The whole article is flawed in one major point. They assume that women are buying women's magazines because they are for women. In reality they are buying magazines that are of interest for them. Thus women's magazines are women's magazines because of the content. If you change the content (let it be rocket engine construction) it won't be women's magazine anymore because women won't buy it.
I think this is a typical mistake feminists make. Instead of understanding and accepting what women want, they represents their view of what they should want and blame all other factors (stereotype anyone?).
Exactly. "Women's magazines" should really be called something like "women's traditional role model in society". It's something of a remnant of a previous era which is still useable for some purposes. My wife can read Cosmo if she needs women's fashion advice, but we read the same articles in Esquire or TechCrunch.
Fortunately, the internet should help change this. Magazines will die, and be replaced by something much more dynamic and adaptable. With content aggregators like Reddit and Prismatic, viewers can choose what actually interests them. Those sites aren't immune from demographics-based marketing, but I suspect that in the long run, the most efficient kind of marketing will be the kind that tries to learn what you actually like, instead of just prescribing you something based on your age and gender.
> they represents their view of what they should want and blame all other factors.
An interesting point, the magazines are (primarily) written for women by women and as they are not a compulsory purchase I suspect that if there was a demand for tech news in them there would be (I suspect if it increased readership and hence advertising revenue they'd cover ancient Latin if there was the demand).
Making an issue of a womans magazine carry tech to balance misogyny is as strange as getting Linux Format to carry a recipe for buns.
All that said of course this is a Guardian piece and they do tend to write this kind of stuff to insite controversy (in many ways the liberal daily mail).
Also: is there a law that stops women from buying tech magazines? I don't think there is, and I wager that women who are interested in tech do buy them.
Isn't it demeaning to perscribe adult women which magazines and which content to like?
Making tech more accessible to women and less about the cooler-tech-to-get-you-laid attitude that most tech/gear magazines have would be a positive thing.
Tech magazines are written for a predominantly young male audience, not for a broader audience.
Interesting you make the same mistake. Actually, woman magazines are bought by women interested in woman's magazines - this is a subset of all women, and may or may not be particularly representative of women as a whole.
Women who buy women's magazines are women who first and foremost are interested in reading magazines. Out of that subset of women, one can begin measuring who are interested in women's magazines. I would assume the percentage here becomes quite large. I'll leave it up to a potential child to find that magic number and whether or not it can be representative of women in general.
Although, quite frankly, I am quite tired of this kind of "woman analysis" as if there's something inherently wrong with women in our society.
Are you a woman? If not, then you have no right to be tired of this kind of “woman analysis” (which is not, in fact, what the attached article is). It’s analyzing media and its approach to the spending habits of its target market, and how they miss the opportunity to introduce new advertisers to cover the fact that women in the UK spend on average 40% more annually on technology purchases than they do cosmetic purchases.
This is not asking for a Pink Power Wired; it's saying that the publishers of “women’s” magazines are leaving advertising dollars on the table and potentially missing the needs and/or interests of their purported audience by ignoring technology purchases and dealing with them in a non-sexist, adult way.
Quite specifically, this article isn't about you—especially if you're a man. It's about how the magazines, their advertisers, and manufacturers are missing an opportunity to be more meaningful and targeted toward the needs of their audience, which is increasingly more sophisticated than the magazines themselves.
What the statistic completely ignores is that the £394 a year spent on tech is almost certainly spent on one or two big items. I'd say iPhone ownership is fairly ubiquitous - the average cost of an iPhone is probably about £360/year. The rest is probably made up of the fraction of a tablet or laptop that the average woman purchases each year. Even if someone theoretically spend £394 a yer on tech, it doesn't mean that advertising a tech product to them will make them buy it. Phone purchasing decisions happen annually, laptops or tablets even less frequently. Cosmetics, on the other hand, are purchased across many small transactions in a much more continuous manner, giving far more scope for effective advertising return.
And as others in the comments have said, magazines are really about delivering adverts to customers.
Is that any different for men? I mean, I may buy the odd (relatively cheap) geek gadget, but most of my tech spending is pretty similar to that of my wife.
Yet there is plenty of tech advertising aimed at me.
most of my tech spending is pretty similar to that of my wife.
In addition, the key metric is probably not tech spending, but tech creating, which is often not measured in dollars. We've all probably run into guys [1] who produce impressive code using a five-year-old laptop who don't spend much on "tech." Maybe a couple bucks a month for hosting, but that's really it.
Why would the key metric be that of creating rather than spending?
The fact that I sit at Vim all day cranking out Ruby and Python (for work and for open source etc.) is irrelevant to whether I buy a smartphone. Apple getting £500 from my mother for a new iPhone is no different than them getting £500 from me. In sales, the key metric really IS spend rather than creativity/interest.
Does that mean advertising for technology doesn't work? Samsung would like a word with you, if that's the case...
While you're right that yes, tech is less frequent and higher ticket, it's worth huge money, and advertising is useful for the majority of buyers (not HN readers basically)
"Does advertising technology in magazines work on women?" or "How well does advertising technology to women work?" Would be better questions than one that applies to all demographics, at least in this discussion.
Here's a nice article[1] about why an ad campaign for women's watches appeared in the Economist, an magazine with readership 90% men.
Seconded. The Last Psychiatrist blog is excellent.
