Picture this – a man is speaking to a woman about a business proposal. She is nodding along, letting him know she is listening, but he assumes her nodding signals agreement. When they discuss the proposal at a meeting later on, and she disagrees with his ideas, he feels duped and angry. She is left confused.

What’s going on here? Why is there this disconnect? Lady Geek interviewed the very insightful Tammy Hughes of the Heim Group, “GenderSpeak” expert, to find out why men and women aren’t hearing each other.

Tammy shared with us the story of one woman who had made it to the top of her field – one of her secrets? She stopped nodding at men in the workplace, concerned she was sending the wrong signal. Will this break barriers? Will we reach gender equality if women merely stop nodding at men? Not likely, but if we take the time to understand these differences in communication styles, we will only benefit. Gender differences – whether they are nature or nurture – aren’t going away. Tammy added, “This isn’t about good or bad or right or wrong, but about difference. Valuing these differences will add commercial value to our organizations.”

Tammy also told us a very interesting anecdote. Whenever she speaks to corporate audiences, beforehand, she asks what the male to female ratio of her listeners is. More than half of the time she gets an answer that sounds something like the following. “There are 47 men and 3 women, but 2 of those women don’t count”.

We’ve probably all heard of a woman described this way – tomboy, manly, butch, bitchy – all meant to say that they aren’t feminine enough. Many women feel they must adapt to the masculine environment of so many organizations. She might be acting “manly”, but this could be a survival method in a world where, astonishingly, three times as many women would pick a male boss rather than a female boss (CareerBright).

The problem is that when a woman “acts like a man” as a coping strategy for climbing the career ladder in male-dominated companies, it blocks the path for other women. The glass ceiling remains intact. Instead, we should welcome gender diversity, showing just how much value it adds to a company. Research shows again and again that gender diversity outperforms homogeneous intelligence. (Why Gender Diversity Matters) Plus, we won’t need a Rosetta Stone for men and women to understand each other, just some gender speak.

Tammy Hughes is President of the Heim Group.

Written by Sarah Fink from @LadyGeekTV.

@BelindaParmar is the CEO and Founder of Lady Geek TV. Please join the Lady Geek campaign to end the stereotypes and cliches towards women in tech and Like us on www.facebook.com/LadyGeekTV.

Image by Joana Pereira.

The first app I remember seeing was shown to me by a guy friend of mine, and it was the Wobble app. In case you don’t have the pleasure of familiarity with this app, it allows you to add “boob jiggle” to a photo of any woman of your choice. And we wonder why our research with YouGov (Source: The App Economy YouGov/Lady Geek 2010) has show women with smartphones were nearly twice as likely as men to have never downloaded a SINGLE app.

Quite remarkable when the same piece of research showed that more women than men bought smartphones in the last 6 months.  So women are buying smartphones but are not buying apps for 2 main problems.  One like me, women perceive a lot of the apps are not relevant to their lives such as iFart, i Burp and so on.  The second is that there is just too much choice out there. Who needs 200,000 apps- most women want a small selection of apps that make a difference to their lives.

And that is exactly the ambition and purpose of the brilliant IdeasProject “Apps to Empower Women” Challenge run by Nokia. The competition asked for submissions of app ideas that would make a real, practical difference to women’s work, education and leisure. The top app chosen in the challenge will be developed by a team of women software developers.

Honours went to Mobile Women African Crafters by Atim Oton, Easy App for Elderly Women by JoJa Dhara and Trigger Free by Jenny Evgenia. Mobile Women African Crafters would be an app  that creates and increases sustainable income for local women crafters in Kano, Nigeria who stay at home and work. The idea is an online space for crafters to share and sell their crafts via Mobile phones. The Easy App for Elderly Women would help elderly women navigate their way through various social networking and communication tools to help them stay in contact with their friends and family. Trigger Free would allow survivors of sexual violence to identify media that can trigger post-traumatic stress. Allowing users to add media to a database, rate them and help other survivors enjoy trigger-free leisure.

