Beyond a pink phone

By Anne Bouverot, Director General, GSMA

If Steve Jobs had been a woman, the iPhone would have been pink. Siri would have been a man, and the default ring time before voicemail kicks in would have been two minutes, to allow women time to find their phone in their handbags. Very bad stereotypes, I know!, but sadly there is a grain of truth here. When I ran the mobile business for Orange – France Télécom, handset makers did actually send me pink phones, ‘because she is a woman’…

Thinking about this seriously now, if Steve had been a woman, I think products like the iPhone would be elegant and stylish. They would be perfectly sized to fit in your hand, and they would have a sleek design, sculpted from the finest materials. The software that runs on the phone would be simple and intuitive, while providing all of the features needed for your daily life. The iPhone would be a high-quality product that consumers would love to own.

Now, those of you that own an iPhone will realise that what I have described above is exactly what an iPhone is today. In fact, many of the latest generation of smartphones coming to market meet these criteria. We are in the midst of an exciting time for the mobile phone industry, with a range of amazing designs from companies like Apple and Samsung and others to capture the imagination of consumers.

«My goal is to live in a world of great design and services, but also a world where they are produced by companies that are led by great men and great women»

The key point for me is that it does not matter whether Steve Jobs was a man or a woman. What is important is that great design comes to the fore and helps us all take advantage of the revolution in our lives that is being enabled by mobile broadband services.

But there is an underlying problem that needs to be resolved. While woman make up over half of the world’s population, they hold less than 5 per cent of the senior management positions in technology companies globally. And this is a massive lost opportunity for the world’s leading technology companies.

My goal is to live in a world of great design and services, but also a world where they are produced by companies that are led by great men and great women. Only then will we see the next generation of amazing products, and the demise of the pink phone stereotype!

ICTs are not synonymous with knowledge society and woman is not synonymous with gender

By Gloria Bonder, Director, Gender, Society and Policies Area, FLACSO Argentina

Women, in Latin America and in most regions, are a minority in technology production, and this is one of the most significant digital gender divides. The research we have carried out from the UNESCO Chair in Women, Science and Technology in Latin America confirms this. However, the results enable us to state that gender inequalities in this field do not only concentrate on this issue. Age, ethnicity, educational and socio-economic level and area of residence (urban/rural) are some of the determinants that have a significant influence on the construction of this techno-cultural environment.

Only an uninformed view would lead us to state that the first step has to be increasing the number of women in technological production. Looking more closely, we realize that change does not start there.

«Creating technology with gender awareness is a first step towards a society that is more receptive to both women and men's ways of thinking and innovating»

Encouraging the interest of more women in technology careers, reversing the stereotypes that associate ICTs with the male world, promoting the full participation of women in technology-based enterprises and encouraging strategic appropriation of ICTs by both women and men, are some of the links of this chain that must be strengthened.

Having (more) women in technological production does not ensure an information/knowledge society that is more inclusive, diverse and attentive to their needs, desires and interests. However, if the person who creates technology (either male or female) does so with gender awareness, we will have taken a first step in overcoming inequalities, and in the construction of an information/knowledge society that is more receptive to everyone's ways of thinking, innovating and transforming, both men and women.

If Steve Jobs had been a woman, perhaps the only difference would be the Apple logo.

How to promote female 'geek' vocations

By Cristina Ribas, Associate Professor, Pompeu Fabra University

Could Linux, Facebook, Apple and Google have been created by women? I think they could, but the fact is that the most visible faces on the internet right now are still men. Does this have anything to do with women's reluctance to consider themselves, and indeed refer to themselves, as brilliant or ‘genius’? Or is that geek culture is too distant from the prevailing sexist education? I wouldn't like to hazard a guess as to the reasons, though I'm sure that both of these have an influence. What is clear is that the consequences of the fact that very few women are creating and influencing technology are very negative, both for women themselves and for society as a whole. As is the case in so many other fields, not only is it unfair to limit decision-making powers and participation by relegating women to simple consumer status, but also shutting women entails a huge waste of talent which could be focused in new and innovative directions. What can we do to make the culture and vocation of technology more appealing to women?

«It is unfair to limit decision-making powers and participation by relegating women to simple consumer status, but also shutting women entails a huge waste of talent which could be focused in new and innovative directions»

First of all, greater visibility needs to be given to the female protagonists of the history of technology to shatter the image of their presence as unusual or impossible: Ada Lovelace, the mathematician daughter of Lord Byron, regarded as the first female programmer; Betty Jean Jennings and Fran Bilas who, amongst other things, programmed the first ENIAC computer in the 1950s; plus all those anonymous women who worked tirelessly at Bletchley Park deciphering codes during the Second World War, who cyberfeminist Sadie Plant paid tribute to in her book Zeros and Ones. In the same way that the industrial revolution was woven by the hands of women in the textile factories, so digital workers were also women, according to Plant.