The original story is unclear about whether it counted just articles in the magazines or adverts as well. It does mention the tech adverts in one magazine but the general tone is about tech 'coverage' - as in the choice of the content. Which would seem to exclude ads, since I'd bet the magazines would accept advertising from whoever pays them enough.
I would guess that a study of the adverts would show a whole lot more tech products, as marketing departments can't have failed to notice that women buy their products too.
Yes, but those magazines could be delivering iPhone adverts. Or tempting iPhone owners with galaxy S5 adverts.
The could have articles (you know, incitements to spend money disguised as articles) on "how an iPhone gal could date an Android-using guy". You can't stop vapid, consumerist magazines from being vapid and consumerist, but they seem to be missing a trick with their target audience.
To argue the devil's advocate position: Fashion and Beauty, on the other hand, are seen as celebrations of femininity that put women on a pedastal, the center of attention, and on a higher tier of social power and rank. Gadgets - either kitchen or electronic - however desirable are seemingly out of place in this context, as they are ultimately ultilitarian.
Fashion and beauty are vehicles for self-expression very much like technology is (iOS or Android; power user or not, etc). We identify with the technology we choose every bit as much as we identify with the style we wear and the manner in which we groom ourselves. This is not limited to women (graphic tees, anyone?).
The iPhone is now available in several colors and finishes, there are tech-mirroring trends in beauty (matte finish nail polish, metallic finish makeup, etc), and wearable tech is becoming a thing. I'd say the line between tech and fashion/beauty is pretty well blurred. And technology hasn't been "ultimately utilitarian" in a long while.
Also, tech doesn't have the same "market it like crazy, and rely on massive margins" philosophy.
Apple does do some marketing, but it's not like they sell a phone for ten times what it costs to build. Software is a little different - B2B relies on direct sales.
Games are probably the closest thing you'll find to fashion and cosmetics. I guess you could compare fashion magazines to gaming magazines.
"The average British woman spends about £279 on beauty and cosmetics but she spends about a third more, £394 on technology products.
By comparison the magazines she reads gives about 20 times as many column-inches to cosmetics than they do for tech.
The disconnect between how the glossy mags choose to fill their pages and how British women actually spend their money suggests that traditional publishers are out of touch with their readership.
Women spend more on smartphones than men, they spend one and a half times as much on technology and influence 57% of new technology purchases. The glossy mags have yet to acknowledge that women are now fully involved as technology consumers."
The most damning evidence
It makes me think that these magazines are not actually designed to optimally interest their readers, but simply to grab their attention and then mold it to their advertisers interests.
It makes me think that these magazines are not actually designed to optimally interest their readers, but simply to grab their attention and then mold it to their advertisers interests.
The whole point of the editorial content in trade publishing is to sell advertising pages.
Back when I was a columnist for Computer Shopper (in the UK, circa 1999-2005, during the golden autumn of the computer magazine publishing era -- before direct PC sales over the internet gutted it) the ABC audited circulation of the mag was around 135,000 readers (multiply by 5 for an equivalent US readership). Cover price was on the order of £2.35, so you could expect revenue of £317,000-odd per issue from paid subscribers/store customers. Around 120 pages consisted of editorial content, plus up to 550 pages of advertising. (This ratio holds in the US, too, where to take advantage of printed matter bulk postal rates magazines had to have no less than 20% editorial content mixed in with the ads.)
I don't have exact revenue figures, but a half-page black and white ad in CS sold at the time for roughly £2000. So, ignoring the premium for colour and blow-in ads, we can approximate the advertising revenue to £2.2M per issue. In actual fact, colour ads sold for a lot more, so the revenue per issue would be closer to £3M.
The take-home here is that at most 14% of the magazine's revenue came direct from the readers -- indeed, the readers were probably getting the colourful 650-page object for the cost of printing alone. The remaining 86% -- or more -- of the magazine's revenue came from advertising.
Now, from a business perspective, whose interests do you expect to weigh more heavily on the mind of the publisher -- the readers, or the advertisers?
I was going to say: Since technology sales are higher, why aren't technology companies advertising more? But the markup on cosmetics (scented water with fancy labels) is huge, so the cosmetics companies have much more money to spread around in advertising.
Also, ad sales in print computer magazines fell off a cliff after 2001 and never recovered. (Last time I looked, the ad page count in CS had dropped to about 200 pages, from a peak of nearly 600 pages.)
The drop was due to (a) lots of the smaller PC OEMs merging or going bust (a mag could only sell so many 12-24 page glossy advertising segments to Dell or HP), (b) the rise of internet advertising on the back of home broadband (over a 56K modem ads were painful; with 512K and up broadband they were tolerable and far more effective), and (c) dwindling profit margins.
Oh, also CS had two distinct customer bases: the hardcore folks who bought it for the specialist columns (the UK mag, unlike the Ziff-Davis Computer Shopper, had stuff like assembly language programming tutorials and an Atari ST enthusiast's corner as late as 2004) and who propped up the ABC circulation figures by subscribing (and whose ABC figures in turn were used by sales to convince advertisers that the magazine was worth purchasing space in), and the newsstand casuals, who wanted a new PC, would buy an issue for the ads, buy their PC, then never buy another copy. And of these latter, according to market surveys, only 15% ever installed any software on their machine: they bought from OEMs with Windows and Office pre-installed along with a bunch of not-quite-crapware, and used what they'd bought as-is.
