Women, Technology and Creating Sustainable Business Advantage

We have been banging on about this for ages, here it is yet again from Computer Weekly.(Hat tip Sarah Blow for link)

....irrespective of the reasons for people's lack of understanding, the argument for more women in technology needs to be made really simple. So here's an easy reason to get on board for those who just don't get it: Money! Profit! Lots of lovely revenue! Amazingly enough, companies with a mixed workforce make more money, in general, than companies without. An article in the Harvard Business Review last month said that the female market has twice the potential of China and India combined. And a study by advertising consultancy Lady Geek, founded by Belinda Parmar, found there's a possible £0.6bn up for grabs in the UK technology market alone. That's right, you could make loads of money convincing me I need another one of your lovely laptops. If only you'd stop slapping butterflies on them and trying to tell me they're a fashion accessory.

The money is there for the taking - if you get it right (which very few companies have yet). And what's more, to tap into this market, you need people who are able to get it right (which very few companies are yet). If you want to make money out of women buying technology, you need more women working for you. It's genius! I might patent this idea before the big boys catch on.
In a further extraordinary revelation, McKinsey's 2007 "Women Matter" report showed European companies with the highest proportion of women in senior management experience better-than-average financial performance. It makes logical sense, because different types of people are likely to have different ideas. Discussion will hopefully throw up the best way of approaching something. (That's if everyone is capable of communicating and discussing things properly, which is admittedly a fairly big if.) There's a steady stream of articles and books backing up the claim that mixed teams do better.

Readers of this blog will know that our hypothesis is that having women designing services for women will create fairly sustainable advantage over male dominated businesses. It is interesting to think about why this obvious stuff is not being acted on, given the arbitrage afforded to people who will act on it.

(Although, on a related matter, I'm glad that Nichola Pease has started to highlight the economic costs of maternity leave on very small startup companies in the UK - the law is fine for large companies but potentially crippling for small ones)