Just recently, I’ve been thinking about the women’s market on the Web. I had been fortunate enough to meet a number of women entrepreneurs and as I saw what they were working on, it got me thinking about women’s products and services on the Net.
When I thought of women focused Internet products, all I could see were sites dedicated to men, fashion, shopping, and baby care. Why is that? These may be the most prominent of all topics that women *seem* to focus on, but they also seem very shallow and very stereotypical. Surely women must be interested in other things too?
I suppose entire industries have been built around these categories, and thus maybe they are a faster path to profits as product manufacturers want to advertise around those content areas. You talk about fashion and gain a following, and voila! you’ve got fashion advertisers wanting to buy ads on your site. Seems pretty easy to me.
So do women think about anything else but the “big 4”? I would think that women weren’t so shallow as to think about nothing but the “big 4” and there must be opportunity for women focused products and services beyond these topics. I think the problem is two-fold.
First, I don’t think people are thinking broad enough about women’s products and services.
As soon as you try to target women for your site, you immediately think about the stereotypical things that women think about all day. I think this is missing the boat. You can definitely focus on the “big 4” and there is much improvement that can happen in those categories. But I think there must be more content areas than these. Are women interested in NOTHING else but men, fashion, shopping, and baby care? COME ON. Doesn’t it sound ridiculous just to read a statement like that?
I also think there is much that could be done beyond content.
For example, what if you put a feminine spin on email? Is there some optimization in the way women communicate that hasn’t been capitalized on yet? This can be in functionality, the GUI, visual design (and I’m not talking about making it pink), and other subtle or visible modifications. My belief is that this is hugely unexplored, and that sometimes taking the functionality and tweaking it slightly, can have a huge effect on the users. If this is done correctly, it is possible that women will all of a sudden find your product a little more attractive, a little more fun, a little more everything and may not even be able to articulate it.
Look at the difference between Windows and Mac OS. At a gross level, you could say that they were both icon-driven windowing systems with menus and mostly controlled by mouse. But once you start playing with either, you’ll find it’s the subtle differences that make the Mac OS so much better than any Microsoft product.
Second, I think the lack of women entrepreneurs on the Net, both in management and in engineering hampers the development and exploration of women’s products and services.
If you look at most development teams, they are primarily male. Today’s universities are just not turning out nowhere near as many women engineers as there are male engineers. So what happens. Whole product teams are working on products that subtly become more male oriented because that’s where their natural sensitivies lie. They’re men, so they design things that resonate with themselves.
So you see the problem I have with women’s products today. Women should be designing women’s products, not men. And while many women’s product teams are led by women, I still don’t think there are enough women on the team to really make the differences seen and felt. Products are simply rehashed men’s products – I would even argue that today’s gender neutral products are inherently men focused simply because they are designed by teams that are largely composed of men. That doesn’t mean that women can’t use them; but it does mean that the subtle optimizations that could occur, aren’t.
So let’s ask ourselves: what if a gender neutral Web product today were designed and engineered solely by a team of women? Would it come out the same or different?