The former vanished first, to places like Slashdot, Hacker News, and more recondite corners of the web. And the latter dried up as google made it easier to find cheap PCs via the internet.
I'd hazard to guess that cosmetics are closer to the impulse-buy zone and enjoy a larger availability.
You can walk in any supermarket / drugstore and find a cosmetics selection at which point advertising influence kicks in. You are familiar with the advertised brands in the offering and more likely to buy them.
Tech on the other hand is a $300 upward proposition a peace. That's far outside the impulse buy zone, which is why advertising this works differently. Much more product placement and bundled distribution channels (phone shops) in play here.. and caries.
My hypothesis is that there's a more important factor. Cosmetics companies' expected return on an ad in a women's magazine is higher than tech companies' because of the focus.
For a tech company women are at best 50% of their target market. For a cosmetics company, women are the market. Their Excel sheets just show they can bid higher on the ads than tech.
People would likely forget about cosmetics to some degree if they weren't advertised so much, they are pure luxury.
Technology provides functionality (beyond luxury) used in everyday life, so it doesn't have to advertise as much. Cosmetics have to advertise to just stay alive.
Yeah, but women and men view the world differently. In general women place more emphasis on aesthetic things, whereas guys are more into fixing things / how they work. I am sure there are loads of counter examples, but as a general thing it quite easy to see.
My sister, when researching baby monitors, had to resort to male-dominated forums. She was interested in the technical details and experiences of these before buying, but women-forums only ever covered aesthetics and feelings towards the topic.
You could say my example is anecdotal and worthless, but what I am describing is a large statistical pool with both sides represented. And this isn't exactly news, you can be as offended as you'd like, but every single area of our society barring the higher echelons of science tells us this same story.
The fact that you think it's offensive makes you the offender. I should think most of the world couldn't care less. Myself included, it's just a matter of interests.
Disclaimer: I know every rule has plenty of exceptions.
The offense is in attributing it to intrinsic differences between men and women. If you can supply some information that your sister's baby-monitoring experience was due to natural differences, vs., for example, conditioning by advertising, then that would be helpful.
I find your view on what is offensive fundamentally wrong.
Noting an arbitrary difference, like say "those ten guys are very interested in that woman's behind, while those ten women are clearly focussing on what this man is saying" is just observation (and not a reflection of my real world view, merely an example). Anyone who attributes negativity to either of these observations are betting offensive.
I should think aesthetics and personal feelings with regards to baby monitors can be helpful, in my example however, it wasn't. You chose to think it negative the female dominated forum judged differently than a male dominated one, if that's the case you are offending, not me.
I agree with you that in our age this is driven to exasperation because of the way everything in modern life seems to be so exasperated, as if exasperation itself is being marketed ... but this is off topic.
w.r.t cosmetics and aesthetics, don't forget that humanity invented cosmetics and jewellery way before most of the practical technologies. Whether that was a male (warrior paintings) or female thing, I don't know.
"luxury", as you put it, is what makes us humans, do the useless, for the sake of it, create cultures around that stuff. We have that strive deeply embedded inside us.
Its worth noting that ad spend is a functin of deep pockets, no relevance or general importance to society. One historical comparison is that during the financila crisis, the Auto industry's ad spend plummeted and the top TV advertiser became Mobile phones. The importance of auto's, however, has generally remained unchanged. Its just that advertising is a key element in the business model of soem industries and is less in others. Clearly, given the markups and the insecurities preyed upon by the industry, Beauty products are heavily reliant on ads for both sales and luxurious margins.
It's ridiculous to state "The importance of auto's, however, has generally remained unchanged." because car sales nearly halved between 2007 and 2009. New cars (and advertising of them) were objectively pretty much irrelevant during that time.
It's like what people say about Facebook, Google etc - if the service is free (or like here heavily subsidised), you're not the user, you're the product.
Is money spent relevant though ?
I spend more on car insurance, gas and other maintenance fees than on entertainment, and really don't care about cars as long as mine doesn't break. A lot of women might have as little interest in the next Samsung phone.
Technology is more expensive. Hey, women spend more on cars than cosmetics, should they include car columns too? Buying a laptop, an iPhone and a tablet or something will cost way more than a year's worth of make up, doesn't say anything about a person's real interests.
Also, the average British woman is not the average Women's magazine reader. It's more likely that readers of women's magazines 1. don't spend as much on technology, or 2. if they do, it's simply the case of buying an expensive smartphone or whatever to listen to music or browse Facebook.
I know it's a tech magazine. I'm just somewhat flummoxed what the attractive busty woman on the front of every magazine has to do with iPhones or whatever.
The theory is that seeing them close together, will cause an association in the (assumed male) reader's mind, between the qualities of the attractive sexy model and the product, so that when the reader sees the product in the future, he will be attracted to it on a subconscious level, and thus more likely to buy it ... or in other words, "sex sells".
My wife reports to me that if she wants to buy a copy of Android Magazine she has to shoulder aside men who are much larger than she, and fish among the magazines about fishing, cars, "Lad's Mags" (ugh (her words)), and similar things.
Exactly. Hell, I (as a upper middle class young male) get annoyed when trying to find a tech magazine on the shelves. Hidden amongst a dozen other things, and usually a terrible selection. Sigh... Not that it matters, my favourite magazine (Atomic MPC) that I subbed to for 5 years folded into PC Authority :(
Currently, tech magazines for men is nothing fun to women.
