Last week, Diane Morello found herself watching one of her clients give a presentation on technology and wondered, not for the first time, why there weren't more women on stage.
An analyst with the technology research firm Gartner Inc., Ms. Morello says she was one of about 500 attendees.
"I looked around at the audience, and it was a very diverse group of men and women and different nationalities -- but the people who were considered the critical component of that group were on stage, and they were almost all men."
The same holds true in small and medium-sized businesses, Ms. Morello says, where men are perceived as early adopters and natural leaders of technological change. As a result, women are fleeing the IT sector, she says, and companies are being forced to look at differences between the genders and what this might mean to their businesses. This challenge was also the basis of a report, co-authored by Ms. Morello, called "Women and Men in IT: Breaking Through Sexual Stereotypes."
The report looks at a variety of psychological and biological research about gender differences, and Ms. Morello said one of the biggest is the way in which men and women handle business relationships. Men tend to focus on problem solving and building influence, she says, which means they create hierarchies of power. Women, on the other hand, tend to excel at building "horizontal" relationships across departments or groups of people, rather than focusing on the top.
This becomes a problem when companies don't put women in roles that can further their business growth through technology, Ms. Morello says. In her opinion, no company will meet its IT-supported business goals without women in a leadership role somewhere within the organization.
"If you're designing a consumer product, and you haven't recognized that women make the bulk of household decisions, then you're not going to design something successfully," she says. This could include the product itself, but also the website that promotes and sells it, or the customer support technology that fields complaints and questions.
I became interested in Gartner's report after reading another study last week that focused more narrowly on the use of online video. According to a survey done by eMarketer, more U.S. women than men will use the Internet this year, but fewer women will visit websites like YouTube, where everything from TV commercials to homemade movies are posted.
When the study came out, representatives from eMarketer explained the difference in surfing habits by suggesting that men are more visual than women, and that women go online mainly to get things done, rather than entertain themselves.
This may not seem like an important difference, but the Web of the future is likely to be far less text-dominant. YouTube is one thing, but video conferencing is being used in a variety of business and health care settings. Just a few weeks ago, Rogers launched one of North America's first cellphones with video calling features. If women are really that image-averse, what does that mean for the adoption of next-generation technologies? And isn't all this getting us dangerously close to Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus territory?
Ms. Morello doesn't seem to think so. "Women will pursue technology based on speed and convenience, and men on features and functions -- there's a generalization for you," she says. "You don't want to pigeonhole people, but you have to be willing to see there might be some characteristics that are average across men or women, and then there are specific people for whom the average is not useful."
Ms. Morello says she stumbled across at least one useful average. In her research, she found that men and women both believe themselves to be good problem solvers, which is not surprising. But men often felt women are poor problem solvers.
"Now imagine you're working on a large, complex business issue with women on the team and you believe women aren't good problem solvers," she says. "You will make decisions based on that."
In theory, you might conclude that women won't be able to properly use technology to solve the problem, which is what most IT is intended to do. Or you might assume that the technology, not the woman's use of it, solved the problem. Then again, you might just overrely on technology yourself to come up with answers that might come through discussion with a female co-worker or by getting ideas and input from other members of the team.
People are always talking about how technology levels the playing field, improving communication and giving a wider range of people access to more information. That doesn't mean all users are created equal, or that they will all use technology in the same way.
As much as we might try to pin down the gender differences, however, there is a limit to how far you can apply these generalizations. We run the risk, in fact, of exaggerating some of these supposed innate characteristics and creating brand-new stereotypes, which is certainly not what the world needs.
Instead, a more useful step might be to identify the perceived differences between men and women in a given company, and determine how those perceptions might affect the way technology tools are offered to and used by all employees.
More than likely, this will lead businesses to the conclusion that IT systems tend to work better when both sexes have a chance to voice their needs.
Shane Schick is editor
of Computerworld Canada.
