered. The male brain loves getting stuck into machines and playing with them, whether these are cars, computers or bikes.

I am going to resort to purely anecdotal evidence, so if there are any ladygeeks out there who love to program and know their way around autoexec.bat, then apologies, but hopefully what I’m saying will still ring true to some extent. I didn’t know any girls in the 80s, but even since then, I can only think of one girl I have met who could (as far as I know) be remotely interested in the conversation I was having with my girlfriend’s father. For a long time computers and the concept of geekiness were organised around the idea that geeks could program, that they could code their way out of trouble and would take the time to run through system files tinkering and tweaking to accomplish what they wanted to do. And during that time, computer geekdom was a resolutely male domain, as it was largely men who actually enjoyed doing this sort of thing.

That began to change over a decade ago, when Windows 95 banished the C prompt to dire emergencies only. But emergencies still happen, and the traditional male geekiness is still called upon. However, the move towards cloud computing is going to strike another blow at this predominantly male domain. Processing power, programs and the problems they cause will no longer be stored locally, and will no longer be sorted out locally. Your laptop, like Belinda’s Eee PC, will not be a fully-featured powerhouse, but mainly a way of accessing the internet, where most of your computing needs will be met by a variety of services provided by Google, Amazon, Microsoft et al. With this model, there is so much less that can go wrong, and correspondingly less need for the male geek types.

And this unleashes productivity, too. Instead of spending countless hours fiddling with registry files and secretly enjoying it, the focus of computer wizardry shifts to the wonderful things that you can actually achieve with them, and this field is not gendered. Women are just as interested in technology as men, now that the technical fiddling is no longer required (most devices actively discourage you from opening them up and tinkering), and in every way, they are an equally important part of the technology marketplace. Mobile phones, content creation and social media are all areas where women are just as likely as men if not more so to participate and produce. These are also areas where the internal workings of the system are best hidden from its users.

The new geeks will be male and female, they will have no need to know how computers function internally, but they will be masters of manipulating symbols on screen and in the cloud, and the things they accomplish will be awesome.

Move over Barbie, the “Smart Berry” has arrived

I want to cry into my coffee. Japanese little girls of between 6 and 8 have eschewed Barbie and now want a Smart Berry. Its a new ‘mobile communicator’ and is a ‘girly’ version of the BlackBerry made by Bandai.

Its got a touch screen and a slide out keyboard and Wi-Fi. The device registers user profiles so that Smart Berry owners can only send and receive mail from friends. It also has a function that allows users to raise a virtual pet. Other functions include a scheduler, calculator, alarm clock and address book. The toy costs $97.

I can’t work out what I am most upset about. Is it the fact that the Blackberry has become such a symbol of status and ’success’ that a 6 year old would even know what a Blackberry is, let alone want one? Or is the fact that they have taken an intelligent piece of technology and dumbed it down and pinked it up for young girls? I think I am most aggrieved about Bandai not using any imagination or depth of understanding of young girls other than they like pink and want to communicate with their friends and nurture animals. The Smart Berry has a virtual Tamagotchi-like pet you can play with.

I have no problem with young children using technology and gaming as a way to stimulate and fuel their imagination. And living with a hard core gamer, I will have no chance in vetoing games when it comes to my children. I’d much rather my daughter play on the Wii than dress up an anorexic Barbie doll. But why can’t product developers and games designers come up with new and interesting ways to keep children’s imagination alive beyond the obvious?

I have a 7 year old niece, Lila. Lila is beautifully ‘unbranded.’ Lila loves art and creativity. She loves fantastical role play with her friends. She loves feeling like she ‘belongs’.

I have no doubt that she would want one of these as she loved her Tamagotchi. For a few minutes. For a few weeks. A few months at very best. But it will be a fad. Another toy that gets thrown into the playroom with other ‘deleted’ toys which cannot capture her imagination for more than 5 minutes. When the technology that surrounds us is so much more advanced and accessible compared to use than days gone past, how is that companies can just churn out gadgets that do nothing more than dumb down and imitate the world of the adult. Surely the generations that follow deserve more?