In majority, women want artistic fun rather then numerical fun.
Again, in majority, women has no interest on benchmark number stuffs, and more interested in which app look more beautiful. Such as "Best sexy looking app top 10" rather than "World fastest super-computer top 10".
In other words, their behavior has not been changed. Only the medium has been changed. It was fashion and beauty stuffs before, and now it just expanded to electronics.
Judging from the OP, he's right and you're living in lala-land.
Ie - it could be a case of major conspiracy on the part of publishers (who are all women btw) to keep their readers away from tech. Or they could simply be giving their readers what they want.
If (masses of) women really had a need like that, they'd buy the current tech magazines - it wouldn't fit the niche perfectly, but it would at least partly fulfill that need.
They don't. Which is evidence that there is no such unfilled niche.
Or, much more likely, they aren't interested in the male focus of said tech magazines. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6738657 for a quick look at the covers of the tech magazine T3. Are you saying the average woman would really want to read a tech magazine with that sort of focus?
We're not talking CACM here; we're talking tech magazines that, for the longest time, celebrated conference booth babes.
If what you say is true, then all the world's women with the desire for reading tech would flock to the few tech magazines that have less of "that sort of focus", they exist. This would cause these "non-booth-babed" magazines to have a disproportionally large amount of women buyers, which they would see immediately... but it's not happening.
Reality is that which doesn't go away if you disbelieve or dislike it.
Reality being that which doesn't go away if you dislike it, I recommend you look carefully at those supposed tech magazines with “less” of the young male focus that you claim exist. You'll find that they don't, really, outside of quasi-academic magazines like CACM. Even there, it's hard. How many women are on staff? How many of the articles are written by women? How much do the articles focus on metrics, measurements, and numbers as opposed to usability? I really like reading AnandTech, but as a tech magazine that isn't interested in booth babes, it is still deeply focussed on the male interest and experience with tech, as the masthead (http://www.anandtech.com/home/about) with it's conspicuous lack of women on staff indicates.
Reality being that which doesn't go away if you dislike it, the reality is that there are no mainstream tech/gear magazines—online or print—that don't use a hypothetical young male as the primary audience for that magazine, doing a disservice to both those young men and the young women who might be interested but aren't interested in the editorial slant involved.
Reality being that which doesn't go away if you dislike it, you're a guy—as am I—and we don't actually get to say that something we like is not sexist in its nature. There are things that I will read that I know are sexist (and not care that they are because I want to read them anyway), but I don't get to pretend that they aren't sexist just because I like them.
As I said above, "it wouldn't fit the niche perfectly, but it would at least partly fulfill that need".
If they aren't buying the currently best-fitting magazines (even though they just partially fit the need), then they are showing with their wallets that they don't really want it; and the magazines are completely right to do as they do now instead of throwing resources to serve a nonexistent/tiny market.
If all the women buyers would go to the magazine which currently has the least "male slant", then they'd be 90% of the audience for that magazine, which the publisher would immediately see and they'd get attention.
If noone prints anything even remotely acceptable but the readers would really want it - then they'd get that need filled on online media. Is there a booming audience of women tech bloggers writing for women readers and getting huge audiences + ad income that would justify targeting a magazine directly at that?
There will be articles written by women for women only if they actually put their money where their mouth is - if someone (+ millions like them) are not going to buy the resulting magazine, then saying "there should be a mag like that" is empty talk. Even if it's unfair and sexist, if the buyers aren't there then such magazines don't have a reason to exist - that's reality.
There are just no women reading it. So you might consider the possibility, that maybe - just maybe, women are just not into this stuff. And that women publishers are savvy enough to know what their readers want covered.
A reasonably large amount, ranging from cool toys to the latest apps and random websites they've come across. Add on a lot of technology magazines may as well be men's magazines due to the content focus, tonality and usage of scantily clad women caressing the latest tech products.
Or I could buy Playboy. The tech and music coverage in there is very good. Despite being a “men's” magazine in the most direct sense, the breadth of coverage (music, movies—both new releases and home video, video games, automotive tech, men's fashion, and technology in general, plus the politics, interviews, reporting, and fiction) is generally good. GQ also has fairly good broad-based coverage. A couple of other magazines that aren't strictly men’s magazines but have a male editorial slant do much the same (VF and Rolling Stone).
Men's magazines tend to cover far broader interests than women's magazines.
Tech magazines, on the other hand, almost exclusively cater to a young male audience.
It makes me think technology items are just too damn expensive. Phones and the contracts associated with them are more than a tad expensive. How much are we paying just to stay in contact with each other?
Technology items are dirt cheap. A white label tablet with decent specs is 100$, a no name android phone 150$, decent gaming PC - 500$ ... its the fashionable tech items that are expensive. And the abusive carrier practices.
So this is something that has been on the back of my mind for ages (at least a few years / through one or two relationships now) -
I used to subscribe to Men's Health / Fitness, a Motorcycle Magazine and another tech one (T3 or stuff, I can't remember) - and they'd all be on the bookshelf (dozens and dozens spanning a couple of years).
Whenever my any of my previous significant other(s) would thumb through them - they would always comment on how much more practical and informative they were - literally everything was put there in some way to help you become a better person; from fitness tips and guides, to the business insider interviews and "lifestyle" hacks / articles, down to the insider information on upcoming gadgets / vehicles and what not.
