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.

A recent article suggests that the number of girls playing games has increased to 41% in Australia. The article argues – as we have pointed out many times in this blog – that stores selling video games and makers of video games are not set up to please female customers. It is really surprising that companies have not realised that almost half of their customers are female.

The study also highlighted that women playing video games in Australia are now on average 28 years old, up from 24 years. The trend suggests that games of the future are not only as likely to be male as female but also older.

The article suggests that one way of responding to the increasingly female audience of video games is through having more female game developers. The figure the article quotes for Australia is 5% while the international figure stands at 12%. The picture is similar in computer science courses at universities and colleges where women make up only about 10% in the US as an article in USA Today states.

This is supported by the fact that the few women who enter science and technology professions are also likely to drop out as a recent contribution of Silvia Ann Hewlett in the FT claimed (I will review her Harvard Business Review article here when it is published next month). Hewlett argues that as many as 52% of highly qualified women in science, technology and engineering drop out due to work pressures and a hostile environment.

The IT industry can ill afford training few women and losing them in disproportionate numbers later on. However with more women actively using technology and playing computer games, one can hope that the image of technology jobs might change slowly.