The winner was Woman’s Personal Private Market Place by Rustam Sengupta. Often women, especially living in the rural areas of emerging markets do not have access to personal care products such as contraceptives, or the means to purchase them from traditional sellers. The app will have a catalogue of such products and allow the process to be as discrete and comfortable as possible. Now that is what I call a real app.

These ideas show the force for good in innovative technology like apps. Yes we can download apps to get the weather or play a game, but its amazing to see how apps are transforming how women gain access to everything from health services to banking, and employment opportunities to educational tools. The mWomen Programme is an important component of this, and addresses key barriers to women’s access to mobile phones. The appetite for empowering apps is a hunger to feed, and there are inspiring women making it happen.

Written by Sarah Fink from Lady Geek TV.

The judges for the Apps to Empower Women Challenge were Mitchell Baker, Abigail Disney, Libby Leffler, Elizabeth Varley, Angelique Mannella and Belinda Parmar.

Belinda Parmar is the founder of Lady Geek TV. Please join the Lady Geek campaign to end the stereotypes and cliches towards women in tech and Like us on Facebook

There are not many female CEOs of companies around. Although women are traditionally underrepresented in technology professions, there were a number of high profile CEOs in the US in recent years. We can think here of Carly Fiorina, formerly of HP, and Anne M. Mulcahy, of Xerox. Now Xerox has entered history books by appointing the first African American female CEO to lead a major US corporation: Ursula Burns. Interestingly enough she is also the first female CEO who succeeded another female CEO.

 

Burns had a long-term career at Xerox. Burns, who holds degrees from NYU and Columbia University, joined Xerox in 1980 first as a summer intern and then in product development and planning. In 2000, she was named senior vice president, Corporate Strategic Services and in 2007 she became president of Xerox.

Business Week suggests that part of reason that Xerox appointed two female CEOs in a row is Xerox’s commitment to diversity. 30% of Xerox’s executives are women and 22% are minorities. Xerox has a long tradition of affinity networks. Xerox also had a Executive Diversity Council early on. In addition there are leadership programmes that foster diversity and managers are evaluated in their performance reviews on their ability to recruit, retain and promote underrepresented groups. If they fall short of expectations their chances of promotion are diminished and they pay is negatively affected. This shows that diversity programmes do have an impact – even though it might take decades for them to unfold their power.  

 

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!

 

It does not relate that much to technology, but Alison Maitland has just published an excellent article based on my research in the FT. The research explores how female MBA students want to be one of the boys to fit into the masculine culture of the business school. Enjoy reading…

The Telegraph featured an article on 30 May 2008 entitled ‘Feminised gadgets: An eye for the ladylike’. The article claims that women become more and more interested in gadgets. Figures seem to support this. Sony Ericsson claims that women spend more money on gadgets than on shoes (£391 per year or £17 billion in total). Based on the article two-thirds of the Nintendo DS users are female.

The article assumes that feminised technology is something new in the West yet well established in Japan. DoCoMo asked women what they want in mobile phones and subsequently produced a hugely popular, small clamshell handset with an integrated camera. At that time few people understood the value of cameras in mobile phones but that has changed of course dramatically.

Women do seem to hold the key for many design innovations in the gadget market simply because they are often not asked what they want from technology. The article also quotes Ladygeek research saying that women do not want pink products but useful, easy to use products. They want phones that are also fashion accessories and beautifully designed.

The classic example is Jonathan Ive’s iMac design which showed that computers did not have to be beige or grey boring boxes but can be design features. My first generation iBook does indeed look stunning in my room and is regularly admired by visitors.

What appeals to women often does appeal to men too. The article claims that indeed ‘gender barriers are becoming blurred’ suggesting that men and women both want beautifully designed, easy to use technology. Rather than becoming feminised it appears that technology is finally being made fit for humans rather than just a certain group of technology savvy and nerdy men.

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!