The mamas, not the papas

I was playing with some old survey data the other day and found some interesting effects of life events on how men and women use technology. We asked about the number of people who had done various activities online in the last 6 months.

On the whole, the numbers for men and women for most activities were broadly equal. But for certain activities, the presence of children changed the picture completely. Take blogging. Among those in the pre-family lifestage, the proportions of men and women who were bloggers were about equal. If we now compare these figures to those who have children, the proportions who blog are similar for women, but men with children barely blog at all.

It’s a similar story with social networking sites. Mothers are almost as likely as not-yet-mothers to be active members of these sites. Fathers, on the other hand, just don’t seem to be as interested. Is this because mothers tend to have more time at home to spend on these sites? Given how much social networking usage seems to go on in offices, I doubt it. I think part of it is that mothers are more closely involved with their children’s social lives than fathers are, and so might have been persuaded to get a Bebo profile somewhere along the way. Might this also point to women becoming less set in their ways as they get older, perhaps again because they are around younger minds for longer?

Or perhaps it is simply a demographic effect of mothers generally being younger than fathers, and the difference in web 2.0 usage will disappear as younger cohorts come into parenthood and the fathers are equally tech-savvy as the mothers. This data is about a year old, and when I get a moment, I intend to check these results against more recent waves of the same survey to see if they show signs of shifting this way. [Disclosure: this data comes from (my employer) the Future Foundation's proprietary research.]

Finally, most people who have bet or gambled online are men without children. Most of them give up when they have kids, however. Young women are very unlikely to bet online, but when they have children, something seems to happen, and they become three times as likely to have a flutter.

All of the above are just observations from the data. I’d love to know your hypotheses for why older women seem to be more interested in technology than older men.

A router that looks like no other

Linksys invited me to the unveiling of their new Wireless-G Broadband Router WRT54G2.  I went to the event with pretty low expectations, I mean how sexy can a router be?  Its not exactly like my PSP or my prized possession: my Internet radio.  In the hierarchy of technology, surely the router is at the low end with the cables and bits of kit that I know I have to own but don’t particularly want to think about?

My new linksys router

The dream: Will customers fall in love with their networking technology? Might we feel the same about a router as we do a well-designed sofa?

Firstly, I was really impressed by the fact that Linksys are taking the female market seriously and want input from Lady Geeks and those who work in the field. Linksys have conducted some research and recognised that over half of all women with broadband have a wireless network and want a simpler way to connect all their technology together.  95% of women with a wireless network have a PC/laptop, 68% a digital music player, 52% a DVR/PVR, 50% a games console and 14% a digital photo frame. This company has realised that women are clearly no longer a niche market but the drivers of tomorrow’s growth.

Secondly, having always classed routers as ugly things with strange antennae to be hidden, I was really impressed by the look and feel of the new Linksys product.  It’s piano black, sleek, sophisticated and smooth to the human hand. Gone are the outlandish “cyberman” antennae and the garish colour-schemes. Linksys have gone for a minimal look: The rounded form has a set of LEDs that shine through the dark plastic and a simple button which when pressed automates the configuration of many devices.

In the press event Linksys made a big show of their bundled configuration software: EasyLink Advisor. Unfortunately I could not use it because it only supports Windows XP and vista. I have have a Linux based PC. Fortunately a call to a geek friend revealed an alternative setup method that required only a web-browser. Even without the helpful software it was pretty easy: Go to a web-page and fill in a form. After that, it just worked.

I was impressed with the attitude of the designer: He stated that ‘Technology has to exist on the same terms as furniture.’

It’s clear that Linksys are genuinely attempting to apply this philosophy to their product-design, however they do not apply this consistently: For example, the packaging is quite ordinary: It’s cluttered art-work and flimsy shrink-wrapped cardboard gave the impression of a product that does not stand out from the crowd. First impressions matter - and companies that focus exclusivly on the functional attributes of their products fail to make that impression.