These was in comparison not just to the top selling female magazines (Marie Claire / Cosmopolitan etc), but with the equivalent female magazines (Female Fitness etc). I haven't read any of these magazines recently (in about 3 years, since the onset of tablets and whatnot), so I can't comment on how they are now but it definitely came as a bit of a surprise to me to see how different they actually were - and how they actually continued to reinforce an incredibly old fashioned female stereotype; I don't know how else to describe it other than the "dumbing down" of information targeting females, and a subtle encouraging of various fashion / gadget trends that need to be followed to "keep up with the times".
I couldn't help but question it all, and wonder why women would actually buy them ... and then my mind would wander over to women's issue's and how magazines that make them question their image and self-worth, talk down to them and greatly encourage the whole celebrity / paparazzi environment whilst touting feminist ideals etc etc ... it's a whole other world that I am in no way equipped or educated enough to think about; a giant paradox thrown inside pandora's box.
I can't speak for the US but some of the top 'mens' magazines in the UK are disgraceful. FHM, Loaded, Nuts, et al.
You mention how the top womens magazines "reinforce an incredibly old fashioned female stereotype", well these mens magazines are arguably worse considering the primary content is boobs, toilet humour and football.
> I can't speak for the US but some of the top 'mens' magazines in the UK are disgraceful. FHM, Loaded, Nuts...
Loaded and Nuts are 'lad mags' - 15 to 25. They're not for grown up men.
The biggest, and by far the most profitable Man's Magazine is Men's health. It has a little tech, lots of workout/fitness stuff, a lot of diet stuff, and some fashion.
(not sure if FHM still exists so can't comment there)
They are not "disgraceful" anymore than anything else on the shelves is, You have magazines aimed at girls in their early teens discussing sexual techniques, you have magazines telling women if they are not a size 0 then nothing they do matters, you have magazines telling women that if they are not devastatingly good in bed their partners will cheat on them, you have magazines telling women their entire value lies in what they look/smell like and dress in.
If anything is disgraceful those are disgraceful, by comparison "look at the tits on that" magazines are not, hell if you measured the body shape of the women in the "disgraceful" mags compared to Cosmo I wonder which one would have the most realistic average body type.
Pornography is legal and they are not (under most definitions) even pornography and there is nothing wrong with sexual urges or wanting to see the naked human form.
Apropos of nothing: Google Glass and Marissa Mayer both got very long spreads written about them recently in the US version of Vogue. (I buy a copy periodically when visiting the US. Business-related research expense.)
n.b. If you do this regularly you'll be able to make pretty accurate predictions about 30% of the magazine by reference to 70% of the magazine.
While I agree these magazines are frivolous and unhealthy, isn't this a stretch?
>> The disconnect between how the glossy mags choose to fill their pages and how British women actually spend their money suggests that traditional publishers are out of touch with their readership.
...except that, apparently, such women also spend their money on the magazines being criticized. Which seems to say the publishers are in touch with what their readers want.
Obviously not all women buy such magazines, but those who do are not being forced to.
Is this not simple supply and demand? If people didn't want to read magazines such as Hello etc they wouldn't buy them and the publishers would realign to what people do want to buy (be that reading about technology or anything else).
Yes, women spend a lot on cell phones. So,
that means that they are interested in
technology? Not really! Here's why:
Read D. Tannen, You Just Don't Understand:
Men and Women in Conversation -- she's long
been a prof at Georgetown. There learn that
girls and young women want to get security
from memberships in groups of other girls,
and one of the main ways a girl/young woman
can do that is to bring to the group some
juicy gossip. So, they gossip. Yes,
they do gossip. And drawing from the
movie Jurassic Park, yes, "They do form
herds.".
For technology, that's things. In
simple terms, in year 1, month 1, nearly
week 1, in their crib, the girls are trying
to get emotional connections with adults
via facial expressions, and the boys are
trying to hack the latch on the crib
and write C++
code to automate the toy fire truck on the
floor.
The girls are interested in emotional
connections with people, and the boys are
interested in things. The boys are seeking
mastery over the physical world, and the
girls are seeking care taking via emotional
connections with men who have mastery over the
physical world.
The girls are interested in fashion and
cosmetics
both to
attract men and also to fit into the groups
of other girls they want to be part of.
Can women do technology? I don't have much
insight into what the real limits are, but
I've seen a wide range from (1) having a
super tough time with 8-9th grade algebra
to (2) work with programming languages,
starting with no real background at all,
totally blowing away some of the brightest
people
in computing.
But, I've nearly never seen a girl or
woman who actually likes something
technical.
Again, basically the women's magazines
are correct: What girls and women
really like is belonging to groups of
girls/women and making emotional connections
with other people. And that's what
girls/women use technology, radio,
TV, magazines, cell phones, social media,
for -- to belong to groups of girls/women
and to make emotional connections with
other people. For the technology itself,
the girls/women don't care, don't care
any more than they care that it was
a Diesel powered 18 wheel truck that
delivered their women's magazine,
cosmetics, cell phone, laptop,
skim milk, etc.
Just because the women's magazines
dish out material based on stereotypes does
not mean that the stereotypes are wrong.
I'm a woman who's been programming for years, and I really, really like technology. I'm currently at hackerschool, and nearly half the current batch consists of women who like technology. It's not such a rarity.
And no, I don't read "women's mags", and spent my teens reading various Linux and technology magazines.
