En-gendering the next great Web Retail revolution?

At the O'Reilly Web Expo in Berlin, there was an interesting session about women on the 'Net chaired by Suw Charman Andersen (Adam Tinworth covered it here). In the session Janet Parkinson showed some of the research she has been doing on the subject over the last few months. I'm familiar with some of this work as I've been collaborating with Janet on this - another useful byproduct of Lloyd Davis' (who was also on this session) Tuttle Club initiative.. These are Janet's notes:

Women represent a good half of the number of users of the web and even more on social networks.

They make over 80% of all real world consumer purchases and according to a recent survey conducted by Mastercard run across 7 countries recently, women now shop more online than men – though they spend less. Some of the reasons for this being security issues and bad website design.

As Justin Drummond notes in Brandrepublic ‘It is recognised that women, more so than men in the US and UK, are culturally encouraged to be more inclined to discuss their purchases with friends, recommending items they are pleased with and asking for advice from peers in decision-making; “they utilize the powerful marketing tool: word of mouth” (Source: www.alternet.org). This goes hand in hand with an expectance of openness to information about goods they wish to purchase, and makes them harder customers than men in many ways’.

The Web 1.0 online hard sell “Point-Click-Purchase” approach doesn’t always work, and given the choice women often prefer to browse, dig deep and get to understand our choices. Perhaps this is the reason for the success of sites like Etsy http://www.etsy.com/ which offer more of a shopping experience – with social networking at its core.

Social media is becoming more of an integral part of websites – and, as Business Week reports the use of social media is particularly attractive to women.

Web design and online marketing companies which are areas generally dominated by men are having to adapt to social marketing. Having more women involved with their eye for what women want can only be a good thing.

Moving on to advertising, Martha Barletta in her book ‘Marketing to Women’ comments that 91% of women say ‘advertisers don’t understand us’,and IPC Media reveals that within the ever growing market of women over 35, 36% feel that advertising aimed at them is patronising.

I must admit that I’m getting particularly fed up with the marketers and product designers assuming that the way to get me to buy some piece of tech is to make it in pink!

But there are a few glimmerings of hope with Dove, M&S and a few others having launched highly successful campaigns aimed at the older woman.

But my favourite to date has to be Harley Davidson which has added a section on its website dedicated to women motorcyclists. Women now buy 12% of all Harleys sold, and in an article in the New York Times, Jerry G. Wilke, Harley-Davidon’s vice president for customer relationships and product planning comments: “I think 12 percent is just the beginning…. The opportunities to cater to women are endless, and we will continue to do more.”

The video games industry is an area worth watching too with 40% of all gamers being women – though they represent just 12% of the industry.

This is still just the beginning though, and the money is starting to appear.
Advertising on, and traffic to, women-specific sites has increased rapidly and the big boys are starting to get in on the act:

Comcast recently bought the shopping and entertainment site DailyCandy for $125 million;
Peacock Equity and Venrock invested $5 million in BlogHer;
Yahoo created Shine http://shine.yahoo.com/ .

So where do we go from here? With the majority of internet shopping being done by women, and women also being the majority users of socical networks it’s odd that only 16% of women are involved in designing and building websites. And although roughly half of staff in advertising are women, men still monopolise the all important creative director roles which is odd considering that they are trying to influence women.

I would have thought that with these serious facts and figures behind us, now would be the right time for women to really start to make their mark.

In short, Janet's research indicates there is a big arbitrage opportunity in the Webspace - given that women are such big users, it would seem intuitive that if more women were involved in the supply side (as they are in many Brick World retail businesses) then the experience would be better - and more interestingly, "men only" UI/UE designers probably (i) wouldn't be able to build these attractive services and (ii) wouldn't be able to "grok" why women built ones worked better, giving those a competitive advantage for longer.

That this is not immediately obvious (I thought it was compelling, you see) was brought out for me at Web Expo - just before this session, I came into the speakers' lounge to see Janet in discussion with a very sceptical Ben Hammersley. I listened in for a bit, but as best I can gauge it, his argument consisted of the view that he didn't believe it, so it couldn't therefore be true (shades of Pythonesque "No it Isn't" reasoning I thought). For what its worth, the data re gender "convention" and "reality" is similar to that with respect to age. Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy made a similar point a few months ago when he showed that advertisers still target young people today, even though all the money is with the baby boomers who were young in the 1960's (where the "youth" practice started). Sutherland pointed out that this occurs because today the Ad world is full of young people who don't understand (and don't want to understand) old people, despite the underlying economic shift.

If a similar issue exists with Gender, then the arbitrage is probably even bigger than Janet imagines!