This led me to ask some questions: Is technology equally or more important to women than the furnishings in their home?   Would women prefer to get a new HD TV than a new sofa?  Are we a nation of geek obsessed individuals who can’t think past their front door?  If in the 50s people defined their houses by the cars parked in the drive, is the naughties about whether you have a WIi or an Xbox?  Will there soon be more conversations about the type of router you should have rather than your choice of carpet?

The reality (for now) - The router’s design values are ruined by the fact that it’s permanent home is a dusty corner of my attic.

In light of these questions - have Linksys achieved their goal?

I think they are on the right track but will need to apply the principle of emotionalising the product right through from the packaging to the in store experience to the web-based configuration interface. It’s going to take a few more years of this kind of design refinement and a deeper understanding of women before router-manufacturers will have made a device that women will choose over a designer sofa.

My first date with the E61i

I received the Nokia E61i to review with an attitude of nonchalance.  I previously considered myself as Blackberry slave and resigned myself to the fact that my children will grow up to be Blackberry orphans. I begrudgingly removed my Sim card into my new E61i in the spirit of goodwill.

My initial impression was that it was a bulkier, sturdier blackberry, and kind of geeky looking.  As one Lady Geek told me, it looked like a Casio calculator.

Within 5 mins, without reading the manual , I had figured out how to put a photo of my baby daughter as my background on the screen.  In 10 mins, I had made my first call.  Within half an hour, I had downloaded the Gmail application.  This was intuitive design.  No manuals.  Minimal frustration.  My previous reluctance had been totally overcome with a rush of love.  Admittedly,  this wasn’t love at first sight but this was love within the first half an hour. This got me thinking.

What level of gratification needs to achieved in the first 5 mins for a piece of technology to play an indispensable role in your life?  How important is it that women can make technology ‘feel their own’ within the first 5 mins of owning a new gadget?

Meeting your new phone is like going on a first date.  You have to connect in the first five minutes otherwise, its pretty much an uphill struggle.  First impressions do count.  In fact, they are crucial.  I spoke to my Lady Geeks about this and so many of them struggle with initial set ups.  They talk about “wanting technology feeling like their own.” Once they are shown how to use something or have worked out just one thing on their own, they feel comfortable.  Secure.  Protected.   Comforted.  Most importantly, they are saved from phoning the company or asking a man and feeling completely stupid.

Drescher states that there are 3 components of a successful relationship: Comfort, Safety and Sexual Tension.   The comfort and safety elements are crucial for a woman’s relationship with a phone.  Comfort of feeling relaxed with my technology.   The safety of knowing it is there when I need it and has my life in it.  

In hindsight, I never felt the same about my Blackberry.  It is an absolutely necessary part of my life.  However, I would not say I had a particularly emotional relationship with it.  Blackberry have been so clever by targeting the Enterprise market- my company does not support the E61i so I could never use it to check my work email and calendar.

Reluctantly, this morning Nokia told me they want their E61i back: I had to return the SIMM card to the Blackberry Pearl.

I miss the E61i’s qwerty keyboard even if they are quite hard to press sometimes - true love can overcome flaws like that.  I miss the intuitive nature of the device and I miss the photo off my baby on the background (I’ve not yet managed to do the same for my BB’s tiny screen).

If companies want their users to feel an emotional connection with technology, why don’t they focus on that first crucial 5 mins? Why not think about how to make a woman fall in love and not get caught up in product spec most of which most people will never use?  Why can’t every phone or piece of technology come with a small handbag size card with top ten tips to getting started?  What about a demo mode that explains the basic principles? Why can’t their be a hot-line button on your phone to a helpline?

Companies must understand that for women first impressions count and if instant gratification isn’t found in the first five minutes through the design and usability, its very difficult to engender true loyalty.  As Elbert Hubbard said (1856 - 1915)

“An ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness.”

Technology…a politically correct addiction?

I was sitting in a restaurant and I felt agitated.  Nervous.  Jittery.  Stressed.  It took me a while to figure out what was wrong.  And then I realised.  I hadn’t checked my emails for over 30 minutes.  I looked around at the table next to mine - half of it’s occupants were staring into their smart-phones or tablet PC’s.

