Sorry, Young Man, You're Not the Most Important Demographic in Tech

Despite companies' hamfisted, male-focused marketing efforts, women are the dominant users of a wide variety of new technologies.

If you're a man between the ages of 18 and 35, you used to be tech industry's most coveted prize. You were the one who decided what products failed and what products succeeded. That's why companies like Asus tweet ridiculous, sexist stuff. That's one reason why less than 10 percent of venture capital-backed companies have female founders and there is a massive gender gap in tech. The technology industry's focus on men is reflexive and all too intuitive to the men who run the companies. And it's built on a plain wrong reading of the reality of the market.

I hate to tell you/us, but we're not as important as we thought. The body of evidence amassed by Intel researcher Genevieve Bell indisputably shows that men's role in technology adoption continues to be overstated. Here's a summary she gave of her work in a "Big Ideas" talk last month at Australia's Radio National:

Sit with this for a minute. Let me break out the categories where women are leading tech adoption:

Also, because women still are the primary caretakers of children in many places, guess who controls which gadgets the young male and female members of the family get to purchase or even use? More from Bell:

All this to say: there are clear business reasons for technology companies to focus their efforts on women. But few do. In fact, I'd contend that women are using these technologies despite the advertising and ethos of many tech and Internet companies.

Even advertisements that nominally target both genders sometimes do so in ways that are subtly sexist. Take this analysis by Emma Nicoletti of Apple's ads introducing Facetime, which featured a series of four vignettes.

"Two are a man reassuring a woman regarding her looks, one is about a woman procreating, and one doesn't have a woman in it at all," Nicoletti wrote. "Was the assumption that we, the female iPhone consumers, would think 'well would you look at that. If I buy an iPhone, my boyfriend/husband/whoever will be there for me when I need him! And maybe even tell me my hair looks cute!'? If so, did they think that that would be enough? It's not, Apple."

But let's be fair here: Apple's done better than most. Their ads rarely make gender-specific appeals and the iPhone audience is now admirably balanced, appealing nearly equally to men and women. Nintendo, too, has had great success with products that men and women both alike, effectively doubling their addressable market. It's the great mass of other tech companies that seem to cater almost exclusively to a marketer's fantasy of a young man's interests: machines, scantily clad ladies, etc. At this week's E3 conference or January's Consumer Electronics Show, there really are still "booth babes" who are paid to hang around in revealing clothing chatting up the male nerds.

How can an industry get its market so wrong?

One huge reason is the relative lack of women at major venture capital firms, startups, electronics makers, and Internet companies. The other huge reason is the historical erasure of women's roles in the history of technology, as Xeni Jardin pointed out in response to a New York Times article that overemphasized the role men have played in the creation of the Internet. When you look around, it *seems* as if technology is by and for dudes, but the reality is much more complicated than that.

But even if you are the biggest sexist in Menlo Park, even if you believe that only men create technology, even if you are real-life Jack Donaghy hell bent on profits alone, you'd still want to change your approach to women as technology consumers. Follow the money and follow the users: you'll find yourself in a female-dominated landscape.

Bell concludes: