Last week I had the pleasure to be invited by ?What If!, an innovation company, to join a good number of the Top 50 Women in Mobile Content. Jessica Sandin, who heads up mobile at ?What If! was named as one of the top 50 women in mobile content and to celebrate their success ?What If! invited them to the ‘Old Laundry’, one of their offices.

 

Offices sounds way too stuffy for ?What If!. It feels more like a mix between a living room and a playground. I wrote a case study about ?What If! a while ago and was impressed with how they generate innovation. Much of how they work resonated a lot with how I work with ethnographic methods in an academic context.  The difference is that we do not bring products and services to market but write academic articles.

 

The evening started with drinks and we then gathered around in a circle of sofas. We were not allowed to rest a long time because we had to complete a task: learn as much as possible about two women in the room. This was great fun.  We then heard more about what ?What If! does and Jessica started a discussion on what it means to be a woman in mobile content. The discussion resembled many of those ‘women in a male dominated environment’ discussions I witnessed before. At first there was some hesitation as to whether it is different for men and women in mobile content followed by a string of interesting stories which showed that being a woman does matter.

 

After an insightful discussion, we continued the evening with delicious canapés and fascinating conversations. All in all a fantastic evening to celebrate great achievements!

 

 

 

I love taking my iPod to the gym because it gives me the freedom to listen to music that reflects my exercise mood. However when using the iPod on the cross trainer, one of my favourite cardiovascular machines, I often manage to almost strangle myself. I wear my iPod with an armband around my upper arm (the earphone cables are dangling around and can get caught easily in the cross trainer). The armband looks a bit like an oversized sticking plaster but is overall quite stylish and does the job – as long as I don’t do anything where I need the biceps. The cable issue remains annoying and I developed a rather complicated system of keeping the cable out of my way.

However I then came across a much nicer solution: the Arriva headphones. You basically wear the MP3 player at the back of your head and have small cables leading into your ears. This does solve the cable problem. The downside: it is only available for the iPod shuffle and not for other iPods. Other iPods might be too big to wear them at the back of the head. It might also be difficult to change tracks. But it is a nice idea. Apart from using these headphones for sports it might also come in handy when you don’t want other people to know that you are listening to music. Particularly if you have long hair. 

The Internet is according to an article in BusinessWeek going to go pink because women are apparently the hottest target market for social media.

The article’s author Auren Hoffman who is CEO of Rapleaf states that Web 2.0 is all about being social. This is supposedly more appealing to women. Rapleaf and Business Week surveyed 13.2 million people and found that more women than men are using social media.

The research found that young women are much more active on social networking sites but married men over 30 do not even seem to join social networking sites. Married women between 35 and 50, on the other hand, are the largest growth segment for social media – defying the stereotype that only young people are hooked to the Internet.

The study also claims that men’s behaviour in social media is more transactional, i.e. gathering information and making introductions, while women are more relationship oriented. This sounds like a very stereotypical view of men’s and women’s behaviour but Auren Hoffman foresees that women will increasingly be hired to engage with key audiences. The future target market for Web 2.0 applications are according to the article women.

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.

Ars Technica reported that Accenture recently surveyed internet users in the UK and the US by (just) phoning them to explore how they dealt with internet security issues. Some interesting country differences emerged. In the UK 70% remembered their passwords yet only 50% of the US population managed to do the same. US citizens were more likely to write down their passwords. And apparently there is a gender story too: women tended to write down passwords more often than men in both countries.

Another just-approach-them study conducted as part of the Information Security Awareness Week outside Liverpool Street Station in London tried to entice commuters to provide personal information in exchange for a chocolate bar. Overall only 21% were willing to give this information. However 45% of women and only 10% of men were willing to enter the chocolate-for-information deal.

The studies did not speculate on why this is the case. Is it that women are just more friendly and willing to help strangers when they approach them and are asked for their passwords? Might they just have too many things to juggle in their head already to remember all the passwords and therefore write them down? Difficult to tell. But remember to change your passwords from time to time and if a stranger asks you for information offering a chocolate bar, be vigilant!

On Wednesday I read an article in the Metro called ‘’. The article is based on a report produced by Gamesvision. This report claims that 23% of people aged between six and 55 play computer games and 41% of gamers are female. These are encouraging statistics.

The article argues that this is due to more women who join the labour force and program and develop games. The games have in turn become more realistic. This means that the busty Lara Croft went from a 36DD to a 36B. Well, she still fulfils the ideal of slender femininity and has still a perfect wais to hip ratio. However Lara Croft is now a bit more realistic than before.

This makes business sense for game producers. If they alienate half of their potential consumer market, it does not make sense to have stereotypical representations of women. Having more women programming games together with consumer demand might thus change the face of gaming or rather the representation of female characters.

A fascinating topic. The university of Warwick will host a conference on Women in Gaming from 10 to 12 September.