Admittedly we were a geeky crowd but this was a fancy French restaurant in an upscale part of the city, not some a nerd-fest in a seattle coffe bar. As Hamlesh noted, the Crack berry has replaced smoking.  Whilst it was once considered OK to smoke, now its not. It is acceptable however, to check your Blackberry every five minutes.   If they remade Mad Men for today’s advertising world, would they be checking their phone for emails rather than lighting up another cigarette?

Have we become so dependent on technology that it is no longer an empower and enabler but the root of an addiction society?  A replacement for the cigarette?

One of my Lady Geek contacts admitted to me that she checks her Blackberry at traffic lights.  Another told me what without her phone she feels like there is no oxygen in the room.  Another wakes up and has to check Facebook before she has her breakfast.  I have to admit I check my phone every half an hour when I am with my children, which I feel guilty about.   According to a recent You Gov poll, 90% of Blackberry users describe their Blackberry is a lifesaver.   Technology is a lifeline for many of us and brings many benefits..it connects us to our friends and families and many women talk about their phone as the modern day rape alarm.  Its a security device.  The reality is that if someone is to attack you then your phone is not going to be of any use.  But it provides many women with reassurance and peace of mind.

But not being able to live without technology, is that really good for society?  I remember that scene from Sex in the City when Miranda comes home and Tivo hasn’t recorded her favourite programmes and she behaves like a demented neurotic.  I feel like that when my PVR doesn’t record “The Apprentice”.

Surely ‘balance’ in all aspects of our lives is what we should be striving for?  And if we are always ‘connected’ how do we switch off?   We need to make sure technology serves as an enabler, as a facilitator to someone or something we love doing.   Now let me just go and check my mail….

A solitary moment for two

As a  techno-utopian, I believe technology brings people together rather than disconnecting them.

Received wisdom would have us believe that technology breeds isolation:  I’ve lost count of the number of hysterical Daily Mail articles that warn us that computer-games are turning kids violent. As a child I was told that sitting too close to the TV would “make you go blind”. There’s a great deal of nonsense spoken about technology, and it’s often believed because many people consider technological progress to be the root evil of society.

When I think about how technology is used in my household, the HD TV is like a digital campfire which brings the whole family together to watch films, the Wii is a short burst of fun for my husband and I when the kids are in bed, Facebook connects me to a wider circle of friends that I wouldn’t have the time to see, and my mum and I listen to Woman’s Hour together on our new Wi Fi radio.

Not only is technology physically bringing people together through new shared experiences, its creating a new way of sharing an emotional experience albeit in some cases on different platforms and different devices.  The reactions and the emotions of the people with whom you are sharing the experience with is whats important.

This becomes ever more apparent with the shift towards mobile content sharing devices.   As Jan Chipchase shows with this photo of two Tokyoites - on the right of the photo engaged in the same task watching the same television program on their mobile phone each using their own device, with comments passed back and forth.   Whereas one screen can compromise the viewing experience, the same content can be shared and hence the same experience.

As technology evolves and content becomes ever more mobile (or ‘time shifting’), there are so many opportunities for companies to position technology less as something about individual glory and status but more as a shared emotional experience.  Its these kind of positioning that will capture the female heart as well as the female pound.

Attracting Women or Girls?

The article in The Times from 20 May entitled ‘Salesmen say this Pounds 300 pink phone with its cartoon cat loved by children is aimed at women of 30. Parents fear otherwise’ written by Lilly Peel states that the pink Hello Kitty phone produced by Sanrio is targeted not at young girls but at women in their twenties and thirties. This is based on a comment by Sanrio’s sales director Caroline Preston. I wonder what market research Sanrio has done to come to this claim. The Lady Geek research Saatchi & Saatchi has conducted last year found very clearly that only 9% of women in the UK would buy ‘pinked up’ mobile phones and technical gadgets. Pink might in the end be a better colour to attract young girls than women in the UK market.

kitty phone