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.

This month’s HBR echoes  much of what Lady Geek has been highlighting for the past 18 months-perfect timing for my upcoming Symbian talk.  Firstly, that women represent the largest market opportunity in the world- in aggregate, the opportunity is bigger than China and India combined.

Secondly that despite this, most companies continue to market to men and fail to explore how they might meet women’s needs. Or they target women as an afterthought through patronizing initiatives.  Dell’s Della being a perfect example.  The NY Times said Dell needed to go to the ‘school of marketing hard knocks.’

And namely, that those companies that can offer tailored products and services are in prime position to win, when the economy recovers.

Interviewing over 12,000 women about everything ranging from their jobs and education to their hopes and fears, BCG found that women are vastly underserved.  Women feel few companies have responded to their need for products and services specifically designed for them. Too many businesses behave if women had no say over purchasing decisions.  With the recovery in sight now, women will represent one of the largest opportunities and are an important force in spurring a recovery.  One of the findings echoes Wave 1 of the Lady Geek Brand Survey;

I hate being stereotyped because of my gender and age, and I don’t appreciate being treated like an infant.”

Interestingly, the research highlights that women are happiest in their early and later years and the lowest point is early and mid forties.  Women struggle to cope with both children and aging parents, so are most receptive to products that help them better control their lives and balance their priorities.

I could not agree more with their final point;

A focus on women as a target market-instead of a geographical target- will up a company’s odds of success when the recovery begins.

Its official.  Ladies, get your pink handbags out.  The new ad from PC World and Dell is officially the most patronising ever.  It starts with the line

My world is fashion.  I just have to colour co-ordinate everything.  Even my laptop.  That’s why I love the new Dell laptop.

Pass me the barf bag.  Please.  It just gets worse.  Should I get pink to match my shoes….  Must I go on?  I am sure you get the picture.

This is an example of 2 companies who have money to waste.  2 companies who have no idea of how to talk to women and most importantly, no idea of the role that technology plays in a women’s life.

I thought that Dell would have learnt from their latest Della ‘for women’ website which seems to have such bad press that they have renamed it.  This is disappointing as the Dell Inspiron mini 10 is a  fantastic piece of kit.   I also thought PC world had made some progress with their latest work.  But alas, it seems a group of middle aged balding in marketing (sorry but it has to be) decided that “women are the answer.”

Here’s the logic.

Women like shoes.

Women like pink.

So to make women like technology, we need to pink it up and dumb it down and make it match her shoes.

Do me a favour.  None of the professional women I know (which is where the biggest financial opportunity is) would be seen dead with a pink laptop.  For most women over the age of 12, pink is definitely not their world.

And even more offensive is not the colour, but the positioning.   The women I speak to love technology.  The creativity and human interaction it adds to their life.  Not because it matches their shoes.

On the positive side, it confirms how much technology brands need specialists such as Lady Geek to put an end to patronising ads like this.

I treated myself to an iPhone. As many objects of desire, an iPhone does not come cheap, so the shopping experience could be expected to enhance the status of the object of desire as, well, desirable.

An advantage of getting an iPhone is, indeed, that you can buy it in an Apple Store and avoid other technology stores. I would have been able to buy it online, too, but I wanted the in-store experience. So I went to Apple’s Regent Street store after making an appointment with a personal shopper first. Given how crowded the store is, that was a good decision.

I was quickly assigned my personal shopper and led to the cordoned-off area for the personal shopping experience. Although I had done my research beforehand and knew exactly what I wanted, he took me through all the options. I, playing the role of the customer, engaged in the ritual of the sales pitch. My personal shopper was a mid-twenties guy. He explained all the options to me in an unpretentious way. This would make it easy for people who are not sure what they want to make their choice.

After getting a brand-new boxed iPhone based on my choice, my personal shopper set out to register it. Sadly, he had to open the box for this. This meant that my unwrapping experience at home was diminished. But who would complain about this if he then does all the admin for you and you can use your phone straightaway?

He told me the process would take 15 minutes, however he did not consider o2. There was some website problem and we were always kicked out of the registration system. My personal shopper finally rang them using his personal BlackBerry (a bit ironic given that it was an Apple store) and registered the iPhone. It was rather 45 minutes than 15 minutes. However sitting in the personal shopping area of the Apple Store that was not too much of a problem.

Although the box had been opened, my personal shopper put all the material carefully back into the box and gave me a nice shopping bag to carry it home. I could bring my new iPhone home in style and could start using it straight away.

We have said many times that Apple as a brand appeals to female customers. Apple Stores are unlike other technology stores. Apple understands that technology should be an object of desire. My whole shopping experience was not unlike a personal shopping experience in clothing stores on Regent Street. I can imagine that women do like shopping in the Apple store. I did not feel patronized like in other technology stores. The shopping experience had some style to it. The purchase was wrapped beautifully. This makes the object of desire even more desirable. Particularly for women.

My WARC conference presentation stressed that the best way to market to women is to be inclusive rather than to simply overtly exclude men. Nevertheless, most marketing activities aimed at women do so simply by shutting-out the other gender. It’s a mirror-image of the current marketing worst-practice. Della, the new netbook sales portal from dell is a pastel-pink feminized counterpart to the unapologetically ultra-masculine Dell.com. It’s a perfect example of the current trend of exclusion marketing.

