The Feminisation of the Web

This article in the WSJ crystallised some thoughts I've had recently - it was about male vs female styles in code writing, and the paragraph below struck a chord:

There’s a big need to fix testosterone-fueled code at Ingres because only about 20% of the engineers are women, McGrattan says. (Most of them are in jobs involving quality assurance or adapting the product to a new locale, she says, and not the “heavy lifting” of writing code.) She’s on a mission to get more women interested in computer-programming careers. But “it’s proving very challenging,” she says.

This is interesting because I recognise the issues, knowing many women in IT and having been at and run software companies, and I take my hat off to people like Sarah Blows and Co who are driving the issue with Girl Geek Dinners in the UK, and others doing it elsewhere. Also the number of good girl geek bloggers must help.

However, this is also the direct antithesis to what's happening on the user/customer side in social media. Women are now the majority of people on Facebook, and have high representations on such services as Second Life, Twitter, Bebo, MySpace etc. I have also noticed a lot of women are involved in the various "Social Media" style "geek" events such as Social Media Club. Web 2.0 has a much higher female composition at the user end, anyway. Women are also driving online retailing and the evolution of a number of online services, such as gaming.

Hence my thought that social media services have feminised the Web to a level not seen before.

Talking to (female) friends of mine about why this may be, I've had some interesting insights - among them:

- On Twitter, having pictures of people makes searching very easy compared to text based systems such as email
- What pictures people choose to put on their icons and profiles is revealing
- Ditto the data they put up on profiles
- On Plurk, the timeline is more intuitive than previous linear systems
- Its very useful to see who someone is friends with that you also know - allows you to "place" them better
- Video allows a much higher bandwidth conversation (conversely, more worried about appearance when seen)

The impression I get is that Social Media allows far more context about a person to be seen very rapidly, which is clearly very attractive to women. (By and Large) women are not turned on so much by the technology per se, but how you use it. Most social media is used for communicating (the killer app for women and men as well) and is easier for womn to use than previous stuff. One can theorise why this all is, but regardless of the theory, its a fact.

Also, I've been chatting to a number of smart women about how the web may evolve to provide women with services tailored more to them (given that they control more household spend than men), and the differences in insight and nuance are quite striking, and when taken together signal big changes in how you may define what the service does, its functionality, user interfaces, service design etc.

And thus, one would think, that successful companies in this new space may find it very useful to have women embedded at all level in the process of conceptualisation, design, development etc - it must save money and increase the chance of the service succeeding.

So getting that number up from 20% would be a very good idea, shirley?

(Update - this article on CNet puts a window on another issue - women in geekwold don't always help themselves here.....)