New Book on Gender in Technology Work Published

Published on September 26, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

A new book looking at gender in technology professions has just been published by Palgrave.

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Performing Gender at Work develops a new understanding gender: that gender is not something one is but rather something one does. This means that we perform gender and are performed by gender. Drawing on detailed academic research in the IT industry, the book outlines three implications of performing gender for the workplace.

First, many skills that are needed for at work today have a gender dimension. Skills like listening and nurturing are said to be perfect for building teams, creating networks and fostering innovation and they are also seen as feminine. However as this book shows it is not women who profit from showing feminine skills: it is men who are valued for performing what is seen as atypical gender behaviour.

Second, telling your own career story is something that is increasingly important in the workplace. The book argues that there is a gender difference in how men and women perform their career stories. Women tend to tell their careers as if they were due to coincidence and luck, whereas men appear to be on a mission to success. Organisations tend to expect the latter in their hiring and promotion decisions.

Third, the book explores the sentiment that gender problems are solved today. We live in a time of ‘gender fatigue’ where we know of the importance of gender equality, but people lack the energy to talk about and address gender inequality. Because of this gender fatigue, we do not have the right language to address gender inequality leading a situation where gender inequality exists but cannot be talked about.

The book urges us to think about stereotypes and biases when we evaluate skills, to give validity to different career stories and to develop a language, which allows us to address gender inequality. The book illustrates vividly how gender is something that is performed in the workplace and which implications this has.

The Female Economy

Published on September 23, 2009 in Interesting and Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

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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.

The Masculinity of Marketing

Published on September 11, 2009 in Articles. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

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I have sat in numerous meetings where clients and agency people alike have spent hours talking about what the rational unique selling point (USP) is of a product.  Very rarely have any of the products I have sold had a truly unique feature or benefit.  And in technology, any unique feature is quickly copied and therefore unsustainable as a long term strategy.

Whats much more unique is the emotional features of selling a technology product.  How it feels to the user.  The retail environment in which it is presented.  The feeling it creates in others who see you with your gadget.  And ultimately the meaningful human interaction and creativity it brings.

So why then do we insist on spending hours debating the rational USP of a product?  Comparing every tiny feature of a product with like for like competitor comparisons?  And talking about one specific rational feature as if it is going to solve every problem you have ever had in your life?

I propose we are asking the wrong answers and therefore coming up with the wrong solutions.  Take my previous article about Nokia’s N97.  Imagine the engineers and the marketing team’s conversation.

“The n97 has so many USPs.  Its sure to be an i-phone killer.”

“For a start it has a 5 megapixel camera.  The i-Phone only has 2.”

“Not to mention the FM transmitter…”

“And the fold out keyboard.”

The list goes on.  Nokia got so hung up on rational USP’s; they forgot about how people use the phone and the feelings it creates in the heart not the head.  A great product is more then the sum of its features. The tragedy of most products is that despite the brilliance of their specification, these features are not how women engage with technology.

One woman told me last week;

I love my i-Phone.  It somehow manages to capture the human expression of technology; whether its flicking the screen like i would with paper or browsing through my photos.  It just feels more human that other tech gadgets”

Pretty Little Head talk about how most marketing focuses on the Achievement Impulse- a male strategy which delivers competitive claims framed through a product advantage (largely based on Baron-Cohen’s work).  Most advertising claims talk about how technology helps men succeed.   In advertising we use ‘male’ language- military language of targets, strategies, campaigns, deployment and so on.

With the missed financial opportunity being at 0.6billion according to Jupiter, as a consequence of failing to connect with women, technology brands need to build marketing programmes around a female mindset and agenda.

Forgetting about USP’s is a good place to start.

My World is Pink

Published on August 25, 2009 in Ads. 8 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

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.