We can also find women in senior management positions in many iconic internet companies, such as Marissa Mayer, who shone at Google and since July has been president and CEO at Yahoo, and Sheryl Sandberg one of the most successful executives in the digital business, currently at Facebook. It is also worth pointing out that even though there has been a drop in the number of engineers and computer technicians in the United States, we are seeing innovative start-ups led by young entrepreneurs, as explained by this article in USA Today.

«Something is not working in the educational system because there are very few girls with a geek vocation, who want to become programmers»

Who knows what we might be losing if there are fewer women programmers and entrepreneurs, as we need new strategies to help us transform the world, society and the economy, with the help of ICTs. This happened in the field of primatology, which had a before and an after, when three women introduced a new study method by sharing the habitats of groups of chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. The "trimates" —Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Birutë Galdikas― managed to understand the behaviour of these simians which are most closely related to humans as never before. One of the keys to this was that they considered human integration in the group of animals, a method that had not occurred to any male researchers.

There are many more examples of women's input in traditionally masculine sectors. For example, many years ago the sociologist Carme Alemany found that the washing machines designed mainly by men had numerous wash programmes, of which only two or three were ever used, while solutions to practical problems, such as how to make a wash stop if the colours start running —which are technologically simple to resolve― were dreamt up by women designers. Some engineers, such as the Colombian Inés Restrepo often think along different lines in order to tackle the same problem. Restrepo dreamt up a system of harvesting water in local communities using small gutters built in a network by each inhabitant, without the need for huge, costly and environmentally-damaging dams, which had been put forward as the only solution by the (male) engineers in her country. All of us benefit from new solutions from fresh perspectives. Another contribution might be a change of leadership, from the purely transactional short-term and predominantly masculine perspective to a transformational type of leadership with other goals that focus more on creating long-term value, as explained by doctor Sara Berbel on the subject of women's leadership.

Caption from the EU video campaign Science: it's a girl thing!

Furthermore, we need to move away from the stereotypes featured in campaigns such as the European Union initiative to promote scientific vocations among young people. This controversial video, which ended up being withdrawn, showed women among make-up and microscopes, as if they had to trivialize research to make it appealing to women. Psychologist Gemma Altell, on analysing this case, highlights two important questions. On the one hand, what do we need to change in the educational system to make girls more interested in science and technology? It is obvious that something is not working because there are very few girls with a geek vocation, who want to become programmers. And, furthermore, how can we stop fuelling the prejudices that make us judge women —and not men— by their appearance, and how do we reinvent what it means to be a man or a woman in the 21st century, casting aside the androcentric models generated thousands of years ago.

The European Women’s Lobby on the Role of Recognition

By Signe Kristine Nørgaard, guest writer for The European Women’s Lobby (EWL).

Could a woman do Steve’s job? Yes, of course. But the status and fame she would acquire are unlikely to bring her anywhere close to the adulation accorded to Steve Jobs, as Siri Hustvedt pointed out in her contribution to this blog. Whether we talk about pioneers at the frontiers of innovation or culture-bearing institutions, we witness the same tendency: when women enter a new (or old) male dominated field, the mysticism evaporates along with much of the status and pay. Consider how prestige and status have escaped historically masculine bastions such as education, the arts, politics and medicine proportionally to the degree of ‘feminisation’, the causality of which has been discussed superbly by Swedish historian Yvonne Hirdman.^[1]

What excludes women from IT is not the hype and mysticism, but the gendered exclusivity which they symbolise. Inclusion on the other hand means breaking the gendered spell and a subsequent drop in prestige. Of course it is not all that black and white. This could not be further from a biological or essentialist argument. IT is a vast and rather abstract ‘sector’ hardly reserved for men, but there are forces at play which de facto makes it mainly a male domain. It matters little if we are talking about IT or other prestigious sectors dominated by men or rather, masculine values and attributes. The IT sector is symptomatic of the issues worth investigating here. No more, no less.

«IT is a vast and rather abstract ‘sector’ hardly reserved for men, but there are forces at play which de facto makes it mainly a male domain»

Having provided certain insights into the past and current situation, the pressing question is what we can do to change it. As has been brought up several times on this blog, taking to task gendered stereotypes and role models is an important step towards increasing women’s stake in the sector. And we must go beyond that. Comprehensively overthrowing gendered stereotypes requires that we confront the gendered value system itself. From this perspective, asking what it would take for a woman to do Steve’s job and win his glory is not good enough. Can we even imagine the same hype, prestige and monetary value attributed to, say, an outstanding woman working in the care sector? We might not yet be able to envision this scenario, but the point is we need to develop that ability!

