Technology for Women

I had a great meeting with a client yesterday. She’s a lady who needed help with creating an email campaign for a women’s group she is establishing.

We talked for about two hours. She explained to me how her idea of a woman’s group came about, what it is going to accomplish, what is its purpose. As she spoke my well-trained mind began to compile a list of all the technology she could use to support her project: WordPress for her blogging site, Constant Contact for her online newsletter, A customer signup form for creating a mailing list, Ning for an online community...

She is one of those people who doesn’t spend much time online and therefore has no idea about blogs, online newsletters, social networks and such. She is one of those people whose eyes usually glaze over after about 5 minutes of listening to just about anything internet or technology-related, and who either just drops whatever they were going to do out of sheer confusion, or asks desperately “can you just do all this for me?!”

However this is not how my meeting went. She made us some tea and we sat at her computer. She showed me some artwork that she had found, which expressed the feeling and the meaning she wishes to convey. We talked about the name of her women’s group, about the meaning of symbols she wanted to include. She told me how she would like to communicate with her prospective students, and of what she would like to write.

It seemed that we didn’t talk about technology at all. It seemed that all we talked about was what she wanted to express, create, bring into the world, of what images and colors we could use on her site to make her visitors open to the space she wants to create, and yet we managed to accomplish quite a bit on a technical plane. We registered a domain, got a hosting service set up, signed her up for a Constant Contact account, and even had a brief tutorial on how to create an email campaign.

It didn’t seem as though we talked about technology at all because technology was not the focus, not the purpose of the meeting. The focus was on her project and how we could best present it to the world. Building a website was not the focus of our discussion, the focus was on creating a community; on creating a place where people can come and experience what she’s created; where they can connect and share with others.

That meeting was a great experience for me and for the client. She told me as I was leaving that it was great to be able to work with another woman rather than with a man. I thought about that as I drove back home.

I remembered having another experience several months ago, of trying to introduce a friend of mine to all that is available in the online world. This friend is in her early sixties, is a great writer and a superb body-worker. Her whole experience of online technology however is that of using email. My husband and I had met with her to discuss online marketing, as she was working on reprinting and self-publishing a book. We told her all about websites, blogs, shopping carts and PayPal buttons, of social networks and Twitters. The more excited we became the more quiet and withdrawn she seemed to become. When we finished our recital she looked at us helplessly and asked if “we could just do all this for her”. We assured her that we could.

It was a difficult and frustrating process for us and for her. It seemed that she simply couldn’t get it. No matter how many times we explained what and how to do she simply didn’t remember. No matter how simple and obvious an online interface seemed to us, she would always be totally mystified by it. After a few weeks and a few meetings we all decided, by unspoken consensus, to simply let the project go. It just wasn’t working.

The simplest and most obvious explanation would be that she was not willing to learn “new tricks.” But an idea, half formed, hovered in my mind. I thought that the online system we had created for her did not fit her. The way that the system operates is not the way she operates. I felt that somehow we were trying to fit her into a situation that was simply wrong for her, didn’t work for her.

I forgot all about that until my meeting yesterday. As I was driving back home feeling really good about the two hours’ work and thinking about the disastrous situation with my friend, I realized that the half-formed idea was the right one.

Before, when I worked with my friend, I was trying to fit her into a system as it was. It didn’t matter who my friend is, how she relates, how she communicates. The system is what it is. The technology works how it works. She just has to deal with it if she wants to use it. But when I worked with my client yesterday I found myself adjusting the technology to what she needed, aligning it to who she is, making sure that it resonated with how she relates, how she communicates.

It occurred to me then that the reason so many women resist or are afraid of technology is that technology is not designed, nor is it presented, in alignment with women. Technology is not adjusted to the way women think and relate. Technology is created, for the most part, by men and for men. The way it is structured is the way that a man’s mind works: straightforward, linear, logical, practical. Achieving the perfect system, the perfect software, the brilliant piece of code, is often the goal in and of itself.

The client I worked with yesterday was not interested, nor would she be impressed by how wonderfully complex a web structure I could provide her with. What was important was how the online system could support her in her work, how it could contribute, how she could use it to relate to others in her own way.

She was happy to be able to work with a woman, not only, I thought, because it make her feel less pressured, more receptive to something that is usually considered a man’s thing, less intimidated in the company of a tech nerd who talks too fast and uses words she doesn’t understand, but mainly because we translated the technology, the system, into a woman’s language, a woman’s reality. We approached it in a way that a woman finds safe, inviting, exciting and easy to relate to.

This experience left me thinking that there is a greater opportunity in the technical world created by men, the opportunity of women taking ownership and transforming what men have created, and bringing it to a whole new level of creativity and cooperative, relational adventures.