Baby Geek

Published on August 16, 2009 in Electronics. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

If Microsoft can do it then I can go one better: My three year old son is reviewing the latest touch-screen laptop sent to me by HP: The HP Touchsmart TX2.  I had reservations about a touch smart screen as why would you need a touch screen on a laptop when you have a keyboard, but my son really loved it.  So did his favourite toy Serena…

The N97, the ultimate Symbian smartphone or Nokia’s big joke?

Published on August 11, 2009 in Electronics. 5 Comments

I have to admit that I was in a state of giddy anticipation when I got home to find that the courier had delivered a shiny new Nokia N97: It came in a under-stated black box which resembled a treat from a Regent Street boutique. It was a pleasure to unbox, as I appreciated the way it feels comfortable in my hands.

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The N97 is a radical new design, somewhere between a classic touch-screen like the iPhone and a keyboard-phone like the Blackberry. The whole device slides open with a very satisfying swing that just exudes quality engineering revealing an easy to use QUERTY thumb-pad and a joystick for people who do not enjoy using touch-screens. Other bloggers have complained about the angle of the slide: The screen is at approximately thirty degrees to the key-pad, and it’s impossible to push it flat. I never found that to be a problem because the shape of the phone when opened out makes it very easy to hold securely while typing and walking.

I agree with Susy Weaser when she says that the test of a good gadget is that you should not need to read the manual. It does not take me long to download the Facebook and Twitter application.

However, it takes me ages to find out how to change the basics: date and time, profiles, personalisation. I found the structure of the configuration application very confusing: It took half an hour to connect to one of the many WiFi access points in the house and even more time to download the Google Apps.

Nokia are pushing their “Ovi Store” as the one-stop shop for all applications, however I found that I couldn’t find the applications I wanted. The search did not seem to work at all.

In all I think I must have spent about twelve hours customising and tweaking the phone’s apps and settings before I had something which seemed vaguely right.

Speaking of customisations – the phone seemed to want to do it’s own thing: For example even though I set up my own Google Mail application and then the “Mail for Exchange” client (which can be used to connect to Google’s calendar and tasks) it still insisted on forcing me to set up Nokia’s own mail software each time I powered on the phone. Even after I relented and signed up for “Ovi Mail” it still wanted me to set up the mail service every time I switched the phone on, which happened rather a lot given the phone’s tendency to crash in the middle of whatever I happened to be doing.

And on the subject of reliability: The Symbian platform is known for it’s dependable full-featured phones. I’ve been using Nokia’s S60 phones for more than three years. Unfortunately somebody in Nokia’s testing department must have been on holiday when they were preparing this for release: Even after upgrading all the software to the latest version this phone crashed two or three times per day. It usually happened at the least appropriate time, such as when I was talking on the phone.

The most annoying bug was a quirk on the key-lock: If left un-used for a minute the device automatically locks it’s keyboard to prevent accidental dialling. You are supposed to be able to unlock it by simply flicking the keylock switch on the side, however from time to time it would decide to ignore this. Other than removing the battery to hard-reset the phone I could find no way to get back in control of the device. Given that this happened two or three times a week I’m astonished that Nokia’s quality-control people did not spot this problem.

Finally, my biggest gripe is the screen itself: It looks just like any other mobile phone touch-screen however unless you push it quite hard nothing happens. I found it required quite a bit of pressure to make it work, and then given the force you have to use it becomes very imprecise so I often found myself pressing the wrong button by mistake. The N97’s touch-screen is really quite clumsy. It’s got no multi-touch and Nokia cheekily bundle a little stylus with the phone – suggesting that Nokia are well aware that this touch-screen is not intended for touching.

The iPhone has already set the standard for a touch-screen.  Everybody knows how well the iPhone works – you can touch it with one or two fingers. You can manipulate images on screen with easy to learn gestures. You do not need a stylus or any special accessory to use it. Like most modern touch-screens the iPhone, HTC Magic, Palm Pre and pretty much everybody else uses a “capacitive” screen which can sense the presence of your fingertips without the need to push. The N97 uses an older generation of screen known as “Resistive” – it’s the same kind of screen that you find on a Nintendo DS. This cheaper sort of screen relies on actual pressure in order to register input.