IT or care economy. We know that the first sector does not exceed the latter in economic or societal importance. But we also know that the societal valuation of the contributions of these sectors by no means reflects this reality. This discrepancy can be linked to the age-old political discussion about production vs. reproduction on the one hand and on the other it is a pressing socio-economic problem. Above all it is a gender issue. The gender segregation in the IT and care sectors is not a law of nature, nor are the distorted valuations of these sectors’ respective contributions or associated gender pay gaps. Therefore the most tangible benchmark for progress is the level of gendered pay and pension gaps and of gender segregation in the labour markets. But the solution must be found taking a more ethereal road through our minds. So long as society (women and men) subscribes to masculinised ideals, women’s work, regardless of the sector, will remain undervalued in terms of pay and prestige.

«So long as society subscribes to masculinised ideals, women’s work, regardless of the sector, will remain undervalued in terms of pay and prestige»

This is not a battle between the sexes, but merely a matter of how recognition operates. Recognition, like respect, is not something one can claim, but something one must be given; the double meaning of recognition being key here: the way men successfully achieve recognition (acknowledgement) from each other is to a great extent dependent on their societally-rooted culture for mutual recognition in the sense that they ‘recognise’ (know, see and understand) each other. A woman achieving a position equivalent to Steve Jobs’ depends on affecting profound social change, but also on women’s ability to strengthen mutual recognition on their own terms by affirming what we already know: the deep awareness of the indispensable role of our contributions whether they are productive or reproductive. All the proof we need is already there. We need to operationalise this evidence and start formalising the means (institutional, capitalist, symbolic, communicative etc.) to give ourselves the recognition we know we deserve.

Footnote:
1. Her profound investigation of gendered culture, symbols and values is synthesized in the work Genus – det stabilas föranderliga former (the mutable shapes of stability). She develops a 'gendered power system' which refers to historically embedded, set of gendered values and symbols, which permeate our daily language and norms. Due to this inherited symbolic system "the masculine" is automatically attributed greater value than the "feminine". What is understood as 'masculine' and 'feminine' can change radically, but the gendered power system remains stable because power, value, prestige and status accrues to the ever 'masculine'. According to this logic attributes with feminine connotations can later on be adopted as 'masculine' attributes and so switch from low to high status, only now they are no longer 'feminine'.

Imagining Sarah Jobs: An Exploration of Gender Roles and Technology

By Carolyn Danckaert, co-founder, A Mighty Girl.

If Steve Jobs had been born female, for instance as Sarah Jobs, his experience would have been very different right from the start. As Sarah, it’s quite likely that her parents would have discouraged risk-taking behaviors from a very early age. One study found that mothers of 11-month old babies thought girl babies would be less capable of crawling down a carpeted slope than boy babies when, in reality, the girl babies were actually more daring than their male counterparts.¹ These types of perceptions encourage parents to intervene more quickly when their daughters are engaged in “risky” behaviors leading, over time, to girls’ decreasing confidence in their own abilities and willingness to take risks.

As Sarah grew, she would have discovered a significant difference in the types of toys offered to her versus boys. A 2009 study from the psychology journal Sex Roles found that 31% of toys marketed towards girls were focused on a girl’s appearance whereas 46% of those marketed towards boy were focused on activities.² As a result, Sarah would have begun to internalize a message that girls are passive and defined by their looks while boys are defined by their actions.

«Starting from Sarah's inculcation for risk aversion as a baby to the lack of female technology mentors at her university, the odds would have been heavily stacked against her»

Once Sarah went to college, it would have been highly unlikely that she would have chosen to major in computer science. While women in the US now receive 57% of bachelor’s degrees, less than 14% of computer science degrees are awarded to women.³ This disparity continues into the workforce where, according to a US Department of Commerce report, women hold half of the jobs in the US but less than a quarter of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) positions. Of course, this would not bode well for Sarah’s future earnings as women with STEM jobs earn 33% more than comparable women in non-STEM jobs. In this same report, the authors cite a few of the possible factors behind this discrepancy between women and men in STEM fields as being attributable to: “a lack of female role models, gender stereotyping, and less family-friendly flexibility in the STEM fields.”

Given that all of these facts and figures are focused on the current reality for girls and women, it’s logical to assume that these types of disparities would be all the more extreme when Steve Jobs was a child fifty years ago. So then, to answer the central question, if Steve has been born Sarah would she have emerged as the great technology innovator and business leader that Steve became? Starting from her inculcation for risk aversion as a baby to the lack of female technology mentors at her university, the odds would have been heavily stacked against her.