>starting with no real background at all, totally blowing away some of the brightest people in computing.
That's pretty much an acknowledgement of your existence as an exception to the general rule.
Did you know there are -despite this (I assume) man's statements- men who are not the least bit interested in technology and "things"? I hardly see them being offended on behalf of their whole gender like yourself.
Read more carefully yourself. I didn't reply to the bit about competence, I replied to the bit where he said "But, I've nearly never seen a girl or woman who actually likes something technical." As he's not met a single one, I'm pointing out I exist.
I'm not offended (much less 'on behalf of my whole gender'), I'm surprised. Don't bring your own baggage into other discussions randomly.
I am "serious". I'm very, very,
very serious, fully, 100%, iron
clad, totally serious. It's one
of the most important lessons I
had to learn in life, a lesson
I didn't know and had to learn, the
hard way, a very, very hard way,
and the cost was high, very high,
a major fraction of my whole life.
What I said about babies is a
slight exaggeration of some recent,
solid research. It's correct.
Nearly every parent with anything like
an open mind and both boy and girl
children comes to the same conclusion,
finds that such differences between
boys and girls are so totally obvious
that no one should fail to understand
them.
The girls like dolls, and the boys
like fire trucks. And this usually
holds even if the boys and girls are
treated just the same. Why? Early
in the crib, the girls are interested
in emotional connections with people,
and the boys are interested in things.
Tannen describes some more research
on the differences already at age
5.
I'm correct: What I'm saying about
nearly all girls and women is
100% absolutely, positively, totally
rock solidly correct. Sorry 'bout that.
You are very, very different. I've never seen
such a girl. As I indicated, I've seen
girls who could do technology very, very
well (I was married to one; she
was Valedictorian, Summa Cum Laude,
Phi Beta Kappa, Woodrow Wilson,
NSF, and Ph.D.), but she didn't like
it. The story did not end well.
If I had a daughter, then I'd encourage
her to be a very traditional female,
including thinking about clothes,
hair, and makeup. But I'd also
try to get her well informed on people,
men, relationships, marriage, family,
parenting, emotions, psychology,
socialization, and art. And for
a career, I'd suggest something
involving people, maybe being
a bookkeeper, accountant, CPA,
nurse, K-12 teacher, etc. No way
would I sacrifice her life trying
to shovel sand against the tide.
There's a big reason I don't have
a daughter or any children or now
even a wife: I was far too slow
to understand the usually rock
solid differences between boys
and girls.
Maybe someday I will write a book
covering what I wish I'd known --
Girls 101 for Dummies -- Boys.
Could do a lot in 100 pages.
If I did have a daughter, then I'd
conclude that
she needs a good life; for that she
needs a good marriage; and
a good marriage is based on
"offspring, security, and care taking",
and extra credit for knowing the
source (hint: it was a woman, and
past President of the American
Psychiatric Association).
Knowing and liking Linux won't by
itself keep you from having a good
life as a woman, even an otherwise
quite traditional woman. Still,
nearly no girl or woman actually
likes technology -- they like
people, not things.
For what it's worth, the model I find most useful is a bimodal distribution: the average for men and women is indeed fairly different on the parameters you describe, but there is quite a lot of overlap, and individuals who are past the mean of the other gender. There's no need to apologize for acknowledging that the means are different; there probably is cause to apologize if you insist on treating people as if they were in two distinct, narrow columns with a huge gap between them.
The results with differences in children are there, but the claims of innateness are overstated (not false, merely overstated) - children are treated differently, in terms of how they're talked to and bounced around, even in their first week of life. I don't believe the social differences in their treatment have absolutely no impact.
I hate forcing people into 'traditional' roles - and those roles tend to be an idealized version of how people think their grandparents lived, anyhow. I'm in favour of letting people be people. I think children should be encouraged to follow their interests, and learn how to interact in at least one culture, but not forced into moulds for the sake of ideology. If someone wants to learn about fashion, makeup, or piloting fighter planes, great; if there are statistically significant differences in who is doing what, fine; if you're forcing people into one thing or another based on traits that correlate (such as their gender), stop. Don't force someone to chose a profession based on their gender and opposed to their interests, whether you're shovelling sand with or against your society's tide.
Good lives can include good marriages, and probably do for most people, but don't necessarily have to; people are diverse. I'm sorry to hear your marriage ended unhappily, but I would hazard a guess that it wasn't purely due to you not understanding women as a group, and at least partly not understanding the needs of the particular woman you were married to; the two may have been similar, but certainly were not identical.
Purely anecdotally, I'm in a happy relationship with a man, like technology far more than even the average male open source programmer, and don't care at all about fashion, makeup, gossip, or hair. I'm not 'traditional', and I have no desire to be; I am happy.
Congratulations on your good understanding
of and application of probability densities!
That subject is again something many more
men understand than women!
All or nearly all your arguments are fine.
You are the first woman I ever heard of who
actually likes technology. I doubt that
Marissa Mayer really likes technology;
maybe screen layouts, colors, and UI/UX but not
actual technology. Congratulations on your
liking what you do and doing what you like.
My wife was a big challenge. I met her
when she was 18, first saw her socially
at 20, and married her at 22. At 20,
she looked fine, and she had two younger
sisters that also looked fine. And her
mother looked like Bismarck's church,
cooking, children, sewing (in German,
all start with 'K' but I don't want to
go to the trouble to get the umlauts
typed in correctly so give you the English
translation).
