It seems to be increasingly important for businesses to understand how people live their lives. I recently came across this video podcast featuring Karsten Jonsen. He talked eloquently about how social change is relevant for management. He referred to the blurring of the private and public sphere through new information communication technologies as an example. This blurring of boundaries was also the topic of a seminar on Humanizing Work hosted by the Lehman Brother Centre for Women in Business. The seminar was convened by Professor Judy Wajcman who invited Professor Richard Sennett and Professor Lord Anthony Giddens to give keynote speeches.

Both of are sociologists and Stefan Stern, columnist at the FT, wrote after the event that managers can learn a great deal from sociologists. Anthony Giddens talked about addiction. There is a clear technology angle to this because Giddens referred to that when people wake up at night, they are often so addicted to their BlackBerry that they check for new emails first before going to the toilet (Stefan Stern has written about this in his column too).

Email and the internet can become like a drug which Belinda has discussed. Dr Ivan Goldberg has coined the term Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) for this phenomenon and psychologists classify IAD as a mental illness. There is of course always the danger of creating the mental illness one speaks about. What is central however is that the knowledge of how people live their lives is important to create insight into what kind of products and services people might be interested in and also in what kind of work environment they want to be.

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.