Change Is A-Coming

Marketers and systems developers may sometimes be slow but they are not utterly stupid, and a growing recognition of the gender gap is slowly leading to changes in the way technology is developed and marketed. Survey after survey now tracks gender differences in use of the Internet and IT. Differences in the amount of time women and men spend online is also keenly watched, and as we discuss in part two ("Strangers in a Strange Land", ) there are concerted efforts to lift female participation in the computer sciences and IT profession.

Some segments of the market are either consciously working to develop better targeted content and technology for women, or at least making the right noises. For instance, David Gardner, Electronic Arts COO for worldwide studios, recently urged the video games industry to stop failing women by not producing suitable content. Gardner is concerned by EA's own research that found that only 40 percent of teenage girls played video games compared to 90 percent of teenage boys. Most girls lost interest in games within a year. "We have all been talking about this for a long, long time" he says, and suggests cracking the problem would be worth an extra billion dollars in sales.

In France computer game giant Ubisoft recently backed three teams of girl game players in Britain, France and the US on the competitive circuit, to help it promote computer play. The Entertainment Software Association reached out to women by laying down tougher enforcement of exhibitor rules for the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles last May, threatening to fine vendors whose booths used bikini-clad women to represent female characters in games. And in Germany recent organizers of a game convention in Leipzig worked with a magazine for teenage girls and popular television show The Dome to produce a rock concert featuring female German pop stars and Lordi, the ghoulish heavy metal winner of the Eurovision song contest.

Such efforts seem to be paying off, according to Media Life magazine, which notes that increasing numbers of women over 40 years have now taken up playing games as a quick diversion from their daily lives.

The magazine quotes a new study conducted by Harris Interactive for RealNetworks that finds two-thirds of these women play digital, arcade, card or word games per week, and about 60 percent of them prefer games to talking on the phone, knitting or doing home improvement projects. The reason for the surge in uptake? RealNetworks, the magazine notes, specializes in the types of computer games that these women play: puzzles that they see as both educational and good stress relief.

Nintendo is also targeting the feminine demographic, after having "tremendous success" with their Nintendog series with girls.

And when the GNOME project (GNU Object Model Environment), which aims to build a full, user-friendly desktop for Unix operating systems based entirely on free software, received 181 applications for its latest Google Summer of Code (SoC) program - none from women - it initiated a Women's Summer Outreach Program (WSOP) to bring more women into the GNOME fold. Better still, the program is credited with having jump-started efforts to actively recruit female developers within other open source projects as well.

After the nil response from women, GNOME's Chris Ball and Hanna Wallach decided that was not acceptable and proposed that the GNOME Foundation use some of the Google SoC money to fund a project specifically to get women involved with GNOME. As if to prove that women are delighted to join the clubhouse when the doors are not bolted firmly against them, not only did more than 100 women then apply to join, the program also received more than 200 e-mail messages from women voicing support for the program and from women who "didn't yet have the relevant coding skills, but wanted to contribute to GNOME in some way".

According to NewsForge, Wallach says not only did many female applicants fail to hear of the initial calls to take part in the SoC program, but the call for WSOP proposals managed to reach women in other computing groups, at universities and online. Several of the applicants that replied to the call for WSOP projects noted that they had not heard about the SoC, or they would have applied to that as well.

However, the real barrier, it seems, remains women's confidence. "Many of the women who contacted us expressed concern about their coding skills, yet were extremely well qualified. Google's 'prove you're the best person for the job' attitude may be off-putting to people who aren't entirely confident in their skills", Wallach says.

And so the viscous cycle continues. While initiatives like these can only be applauded, until there are vocal, confident women on every board and development and design team, women as a whole are likely to remain convinced that computing is all about boys' toys, and little enough about meeting their own wants and needs.