Please do not mistake me for an Apple fan, it’s just that I recognise that they got it right whereas Nokia got it wrong. And that’s a real shame because the screen was supposed to be the biggest selling point of this new machine. I cannot think why Nokia decided to go 2nd best for the phone’s main feature.

The N97 is packed with features, cool things like a built in FM transmitter, the best mobile-camera on the market, and an email application that easily rival’s Blackberry’s flagship. On paper this looks like the best phone ever made however silly design mistakes frequent annoying bugs makes me reluctant to recommend this product. Other than the screen (which a great many people will not find a problem), all of the phone’s problems are to do with it’s software so in theory Nokia could release an update which corrects all of the phone’s faults. Rumor has it that they will be releasing a refreshed version of the N97 with an improved screen (but without the joypad) – I hope that Nokia can pull it off second time around.

Finally, it’s been said that the N97 is one of the most eccentric products that Nokia have ever made: The week before I had to give it back they sent me an even more bizarre product to review. It’s supposed to be an “anti-theft” device for the N97. You clip your state of the art Nokia into what looks like an early 1980’s phone and then run an application which is intended to make the N97’s screen look exactly like an old-fashion phone keypad.

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The end result is that your N97 is made to look like something that Cybill Shepherd in Moonlighting might have used.  My kids love it.  It shows that even if they did not get the N97 completely right, Nokia has a sense of humour.

I am a PC and I am 4 and a half

Published on August 10, 2009 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

I am loving the evolution of the I am a PC campaign.  Its warm, personal and positions Microsoft as a champion of humanity rather than a cold, distant high functional technology brand which mainly appeals to men. Women use technology as a means to creativity and to provide meaningful human interaction in their life.

One of the ads features a 4 and a half year old Kylie (too cute for words) who uses Windows Live Photo Gallery to send a picture of her fish to her parents.  The strategy is simple: technology so simple that a 4 and a half year old could do it.  Another features a small boy has a large construction ranged all around the kitchen, and demonstrates taking lots of pictures of different parts of it, transferring those from the camera to a laptop, and then stitching them all together to make one.

Its a thankful departure from Microsoft’s unsuccessful retort to the Apple ads which was the wrong strategy for a myriad of reasons I have discussed before.  This is about what Microsoft stands for and gives them a narrative that goes beyond their product.

Its not about the piece of kit.  Its about how you use technology to enhance your home.  Its not about the spec.  Its about what that spec enables you to do.  Its not about the photo.  But the memory and signal you are sending to those who you send it to.

It starts to take Microsoft from being part of ‘my office life’  to being at the ‘centre of my home. ‘   Not a bad place to start.

Faux Nostalgia

Published on August 6, 2009 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment Tags: , .

Everyone will have noticed that nostalgia is enjoying something of a revival these days. It is, of course, connected to the recession and a need to feel reassured and cosy when things are a bit stressful out there. But it is also driven by many other underlying and longer-term consumer desires – a connection with national brands, an appreciation of heritage, a tendancy to view the past with rose-tinted spectacles.

But it doesn’t necessarily need to stop there. Which is why I think the ‘faux’ element is potentially more interesting to forward thinking companies and those of us with an appreciation of technology and more futuristic innovation.

Let me explain…

We have an appetite for the past – but one, we would argue, that never really existed; so housewife afternoons of baking and tea parties for some but without quite so much cleaning and male-dominated territory. Like I say, while we may yearn for the bygone, we’re keen for the new too.

It’ll keep on working because it can be cheap innovation. Because sometimes its quirky and fun. Because its hugely malleable – it can have a foreign feel, more than a hint of sarcasm and sometimes it provides just simpler, cleaner branding (think apple). Currently selling in traditional nostalgia format;

-Cadburys – just relaunched crème egg in a bar. Vile. But it is selling like there’s no tomorrow. Cadburys is currently kicking most other chocolate manufacturers off the shelves.

