rant, rant, mad women go home

Was pleased to see technokitten AKA Helen Keegan blogging that when it comes to the tech conference circuit women are invisible. I also tentatively griped about this with regards to a BBC media debate. (And appreciate Mike Butcher responded). I too didn’t want to be perceived as Keegan states, like a “bra-burning feminist” but this is all getting a little ridiculous based on the male to female ratio at non-speaking events in our respective industries.

But, hmm, what do you think of this? A site which names and shames tech conferences with “a ridiculously high percentage of male speakers” [More at this post by Dori Smith]

Really wanted to keep away from this one. It’s the age old argument that talking about it perpetuates it, then people start “pandering” to inferior candidates etc., but this was something I’d noticed all by my very self. I think it would be unfair to my peers and colleagues who astound me every day with the wonderful things they have to say, to avoid writing;

I think they are not getting the soap boxes they deserve.

The Blackberry Women and Technology Awards were last night and I wondered how I totally missed this tech event. I didn’t even spot a random Tweet about it this morning.

A quick scan of the official site revealed, disappointingly, that perhaps this wasn’t the techiest event of the year. The nominees and winners hadn’t even been posted 18 hours after the event began (an age in online news terms).

This got me thinking about the benefits of this type of brand association with an event. It’s not a bad idea at all. If you caught the Saatchi & Saatchi ‘Lady Geek’ research last year you’ll have seen there’s a huge missed opportunity to market technology to women (around £600m worth).

So I did a rudimentary Trendpedia search to see who might be “owning conversations” around women and technology. First off I scanned through a quick Google search to see if there were any stand out brands in this space. There weren’t so I just used:

• Blackberry: A product like the Pearl was squarely aimed at women. I also wondered how an event like this was giving them ownership of ”women and technology” conversations
• Philips: Last year I was lucky enough to work on their Aurea campaign which, via fashion partnerships with the likes of Lanvin and media spend in Vogue, should’ve brought them into the female tech consumer conversation
• Saatchi & Saatchi: With their research I wondered if the brand had gained a presence in these types of discussions. I also thought it would provide a realistic contrast against the other two brands.

The search terms I used were [brand] AND women AND technology.

The results:

As expected nothing major came up. Low number of results and of those mainly irrelevant data. (I double-checked on a couple of other tools as well)

Blackberry was sort of ahead of the others. I wonder whether the female Blackberry consumer developed organically (most of the conversations are personal anecdotal mentions) and Blackberry capitalised on it or whether it was something the brand had consciously driven. I’d suspect the former and although awards like the Women And Technology event show they are driving the association, the lack of conversational spike this past week suggests there may be a disconnect between aims and results.

Philips’ conversations were much more news driven with direct commentary on their “female approach” and the products aimed towards women.

Saatchi’s ‘Lady Geek’ research still gets intermittent mentions in women and tech conversation. They weren’t actually that far behind these two big players in the space when you think about it. I wondered if they wanted an ongoing association with this area or had mainly created the research as a PR activity.

I’d love to do a deep dive with the Attentio tracking tool and find out just who are the leading brands in conversations around women and technology, I bet it would throw up a few surprises and a few obvious opportunities. I’d also love to work with a brand who wants to use word-of-mouth marketing and social media to position their brand towards this neglected, but potentially lucrative, tech consumer.