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.

This week I was lucky enough collect an award at Red Magazine’s Hot Women Awards 2011 which celebrates successful women in industry. What made the experience all the more rewarding was being able to spend some time with a group of women at the top of their fields. We even got to shake hands with Sam Cam.

I was particularly pleased to chat to two women who are leading the charge for female technology innovators everywhere: Cary Marsh, who founded MyDeo, and Kate Burns, the outgoing Senior Vice-President of AOL Europe and former head of Google UK. Both are smart, impressive women who have trail-blazed their way to the very top of the tech industry and should serve as inspiration to all aspiring Lady Geeks out there.

Yet while their progress is heartening, it only puts into perspective the uphill struggle women face in an industry where only 18% of employees are female (e-skills uk). The passing of Steve Jobs last month made me wonder how long it will be before a woman reaches the same exulted status. Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, Page and Brin, Bezos: all the technology giants of recent years are men.

Of course questions need to be asked as to what the industry needs to address the imbalance, and first instinct is to assume that, like many things, it’s merely too used to being one big boys club. But I believe the problem goes deeper than that.

These days just as many women as men count themselves as tech users (see my previous blogs) and teenage girls and teenage boys have almost identical internet usage statistics. Yet when it comes to careers boys are five times more likely to go into technology (ComputerWorld). Why is this? At what point are we losing our girl geeks to other industries?

The problem is largely one of perception. Girls tend to want careers that lean towards what they deem as ‘creative’ – advertising, PR and publishing all remain popular choices. Why should they take an interest it tech when all that’s on offer for a teenager is a choice between an Information Technology class (spreadsheets, databases, powerpoints, zzzzzsorry what were you saying?) – and a games console at home (made by boys, played by boys). It’s seen as nerdy, dull and – dare I say it – male.

Frustratingly those of us in the tech world know that it can be one of the most creative places a person can work. Instead of boring them to death we should be introducing our young women to exciting cutting edge skills like coding, software development and games design at an early age and showing them that a career in technology is more about creating and building than it is about number crunching. Only then will we start to see a much needed influx of bright young women in the industry.

Until there is a real overhaul of the relationship between tech and women from childhood on up then the Carys and Kates of this world will remain an endangered species. There is a huge opportunity to make sure our daughters and young girls are creators and leaders of technology as well as consumers.

It’s a great time to be a woman.

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 (image in post 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

“Would you like some pepper?” asks the waiter. I stare at him. All of my concentration, every bit of will power I have ever possessed, is going into not shouting “TWIST IT!” in his face. I have not lost my mind, I promise.



Let me explain myself: I arrive very early for meeting a friend. The suggested pub is shut and it’s raining outside so I find a restaurant nearby, get a table and order a drink. I appear to have found a nice restaurant. There are tablecloths and olives. People are celebrating things. I am going to eat food I have trouble pronouncing. A nice restaurant.

I have 30 minutes until my friend arrives. I get out my iPhone and flick through some games. I’m looking for something discrete, something befitting of the ambiance, something that might look like I’m checking my emails when the waiter comes back. Bop It! That seems about right.

I don’t whip out the much loved plastic audio toy and pass it round my fellow diners, clapping as they PULL IT!, FLICK IT!, and BOP IT!. That would be ridiculous. I begin to play a solo round of the game as designed for iPhone and iPod Touch.

The game follows the same principle as its parent game. A demanding American man shouts at you to complete actions using the onscreen icons, instructing you at ever increasing speeds while some delightfully annoying music plays in the background.

You can play the game in a variety of modes: As a solo player you can play in classic mode, with the three original bop, twist and pull icons, basic mode with one icon at a time, extreme mode with up to six icons on the screen at one time, or play against the clock in blitz mode.

If you do feel the need to get the whole restaurant involved and pass the game around in multi player with basic, extreme and blitz modes, or you can play head to head with one other player. I am tempted to ask the waiter.

During the game you are able to unlock trophies and, if you feel the need to boast about your Bop It! prowess, you can share your scores on Facebook.

There are also a variety of settings that are very important to consider when playing in public. You can receive the commands through speech (shouting), sound effects or text, decide if you want to switch banter on or off (request setting transferal to the group celebrating – their banter is getting dangerous), and, most importantly, the one setting I failed to pay proper attention to – ‘Shout It’.

One of the icons that appears is a microphone and you are requested to SHOUT IT!. That can either be done by tapping the microphone (Shout It off) or shouting YEAH! at the screen (Shout It on). As I sit in the nice restaurant by myself a microphone appears and I have Shout It on. Oh well, at least I unlocked the ‘Yeah! Shout’ trophy.

The mobile version of Bop It! is exactly as enjoyable, annoying and frustrating as the original. It’s easy to play and the graphics are cartoony and colourful. I guess the most important information I can pass on is this: No matter how much you like Bop It!, there is a time and a place; and when the waiter approaches with a giant pepper grinder, the response should never be “TWIST IT!”.

You can download Bop IT here.

Ann Scantlebury is the accomplished actress and co-presenter of the award winning game show One Life Left.   Ann is a regular contributor to Lady Geek.

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.