«Countless girls and women do not fully realize their potential as technology innovators and that loss is not just their own but society’s as well»

Of course, exceptional people beat the odds all the time and Sarah Jobs may have been one of those exceptional individuals. Even so, countless girls and women do not fully realize their potential as technology innovators and that loss is not just their own but society’s as well. Encouraging and enabling more women to follow Steve Jobs’ path will require widespread changes ranging from decreasing the gender stereotyping that girls encounter from a very young age to creating more mentorship programs for female high school and college students. There’s no doubt that the opportunities for girls and women today are far beyond what they were in Steve Jobs’ youth but, for the sake of all the current and future Sarah Jobs, we’re got a long way yet to go.

Would it have made a lot of difference?

By Inger Lassen, Professor, Department of Culture and Global Studies, Aalborg University (Denmark)

Intriguing as this question may seem, it might not have made a whole lot of difference whether Steve Jobs had been a woman. On the other hand it could. The question is perhaps not so much whether Steve Jobs would have been man or woman, but rather how Steve Jobs is discursively constructed as man or woman with stereotypically masculine or feminine features. Much gender research seems to be gradually moving away from essentialist views and the binary distinction between what professors Matts Alvesson and Yvonne Billing have referred to as bio-men and bio-women^[1], concepts that refer to the biological sex of men and women. However, we still tend to categorize each other, making stereotypical statements about what we see as typical masculine or feminine behaviour.

This is perhaps particularly predominant in management approaches, where for instance Judy Rosener, professor at The Paul Merage School of Business, refers to masculine and feminine leadership styles as transactional and transformational^[2]. In this view men’s role in leadership is seen as authoritative and women’s as empathetic. A transactional leadership style is task-oriented and uses the principle of rewards or punishments, relying to a great extent on positional authority. A transformational leadership style, on the other hand, encourages commitment to groups and organizational goals, participation in decisions making processes and managing through personal qualities, such as showing empathy and being able to listen to staff.

«Much gender research of today seems to share the idea that masculine and feminine behaviour may be characteristic of men as well as of women»

However, much gender research of today seems to share the idea that masculine and feminine behaviour may be characteristic of men as well as of women, gender primarily being constructed in social and cultural processes. Focusing on gender in organizations, Alvesson and Billing have warned us against gender over-sensitivity, claiming that gender might not always be a relevant parameter because individuals may perform a number of different identities which are not necessarily gender-specific. For instance, in a meeting where executives discuss whether to acquire another company, the parties involved in the discussion would rely more on various aspects of professional identity than on gender identity, which in the situation would most likely be irrelevant.

But where does this lead us when addressing the Open Thoughts 2012 question? According to journalist Sarah McInerney^[3], Steve Jobs’ management style «wasn’t the stuff of university textbooks – he wasn’t known for his consultative or consensus building approach. He was a “high-maintenance co-worker” who demanded excellence from his staff and was known for his blunt delivery of criticism». If the dual management styles mentioned above are anything to go by, this would categorize Steve Jobs as a transactional leader.

«There’s an impression that Jobs possessed both authoritative —or masculine— and empathetic —or feminine— features»

In many ways, this impression is shared by some experts, like Roberto Verganti, Professor of Management of Innovation at Politecnico di Milano,^[4] who refers to Jobs’ leadership style as «vertical, top-down and often harsh». However, Verganti recognizes at the same time that Jobs «managed by meaning» in the sense that to Apple’s co-founder people were human. In his view, Jobs thus offered meaning to customers as well as to employees by offering them a sense of mission, and thereby a sense of identity and loyalty with Apple. This might indicate that in addition to transactional features, Jobs also possessed what Rosener referred to as transformational features.

In his biography on Steve Jobs, author Walter Isaacson^[5] thus characterizes him as being «very emotional and sentimental» and able to «understand other people’s emotions». According to Isaacson, «Steve Jobs understood what caused people’s emotions and was able to connect emotionally with people». This combined with the sense of ‘meaning-making’ Jobs was able to infuse in people might be more closely related with a transformational management style.

So what if Steve Jobs would have been a woman? Well, there might not necessarily have been a whole lot of difference, don’t you think?

Footnotes:
1. Alvesson, M. and Billing. Y.D. (2002). «Beyond body-counting: A discussion of the social construction of gender at work». In Gender, Identity and the Culture of Organizations. Aaltio and Mills (eds.), 72-91. London and New York: Routledge.
2. Rosener, J.B. (1990). «Ways women lead», Harvard Business Review, November-December.
3. McInerney, S. (2011). «Steve Jobs. An unconventional leader». The Sydney Morning Herald, October.
4. Verganti, R. (2011). «Steve Jobs and Management by Meaning», Harvard Business Review, October.
5. Isaacson, W. (2011). Steve Jobs (Biography). USA: Simon and Schuster.

Further reading:
Majstorovic, D. and Lassen, I. (2011). Living with Patriarchy. Amsterdam and Philadelphia. Benjamins.