I remember interviewing one Lady Geek who told me in no uncertain terms that the ‘Dixons Women’s Only night’ was her idea of hell.

“What are they going to do, give me cheese and pineapple on a stick and tell me how to turn the telly on?”

Not exactly the response that Dixons were looking for, and in my experience a strategy which never works quite as well as the men who invented it might expect.

Marketing to women should not feel like “an initiative” i.e that a group of 40 something balding marketing men have been sitting in the boardroom and some bright spark says ‘We need to appeal to women. I know, lets create a portal for women, pink up and dumb down our products…we could even call it Della…(guffaw guffaw)

I admire Dell’s intent. Its brave. It shows that they recognizes that in the current environment, its a smart strategy to improve your bottom line by targeting women. I’m skeptical that Dell will achieve their objectives for two reasons:

Firstly,  do they really have a long-term commitment to growing the female market? Dell has a history of superficial and short-term business strategies such last year’s half-hearted flirtation with Linux . Is there any commitment to go beyond the shell of rebranding and create something which will profoundly appeal to this new market? As Elisabeth Kelan states, when you open the Inspiron artistic shell, its just an ordinary dull Dell laptop underneath.  How much of the products and community parts of the site have been specifically developed with women in mind rather than been re-skinned to appeal to women?

Secondly, I do not think that Dell have achieved a depth of understanding of their new female audience. Evidence of this is the handy lifestyle tips which state the excessively obvious. We also find the usual marketing copy cliches such as ‘giving extension to your digital life’ (I don’t want a digital life, I want a life with technology in it) and ‘enhance your life with technology’ and the ‘giving’ section – it’s the kind of vacuous text that means absolutely nothing.

From a product perspective, the site makes a big deal of their pretty new Inspiron Netbooks, however there’s not a whole lot else on the site – yet another echo of Dell’s failed Linux strategy which also presented an absurdly limited subset of Dell’s quite massive portfolio of products.

My research conducted with Jupiter found that a third of British women are frustrated, alienated and bored by the way tech companies market to them. Despite this most tech marketers are in denial about what must be done: There is plenty which can be done- it just needs to be executed and approached in the right way.

Strategies tech brands need to apply;

1) Go for an implicit strategy appealing to women rather than creating an overt exclusive ‘silo’. Overt branding such as Della, Dixon’s Women’s Only nights and Comets Angels give out wrong signals. Nintendo spent hundreds of dollars understanding women and their fitness regimes but never overtly positioned Wii Fit as ‘gaming for girls.’

2) Make women the heart of your strategy not the icing on the cake. Nike Women has invested millions and is part of a strategy which demonstrates Nike’s long term commitment to women. It goes beyond flogging products and starts to offer real benefits.

3) Develop an authentic understanding of women and what they want before you embark on women only strategies. Employ experts such as the Lady Geeks (shameless plug) who will help you go beyond the superficial and can deliver your proposition in a way that is not going to get women irritated. Dell have lost touch with the reality of those women its trying to sell to.

4) Position technology as entertainment rather than a female or male pursuit. Jeremy Clarkson, has equal appeal and ratings amongst both sexes. Rather than talk about the technical aspects of a car in a dry way, he has used humour and entertainment as a way to make cars appealing.

Della is a somewhat superficial step in the right direction. Lets just hope Dell listen to their customers and radically overhaul Della the concept before it becomes yet another of Dell’s six-month flirtations.

Women’s contributions to the development of technology are often forgotten or written out of history. It is all too easy to forget that women had a significant impact on the development of technologies we use today.

The Ada Lovelace Day is celebrated today by more than 1,600 bloggers who have signed up to blog about her today. We at LadyGeek want to support this initiative and are proud to raise awareness for this exceptional woman.

 

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) is rightly acclaimed to be one of the first  computer programmers. She wrote programmes for a machine  -  an early mechanical general-purpose computer - envisioned by Charles Babbage. Ada Lovelace was one of the visionaries who anticipated the power that computers can bring that go beyond number-crunching.

Ada Lovelace can be seen as a role model for women in technology and some of today’s role models are mentioned in this article in Computer Weekly.

 

 

 

Belinda mentioned in one of her recent posts that the consumer tech industry is now at a stage the car industry inhabited many years ago. Many car manufacturers have indeed started to take women as consumers seriously. For a long time, most cars are implicitly or explicitly designed for men and by men.

At London Business School, I have conducted some research with Volvo. A group of women at Volvo thought it was about time to show the world what a car designed by women may look like. This produced the first concept car designed by an all women team to provide the world with a practical example of how women would design a car. The car was presented in 2004, but there are some valuable lessons to learn here.

The task was to design a car that would not be futuristic but realistic in terms of the needs of women as well as men. Their research has indicated that in the premium car segment women are the hardest group to please and building a car that meets their expectations also means to build a car that will please men.

The team conducted an external and internal study to explore what women want in cars. The central idea about the project was to ask questions in a different way.