But my evaluation was seriously wrong.
It turned out, if knew some of what to
look for, her mother had cut off essentially
all communications with her husband and
with everyone else talked only about trivia
such as the weather. So, the parents had
no intimacy between their ears. I failed
to see that until years later. Otherwise,
the family looked terrific.
Alas, all three of the girls started to
encounter serious problems near age 22.
That's just the way some of these things
work. See it? Now, sure. Then, no.
There was next to nothing I could do.
The only option for her and us was that
she regard herself as dependent on me,
be subordinate to me, look to me for
nearly all direction and thinking, for
what she was to do, day by day, nearly
hour by hour, have me make requests,
show her how to accomplish the task of the
request
if she didn't already know
well, let her do what I had asked, and
then get praise and approval at the end.
This solution did work; I never tried it,
but in effect we tried it by accident and
it worked well.
But, she was very angry about that solution,
so angry she just would not accept it.
I never tried to get her to follow this
solution, and maybe that was a mistake
of mine, asking too much of her. When
I married her, my view of her capabilities
was very high, the polar opposite of
the solution I described.
But, how she lived before I met her
actually was close to that solution:
Her parents and school teachers and
professors made the assignments, and
she did them with high diligence and,
then, got her self-image and self-
esteem. Her big problem, where she
stumbled, dropped the ball, tripped
over the ball, fell on the ball, and
lost the ball was just when she was
given some independence and expected
to work out for herself what to do.
There was more to the situation, but
there was no easy solution except the
one that she was so angry about she
would not accept it.
Technology can be fun, involving,
and profitable -- go for it!
fashion magazines do not make woman a woman just like woodworking magazines do not make man a man.
Geek culture is a niche and it is more healthy to deal with it as such, promote stars female and otherwise.
I am sick of people being divisive on this issue, we have women coders that like to put make up on and look pretty. However I also have friends, dudes and dudettes who don't really care about tech beyond very easily usable iPhone. Brandishing fact that magazines don't give adverts about iPhones is much like saying that woodworking magazines that do not give adverts about family cars with automatic everything(IMO). iPhone is the easiest phone to use compared to older dial a number phones so I am not sure where argument stands here.
As well fashion industry stands by itself as far as I know it and they don't really care to change their ways just because they say so.(re: movie: Devil wears prada).
If I subscribe to woodworking or mechanics magazine, I am not sure I'd care to see adverts for game boy or Playstation.
Given that I am all for women in technology - however I think that making the rest of the world think(like general purpose womens magazines) is presumptuous that people are into nerdy stuff and computing.
In cultures where female circumcision occurs, it's not the men who perform the circumcision, it's the women. And it's women who shame anyone who has not been mutilated in the same way they have been.
I don't know if this is a case of Oslo syndrome, but this kind of peer pressure plays a big role in keeping people down.
The same thing (though probably not quite as harmful) happens with men. Men aren't all supportive of men finding their own way either. If you don't do and like the same stupid things your peers feel forced to do and like, you get ridiculed.
... so you might of (very badly) shown that some woman are mildly mysoginist (if even that)... How do you get "worst mysoginists" and "often" out of that?
Insecurities, eg body image, are propogated to support the beauty and fashion industry. Just one example. Others (studies and simple empirical checks) will also corroborate this. It shouldn't be controversial, but YMMV.
Quoting TFA does not clarify your position at all. "Often" implies women outside of the editorial staff of these magazines. And I fail to see how they are "the worst mysoginists[sic]."
MarissaTV, the Yahoo Q3 News — If It Bleeds, It Definitely Does Not Lead
__________
But this is far from atypical, as a little google-fu whill show you. And if you look into some research, some additional things will emerge: eg What attracts the media to woman-on-woman (WOW) bullying is the fact that women are targeted at a higher rate by female bullies (71%) than by male bullies (46%). I won't belabor the point. Merely pointing out an empirical irony relevant to the headline and the context of this discussion. This is not counterfactual (nor apologetic) to other types of bad behabiour, but it is oddly not widely understood (it appears).
How is providing evidence to your claims "[belaboring] the point"? I know it's easier to vomit a seven-word sound bite, but don't patronize me with a bunch of dismissive hand waving and "find it for yourself on google." You said it, now back it up.
When you make a statement like that on a place like this I expect you to do your homework before you click the comment button. You do us all a disservice by making a ludicrous claim and then backing away from it, because it encourages others to pander anecdote as fact.
You're now arguing from ignorance. I've provided you three examples: (1) Editors at fashion magazines; (2) a High-profile technology editor; and (3) Some research with quantification.
Since this topic starts to bleed into the HN-no-go-zone ("women in tech"), its worth not "belaboring the point" because that soon tends to lead into a meaningless debate[0]. If you have some contra-evidence or a counter-factual to put forward, it would be interesting to see it. But seriously, I don't need to do your homework for you. If you don't have something to show, arguing "i don't understand" or "i don't see it" is dis-ingenuous.
________
[0] This is a distinct topic to the more-common flame-wars around Women's STEM aptitude and/or promotion potenial.
There are countries where woman cannot choose who they marry. Where woman are beaten, Where woman are not allow outside on their own, where woman earn double digit percentages less than male counterparts... You are seriously saying that 'often' the 'worst' mysoginists are woman in the magazine industry!?
And then claiming others are arguing from ignorance. LOL.
