Technology firms must be feeling pretty secure about themselves right now; margins must be sky high and sales must be rocketing. This must surely be the case, otherwise why are they ignoring a market worth £600m in 2007 alone?
Yet this is what the majority of tech vendors and retailers, and even to some extent channel players, are doing. And this million-pound market? Women.
It will be no surprise to readers to find me advocating, nay, boasting about, the merits of women in the IT sector. I am, I’ll freely admit, terribly biased. But that doesn’t mean I am not making a valid point, nor does it mean I am wrong.
I have discussed previously the way to solve the skills crisis ­ through the infiltration of women into the tech sector. If we encourage girls at primary school about how ‘cool’ our sector is, we could go a long way to alleviating what is becoming a real problem.
But it is about more than this. Look at most technology and most technology advertising. It’s written by men for men. Women are almost universally excluded from the minds of advertising executives, who are too focused on the latest must-have boy toy to steal a glance at this cash-rich, tech-poor audience.
While some vendors ­ Apple and Sony in particular ­ have made efforts to target products at the female pound, quite frankly it has been a poor effort all round. And who is that confident in today’s market that they can afford to ignore £600m worth of spend, which, according to a Saatchi and Saatchi study last week, is how much ladies’ loot (or should that be women’s wonga) is worth.
An online technology boutique for women was launched last week to capitalise on this sector, so let’s hope that the vendors and advertisers out there start realising what they have been missing out on.
Sara Driscoll is editor of CRN