-Bold – new washing powder, old packaging – its all rainbows and 70s.

-Cath Kidson – the modern housewife. Not for everyone but it just keeps getting bigger.

-Good Housekeeping (magazines and books) – more of the same – who’d have thought so many modern guides to keeping home would invade our shelves.

But what I’m most taken with is the future’s view of nostalgia and Selfridges clever use of their past to market the future. They’re currently celebrating their 100 year anniversary with an A-Z of products to expect by 2109. Clearly a lot of it is clean, futuristic fun, like the animal translator, designed to help you understand your pets in up to 12 different languages, but it has created an amazing gallery of fun technology ideas that are bound to catch the fun window shopping female’s attention.

My bet – there’ll be a few more copies of faux nostalgia to come and a smart mobile or technology player will almost certainly make good use of this sometime soon.

Why don’t women want careers in IT?

Published on August 5, 2009 in Women In IT. 0 Comments Tags: .
I’ve spoken to several people at universities and most people admit that they don’t really know what drives women into (or away from) IT careers. There are a number of assumptions that form the basis of recruitment drives, but it seems that very little research has been conducted amongst female IT professionals to learn what they find genuinely rewarding about their work.

Here are a number of assumptions that I have encountered so far:

  1. Young women don’t think IT careers are cool, and still imagine the industry to be populated with uncool ‘geeks’ and ‘nerds’.
  2. High schools struggle to present up to date, interesting IT classes and fail to engage the interest of young women.
  3. Women want creativity and meaningful human interaction in their work, and they don’t feel that IT careers provide either.
  4. Women enjoy using gadgets (eg mobile phones) but are not interested in the technology behind them.

These seem fairly reasonable, and widely held theories, but while so few people in education really know what women find rewarding or off-putting about IT careers, and while they base their recruitment drives on assumption it is no surprise there are so few ladies entering IT careers.

Smart girls don’t choose IT

Published on August 5, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: .

On June 22nd I spoke with Anna Liu, Associate Professor at UNSW. Anna’s career in IT spans 15 years. I will be posting more from my conversation with Anna, so watch this space.

When asked how she first became interested in IT Anna says that it was in the third grade when she chose to go to a Computer Summer Camp. She also sites an earlier episode, when her father identified her interest in mathematics on a first-grade enrolment form. Did she really stand out as a mathematician so early on or did she respond to proactively live up to her father’s expectations? She doesn’t know for certain, but it seems that she certainly had her parents’ encouragement from an early age.

“But what,” I asked, “about the coolness factor? Were you not worried about what your peers would think?”
Anna laughs “Well I think I was already classed as one of the geeks!”

We chuckle; neither of us were trend setters at school. But does Anna still see the coolness factor as an issue for female high school students with the potential to enter IT studies and careers? Is there still a perception that IT is uncool and does that really prevent women from pursuing IT studies?

“I think that perception has changed a lot” she says, “IT is the cool thing right now, and I can see women getting into it, particularly the social networking aspect.”

We decide that coolness is not so much the issue at the moment, but Anna raises another point:

“We don’t see enough female participation in the IT industry because we are failing to attract the hardworking female with good HSCs…”

“Generally speaking, girls who get good marks and who enjoy science and maths go straight into medicine. Those who enjoy the communications and English language aspects go straight into law. I don’t know if it’s a matter of dollars or that we haven’t publicised and marketed top IT executives.”

It seems a valid point; most of us know lady doctors and lawyers, and I dare say could name a few fictionalised TV characters in those professions too. But there are fewer recognisable people, in real life or TV who demonstrate the success and enjoyment that women can achieve in technical roles.

So how can we encourage women in technical roles to come forward and share their experiences?