When was the last time you saw an actual mobile phone on display in a mobile phone store?

If you’ve had the misfortune to wander into one of these places recently you will notice that the walls and shelves of these places are usually covered with “dummy” phones, empty shells in which the screen has been replaced by a sticker. Who could possibly think that a dead lump of plastic riveted to the wall gives an impression of the real thing?

Carphone Warehouse is an unpleasant shop: It’s the only technology vendor I know that borrows it’s design aesthetic from the Job-Centre. At the Liverpool St. branch I asked the bored-looking man behind the minuscule desk if I could try out HTC’s newish “Hero”. I found his reply quite astonishing: He explained that he couldn’t let me try one because they did not have a demo unit and that I ought to look on the company’s website which had an “interactive demo”.

At the nearby Orange shop on Bishopsgate I asked to try out the new Motorola Dext. This time my assistant was able to locate a working handset but unfortunately he brought it to me without a SIM card – that meant that I could not try out the phone’s killer feature: Social networking. So how was I supposed to experience this new product? He pointed me to a fuzzy screen near the entrance to the shop: Oh goody! Another interactive demo.

The previous examples are typical rather than exceptional: Conventional wisdom is that shops have one big advantage over online vendors: They allow you to experience the product. But if shops cannot get this very basic trick right then what value are they adding?  And why, according to Jupiter, over half of all women walking out of stores because they cant find what they want.

We asked the Lady Geek panel about the kinds of retail experiences which they wanted: Virtually everybody said it was important to talk about, touch, smell, engage with a  product before buying.

Women are “reassurance addicts.” Women feel at a relative disadvantage when shopping for technology.   They are much less likely to have done research about the product before they buy compared to men.   And they are much more likely to rely on the sales experience than men. Nearly half of all women have no idea what brand they are buying when they walk into a tech store.

The retail experience is akin to a “vending machine.” Not only that but as a woman, you feel like a bit of bait ready to be snapped up by a pushy sales guy.

Our research indicates a clear prescription for selling more phones to women:

• Find a way to put a few real products on display – and into customer’s hands.
• End the hard-sell tactics and let good products sell themselves.
• Stock a smaller range of more interesting products. Vendors should be brave experts and trust their opinion about what customers should want.
• Employ women to help attract more women and make the environment a place where women want to be.

With Best Buy entering the UK market, tech retailers have no choice but to add real value or die.

I just read Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s new book called ‘Top Talent‘. It deals with how businesses can ensure to retain and motivate diverse talent in the crisis.

This is a small book but filled to the rim with useful examples of what businesses can actually do to engage their people in these difficult times. It reports on the research and the high powered network meetings that Sylvia Ann Hewlett holds for the members of her Hidden Brain Drain Task Force of the Center for Work-Life Policy. It is a quick and easy read. A must for everyone who needs to be inspired by how gender diversity can remain top of the agenda when business is down.

The World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Report states every year that no country in the world has yet managed to eliminate the gender gap. While gender inequality continues to be a strong feature of the workplace, my research which has just been published in the Canadian Journal of Administrative Science has shown that men and women find it increasingly difficult to talk about gender inequality. The research is based on a detailed qualitative analysis how people talked about and addressed gender inequality.

Employees from both companies claimed their organizations were gender neutral and that employees were evaluated based on merit. With further questioning, men and women interviewed could describe past situations where gender bias occurred against women, but limited it to happening 10 to 20 years ago, from contacts outside their own organizations (i.e. customer contacts), or to an isolated male colleague from another generation. Instead of denying gender discrimination, workers acknowledge it can happen but construct it as singular events that happened in the past, placing the onus on women to overcome such obstacles.

I have called this phenomenon ‘gender fatigue’ where individuals tire of acting upon gender discrimination in spite of the fact that incidents of gender bias either occurred at one time within their organization or could occur again. The problem with gender fatigue is that it prohibits productive discussion regarding inequalities between men and women, making gender bias difficult to address. If we believe that we work in gender neutral workplaces, seeing and acting upon gender inequality is becoming very difficult.

I have been a bit slow getting all the press coverage of Lady Geek up onto the site.  So here’s the latest piece in the Times featuring Lady Geek.

The Management Today pieces to follow soon…

I have tended not to go to conferences or events in the last year unless  I am speaking at them.   I used to go with high expectations- hoping to be provoked, dislocated in some way.   The reality is that all too often, I was hearing the same old stuff (albeit with a new flickr image) said by the same old people (mostly 40 something men), done in the same old way (one way broadcast).  And if I am going to sacrifice putting my children to bed, I want to feel a connection.

Last night was a real exception.  It was The Next Women Funding and Pitching event.  The first part of the night was inspiring female entrepreneurs such as Sarah McVittie (founder of Texperts) and Karin Loeffen (founder of Libersy) who told their story from the heart.  The mistakes they made.  The challenges they faced.  The lessons they learnt. The hard way.   And the sacrifices and trade offs they had to endure.

It was real.  It was from the heart as well as the head.  No ‘commandments’.  No ’5 principles’.  No ‘long lists.’  Real stories.  From real women.

And just when I started to feel guilty about the bedtime story I should have told my children, things hotted up where ‘Pitch-Preneurs’ who did a 3 min pitch for funding in front of angel investors.  I watched in awe at some of the great ideas presented.  I felt empowered.

I felt part of something.  I felt a connection.

Innovation is thriving.  Its an exciting time to be in business.

I was chatting to a smart single twenty-something about dating. She wants a boyfriend but is too shy to go onto a dating site and feels uncomfortable touting her wares and telling everyone how beautiful she is (interestingly even the most unattractive men do not seem to suffer from this fear).

She told me that she’d been using a site called datemyfriend.net: The idea is that your friends write your profile. Instead of having to blow your own trumpet, your friends showcase your talents and acts as your honest-broker. This is a much more comfortable way of approaching the dating scene because your friends can take care of the most frightening bits leaving you to focus on the pleasure.

This aligns to how many women I meet have a fear of technology: There is an embarrassment and guilt that surrounds not knowing the difference between a megabyte and megabit. Between not knowing if you are connecting via a network, Wi Fi or 3G. The tech companies have been confusing and bamboozling us for decades. There is an opportunity to take the fear out of technology for those women who are not technology-literate and dread buying technology.

What if you could go to a neutral broker and give her your requirements online? She could come back with a series of recommendations as to what most suits you. What if you could have a planning meeting once a year with someone who would come to your home and assess your current network and requirements, and make you a “technology roadmap”? This person would be like a “personal shopper” for technology. An ITA, sort of like an IFA but for technology.

Whilst technology companies are realising the advantages of post-sales support such as the Apple Genius-bar and Carphone Warehouse’s Geek Squad, no-one is taking the fear out of the pre-sales process, certainly nobody who can offer independent strategic advice.

With women spending more on technology than ever before, it might be a good place to start.