Focus On Female Consumers And The Founders Will Follow
Women in tech. I hate to say it, but I am tired of hearing about women in tech.
As a female tech startup founder and angel investor, I am routinely asked how I feel about the lack of women in the technology sector. Frankly, I’m a bit tired of the question. It’s a topic worthy of discussion, but the conversation has grown far too narrow (as tends to happen in our Silicon Valley bubble).
While I have no doubt that the tech sector would benefit from more female founders, entrepreneurs and investors, we are missing a large part of the equation. Wishful thinking and arguing about female founders, entrepreneurs or gender roles is overriding recognition of the powerful role that the female consumer is already playing in technology.
Let’s talk not about women in tech. Let’s talk about women and tech.
We need to shift the conversation and analyze how and why the female consumer is affecting technology innovation.
For starters, let’s focus our attention on the groundswell of female consumers impacting the web marketplace. If gender is at all an investment consideration, it is best utilized in conjunction with concrete market statistics:
• 3,330: the number of text messages the average teenage girl sends a month
• 67%: the percent of Gilt Groupe’s audience that are female
• 77%: the percent of Groupon subscription base that are female
• Your mother: the average social gamer (ok, it’s a 43 year old woman, but close enough)
A basic conclusion that one could draw here is that females are just as or even more enthusiastic than males about technology and the web. The difference is in the types of web products and services females embrace and how they put these to use in their daily lives. Here are a few more examples of female-driven web behavior and trends that represent rapid-growth market opportunities:
Related articles
- The Founder Institute Aims to Graduate 175 Female Tech Founders in 2011 (thenextwomen.com)
- Gender And Tech Companies: Where Are The Women? (searchengineland.com)