Research found for instance that women like an easy to park car not because they cannot park but because they park a car much more often during a day.

The team also challenged the idea that cars are designed with men in mind fitting their bodily features much better than those of women.

The concept car was very innovative because the team re-thought fundamentals of car design such as where the hand breaks or the washer fluid were situated or how the doors should open.

In addition a new concept of headrests was introduced allowing people with ponytails to sit comfortably and the layout of the car was a 2 by 2 version with the rear two seats being moved in slightly to allow the driver to see the rear passengers.

The team wanted to create a car that felt more like a living room and decided to include having movable cushions and different fabrics for the upholstery of seats.

Although it was never intended to be built, the concept car provided a lot of thought provoking ideas which influenced the design of other cars. Tasking women’s perspectives into consideration challenged how things had always been done. The result was a concept car that was built by women for everyone. 

In most Western countries studying computing has long been seen as a male endeavor. However this is not the case across the world. Vivian Lagesen’s research in fact shows that in Malaysia computer science is populated by women. In her summary report for Women-nomics, she stresses that in Malaysia computing is not seen as masculine but instead a good employment for women. In fact, faculty in computing degrees is often female. There are perceived to be plenty of jobs in computing and the office environment of IT jobs is seen as safe.  Vivian’s research shows how flexible the social construction of computing can be. 

 

 

The New York Times reported this week that the number of women studying computer sciences has fallen. 28% of all undergraduate degrees in computer science went to women in 2001. However by 2004-5 women only gained 22% of the degrees. This number is even lower at elite institutions like the MIT where only 12% of the degrees go to women. And according to this article, many computer science departments now report that women make up 10% of the newest entrants. This is in stark contrast to 25 years ago when – as the author claims – women made up up to 50% of computing classes.

Interestingly enough the article quotes figures stating the number of women in science and engineering has increased to 51% in 2004-5 up from 39% in 1984-85. Why is it that the numbers of women in science and engineering are rising while those in computing are not?

I found this very surprising because computing has changed significantly in recent years. Particularly the advent of Web 2.0 seems to attract more women to the internet in general and to working on Web 2.0 technologies in particular. The Fast Company magazine was celebrating women in Web 2.0 just this week.

 

However Web 2.0 might have little to do with what computer science is all about. The number of female web designers is sizeable but web design is by most tech specialists not seen as real programming and – as the article points out – it pays much less than software engineering.

 

Reasons for the lack of women in computing have been discussed widely. It includes that computers are seen as toys for boys, the constant questioning of women’s ability to engage with technology and the geeky and nerdy image of computing – to name but few. With more women using technology to get things done and technology becoming more intuitive and humane, one could have thought that the image of computing is changing.

 

Maybe women are voting with their feet against the way computing is portrayed and taught and instead chose to engage with technology on their own terms. Like with technology design, women might want different computing courses or a different marketing of computer courses. It might be time to explore why computing was a more interesting choice for women 25 years ago than it is today despite of the fact that computing is now omnipresent.

 

 

 

Is her cleavage the ultimate signifier of a Lady Geek? Last Thursday I attended a Girl Geek Dinner and this was the question that led to a huge debate among the 100 plus women who work mainly in the area of technology.

 

Julie Lerman talked about her own journey as a woman in technology. She mentioned how her girlie interests were slowly relinquished to become one of the boys. She wanted to fit into the tech community and therefore she did not want to stand out as a woman. Over time she discovered how she can be a woman and a technical specialist and what combining these two identities means.

 

However she asked if some women in technology go in fact too far. Julie talked about how one female technologist used an image as her speaker photo for conferences which revealed her cleavage (the head of the woman was cropped to protect her identity). Julie commented that this sexualised image might go a bit too far. I somewhat shared her discomfort with it.

 

Some women in the room found this photo rather liberating. One woman said that men should get used to the fact that women have breasts. Others said that the cleavage shot is actually too sexualising and men would see the woman merely as a sex object rather than a serious speaker with a message. One woman replied that this might just be a clever way of advertising herself. But would that be an appropriate tactic for drawing attention to your work?

The issue came quickly to authenticity and being yourself. One woman said that the female technologist might just want to be herself. For her, this might mean to show her femininity through her cleavage. Is showing cleavage then the latest Lady Geek chic?

 

The discussion resembled debates around feminism and postfeminism. While feminists would stress that showing cleavage is demeaning to women because it objectifies them, postfeminists would say that it is actually liberating for women to show their cleavage and also – in a further step – to control men through it. We can think here about the Wonderbra ‘Hello Boys’ adverts with Eva Herzigova: many women found them empowering whilst others saw them as demeaning for women.

 

What would that mean for women working in technology and selling technology to women? Should technology being sold using women and their cleavages? This would be very similar to how technology actually used to be advertised. And these adverts speak mainly to men. Based on that, I would assume that only a fringe group of women would think that cleavage is geek chic.

 

There is also a professional dimension to all this: Women in the workplace in general have to navigate a narrow path of acceptable behaviour, and from my experiences, using too much of a cleavage is doing nothing for your professional image. It will position you mainly as an object of male desire rather than as a professional. That does not mean hiding your femininity but finding a way to emanate professional femininity.