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The Rise of the Mompreneurs

A recent article in Business Week The Rise of the Mompreneurs (free registration required), outlines the ways in which eBay has made it possible for many high-powered women to create businesses for themselves by selling online. The numbers are amazing. More than 430,000 people in the U.S. make a full or part-time living off of eBay, more employees than GE and Proctor & Gamble combined. The most successful businesses are grossing up to $1 million a month. And it turns out that 48% of these business people are women.

As we have seen time and time again, women are looking for a saner work-life balance, and eBay provides the opportunity to manage one's own business from home, on one's own hours, and according to one's own schedule. And some of the very things that "keep women down" in corporate environments, are a boon on eBay:

EBay, experts say, is a welcome, recession-proof option for many women, especially since it makes a virtue of the very traits that are often perceived as weaknesses in Corporate America. Research shows, for example, that women's detail-oriented strengths -- as well as their tendency to bear down and have lunch at their desks -- are impedients to advancement. On eBay, those so-called shortcomings become a competitive advantage, allowing women to provide the kind of high-touch customer service -- the Holy Grail among buyers -- that the big retailers just can't give.

game now includes women

Intel's rereleased the simulation of making your way as an IT manager we wrote about last month, the one with no women. The new release both lets you play a woman and it lets you hire woman. Thank you. Though it would have been even better not to have released a female-less game, Intel's done good by retracting the game and fixing this major flaw once people started complaining. Tore Vesterby has a longer discussion of the new release.

Misbehaving Kinja digest

I've added the entire Misbehaving blogroll (under 'Misbehaving elsewhere') and the Misbehaving authors' sites to a Kinja digest to help keep up with posts by women in technology. If you'd like to suggest a site to add to the digest, email me - gina at misbehaving dot net.

(Full Disclosure: I work at Kinja.)

Gender use of blogs: more alike than different

From David Huffaker's M.A. thesis, Gender Similarities and Differences in Online Identity and Language Use among Teenage Bloggers:

Contrary to prediction, the results indicate that there are more gender similarities than differences in blog use.

BW on Women in Tech

Business Week has a special report on Women in Tech in their May 12 Issue. They have changed their angle on this annual report: rather than profile executives who've already reached the top, they are "spotlighting a wide variety of influential women who may be the next generation of top women in technology." I like it when the up-and-comers are highlighted rather than those who've already arrived.

Alice in E3

Alice Taylor (Quake player and the BBC's recently-designated thinker about games), has been reporting back from E3. From her initial disappointment in the freebies (no girl-shaped tees) she moves on to post a critique of the male-led panel on women in games, helpfully point to the 'memoirs' of a woman who plays games (no, really) and present a collection of booth boyz (in response to the ubiquitous booth babes).

Her main point is this: "25 years of gaming history has sent out the marketing message that games are for boys and men. If you change that message, women will buy more games."

And it's generated a huge discussion (mostly agreement):

How am I not a target market? How come it is, that when people talk about games for women, they are inevitably talking about the Sims? Or Everquest? While I realize that many women (it would seem) really enjoy the community aspects of MMORPG, there are plenty of us out here who scan the racks at EB looking for good single-player action and/or survival horror. Cherie Priest

I'm a lifelong gamer who's also a 'time-poor' mum. pick-up-and-put-down games are good. (Popcap games, say). I know lots of other women who play games, and met loads in pick-up-and-put-down online games (I played a multiplayer online Wheel of Fortune clone, Puzzle A Go Go, for a while). These always seem to be full of women.

My local game shops have several serious problems, but the main one seems to be that the staff simply know nothing about gaming outside a very narrow sphere. So they're just not a good place to buy games. It is, for example, impossible to buy a dance mat of any quality from a retail shop in the UK, and when I wanted to get a snowboard controller I found it very difficult. 'But it's not as efficient a way to play the game as a regular controller', they explained. It didn't, as far as I could tell, occur to them that efficiency in hitting high scores wasn't the only thing people were looking for in games. Alison Scott

My daughter is a gamer ... she hates being the only girl in the shop and having to whoop someone's butt for them to realize she is there to play and not to support some random guy.

See also: Today's Woman's Hour, which takes on wrong-headed advertising to women.

'Girlfriends in High Places'

Helen McCarthy of Demos, a British think-tank, has published a report on formal networks among professional women:

Girlfriends in High Places argues that professional networks can enhance individual career prospects while enabling women to work together to tackle workplace inequality. Women’s professional networks can provide the kind of confidence-building support which men are good at providing for each other through their informal networks.

Somewhat surprisingly (although perhaps not, given the specialised sample), 41% of women surveyed by Demos were or had been members of at least one women's network, and women's networks are a growing phenomenon. Helen connects their growth to "the changing nature of gender politics and the ways in which women construct their identities in relation to work, and in relation to each other", noting that while 81% of respondents rated the sex-specific nature of the women's networks as a positive influence on their decision to join, "few networks explicitly espouse feminist or equality goals". Furthermore, she observes that "networks are an organisational form which enables women to pursue both individual and collective strategies for change."

There's lots of interest here, so do read the full report. (Oh and while you're there, check out the recent discussion on the Demos blog about its own 'male domination', Females: Blogged Off. I love the way it trails off into comment spam - from prescription pills to debt relief, gambling and dating - almost in answer to its own question ;-)

Finally, the majority of non-networkers Helen surveyed simply weren't aware of any networks for them. Where are the networks for women in technology? Are you a member of one?

Genevieve Bell on the importance of culture in technology

Today, in the NYTimes Circuit section, there is a profile of Genevieve Bell (see under "misbehaving elsewhere"). As a anthropologist at Intel, Genevieve has been traveling the world to understand how different cultures consume technology. In turn, she has been challenging Western assumptions, most notably in areas concerning ubiquitous computing.

"We thought, there's a group of people just like us all over the world who will buy the technology and have it fill the same values in their lives," Dr. Bell said. "I was fairly certain that wasn't going to be the case. I'm an anthropologist. Culture matters."

Designing technology for women?

This is one of the pictures promoting Jens Of Sweden's new MP3 player MP-130:

It looks nice and I think its great that technology is marketed to women. But this is also an example of how technology often is marketed to women as 'other things' (make-up mirro) than 'technology'.

To follow up the discussion about stereotypes below - I think it's an interesting idea from Helga to try to 'stereotype' in new and different ways (which is a way to break up stereotypes). But regarding technology, it seems that it's hard to imagine that women like the technology itself - it's hard to create stereotypes of women's pleasure in technology. So excuses are made up to make women buy technology - its about mirrors, colours, communication or whatever, instead of technology.

Dame Stephanie Shirley and F International

Datatid, a Norwegian computer magazine, wrote several times about Stephanie Shirley - or 'Steve' as she liked to call herself according to Datatid - in the 1980s.
Dame Shirley started F International in England in 1962 - a company for programmers and computer consultants who wanted (needed?) to work from home. In 1987 F International had 1100 employees (or associates?) - most of them women, and 75% worked from home.

It's an amazing story and I would like to know more about this. I only found one presentation of her, and it seems to have been written for Who’s Who 2002.

Anyone who knows anything about this company or Shirley?