You seem to be having a comprehension problem with the English language. Its probaly better for you to study the definition and history of the word than for HN to lectur you or try to enlighten you. In addition to the word 'misogeny', you might also do well to study the phrase 'argument from ignorance', which I referred to above. The logical construct 'some of the worst' also seems to be mis-understood. Because there is a reasonably large number of people on HN that speak English as a second language there's no point in continuing this sort of debate. Because ultimately, you seem to be basing your line of attack on false premises. I will, however, limit my remarks for brevity to the case of misogeny in the western english speaking world. (One could extend the argument, but its not neccessary to support my earlier point.).
(1) Definitions: Misogyny is manifested in many different ways, from jokes to pornography to violence to the self-contempt women may be taught to feel toward their own bodies."
(2) Its clear from (1) That the media and workplace bullying are included in the definition.
(3) Its clear from the construct of 'many of the worst', that this refers to a non-trivial number, but need not be exclusive. So, the verbal threshold means 'many but not neccessarily all, and in any event not amount we need to further specify or approximate in specific percentages'. But, for the sake of it. The data I reference earlier implied that despite the higher proportion of total 'work bullies' in the workplace being men, a woman is as likely to be bullied at work by a woman. So, from the perspective of women, this is indeed a non-trivial amount. We can be reasonably say then that the 'some of the worst' bullies are other women, because this makes up half of the pool.
Its a more generalized trend, not some sort of special interest thing. I was merely pointing it out in my first comment. Later examples are just repsonding to specific queries. This sample was published in the NYT today, and it re-iterates many of the same points. In particular, read the last sentence...
studies have shown that the more attractive an adolescent girl or woman is, the more likely she is to become a target for indirect aggression from her female peers.
“Women are indeed very capable of aggressing against others, especially women they perceive as rivals,” said Dr. Vaillancourt, now a psychologist at the University of Ottawa. “The research also shows that suppression of female sexuality is by women, not necessarily by men.”
Something I, and other people I have spoken to in various circles, have observed:
If one woman in a group of women has a nicer job, handbag, husband, x than the other women in the group, their stance will to the lines of "that fucking bitch! She doesn't deserve such a nice car".
If one man in a group of men has a nicer job, watch, wife, whatever than the other men in the group, their general stance will be "damn! I also want to be _as good as him_".
Women pull down, men work up.
Same shit at places of work: women will fuck shit up for other women with talk behind their backs and what not, no matter how competent or efficient the target his. I haven't yet heard anyone air the observation that men do this also. At most it might sound like "god what an asshole, but he sure gets shit done fast".
"The average British woman spends about £279 on beauty and cosmetics but she spends about a third more, £394 on technology products. By comparison the magazines she reads gives about 20 times as many column-inches to cosmetics than they do for tech. The disconnect between how the glossy mags choose to fill their pages and how British women actually spend their money suggests that traditional publishers are out of touch with their readership"
It does suggest that, but it also suggests that they're in touch with the "beauty and cosmetics" companies who spend money advertising in their magazines. Anyone got any data on how much technology companies spend advertising in women's magazines?
> "One of the magazines we studied, Glamour seems to recognise the value of advertising with 6.3% coming from tech companies. In this regard the publisher is somewhat ahead of the trend."
(Side point: Jumping on a "problem" you found in the first paragraph, and ask a question answered a few paragraphs further in, looks rather like you're interested in confirming your bias that this article must be wrong. That isn't a good way to learn about how the world works - If you're only reading HN to feel good, no problem, but I come here to learn stuff.)
I agree, people interested in technology buy technology-related magazines. People interested in fashion (don't assume just women do that, it's a bit sexist) buy fashion-related magazines.
Precisely. The error here seems to be assuming that just because these magazines are often aimed at women they should cover all areas. The magazine is still a dominant force in fashion whereas technology is heavily supported by many and varied online resources.
Gendered behaviours (according to society, your peers, etc) permeate all sorts of things that you personally might not consider "gendered". I wonder how many girls would get surprised questions if they read a tech magazine, compared to the lack of attention they would get reading Heat...
Not that some of them don't, but that's not how society expects them to behave (wrongly, of course), and most people hate standing out.
If somebody is making "The mistake of assuming technology magazines have male only readers" and it is everybody who works for or with the tech magazine in question
I do get what you are saying but you are literally judging the magazine by it's cover.
If I was the editor a tech magazine and knew my readership breakdown was 70/30 then I would be inclined (given that I have to have either a woman or man on the cover) towards putting the woman on the cover.
Perhaps there is a market niche for a good quality tech magazine for women. If there is a demand for it, some smart entrepreneur could make some money providing it!
Enlighten me what exactly will have a good quality tech magazine for women as a content - because everything I could think of is offensive to any woman that has real interest in technology? Tech content is gender neutral. The only thing I have really noticed gender differences is that color and industrial design play a bigger role in purchasing decisions than raw specs but this is very shaky foundation on which to build a magazine.
asking glossy print magazines to shun gloss is too much to ask for, people who pay for it, women who buy it and the advertisers, use the medium. a sufficiently advanced user would just go read it on their website.
These are the same women who make Romantic Comedies popular, you can't complain romcom has too many beautiful people and so less tech/geek stuff
I think this is a typical mistake feminists make. Instead of understanding and accepting what women want, they represents their view of what they should want and blame all other factors (stereotype anyone?).