Forget Discrimination, It Is Better to Be a Woman Online

I feel that we talk too much about gender online. I also feel that we talk way too much about women and how we are discriminated online. I believe that women have been fighting for equal rights for too long to easily forget about the fight, stop for a minute and realize the fight is probably over. If you behave like you are already equal, no one will doubt you are.

But if you remind everyone that you are actually a woman exactly at the very moment when you get your first nasty comment on a blog post and claim that you are attacked because trolls think women are better targets since they are easier to hurt, everyone will keep your gender in mind for the next time.

The key to equal rights online is not to focus on your gender in your communications - be it friendship or business. And if you don’t emphasize your gender, chances are no one will even think about it - instead, everyone will see you as a person who happens to be professional or unprofessional, friendly or evil, etc., not as a woman who happens to be attractive or unattractive. And here you are: you enjoy the equal rights.

Honestly, for some of my online friends who only represent themselves with nicknames and asexual avatars I have no idea of their gender - I just enjoy the conversations and don’t even care if the person behind the avatar wears a bra or not.

I may be mistaken but I feel that men are much more discriminated these days online. And those women that constantly talk about discrimination and how difficult it is to build your own brand as a woman in technology are a little (or probably not a little) hypocritical. Simply because it is way much better to be a woman online.

I believe that this statement is particularly true for the technology media field. What’s the audience here? You will sure guess it right - the majority of readers/viewers/listeners are male. But will you have any difficulties to name at least a few women who enjoy enormous popularity from this very male technology-savvy audience? I think you won’t, really: Kara Swisher, Mary-Jo Foley, Caroline McCarthy, Tamar Weinberg, Natali Del Conte and others are definitely prominent names in the industry.

And you know what? Even in my own pretty short (for now) online venture with Profy I have noticed one very important thing that at least some of these women are perfectly aware of: men do want to pay attention to women and even listen to what we have to say sometimes. Well, not all the time, of course - but after all, men are not always willing to listen to other men either. And of course if you are a woman and you overdo makeup and décolleté you are risking that men will watch only instead of listening - but that’s a choice every woman makes for herself, both online and offline.

The main point is that it really is easier to get attention from the male audience online for a woman and if you actually have something worthy to say to that audience, chances are you will reach the success you hope for.

But there’s another point to prove it’s better to be a woman online: not only can we grab attention easily, advertisers love us immensely. There’s a big story at The New York Times about this particular passion to women. The article discussed the fast growth rate for the websites targeted at women only as well as the revenue growth for this group of websites. The author confirms what we already know: women are actually decision-makers when it comes to household goods, food and health products.

And since women decide what to buy in this particular market, advertisers are craving to get their brands right in front of those women and target them where they can be reached best - at the sites catering to the interests women share, including fashion, family, and health. And these particular websites seem to enjoy the highest pay checks from advertisers that want to reach their female audiences.

What’s more, not only advertisers want to pay to reach their audiences, venture capitalists are more than happy to invest in their online activities to be able to get some nice ROI off this female boom we are now witnessing. Here is what Tim Draper, co-founder of Draper Fisher Jurvetson VC firm, had to say about this:

I love women. Women are more than half the population, and they do most of the shopping. We are constantly looking for more sites that cater to women.

So it’s no surprise that DFJ has already invested in Glam Media, CafeMom, MyShape, and NearbyNow.

The conclusion here is that it is really better to be a woman online (sorry, my dear male friends): you enjoy the audience, you get the attention, you are loved by advertisers and you can even build your own business online and reach a success if you know how to target other women with what you have to offer, even if it is simply stories about shopping or your day-to-day relationships with your loves ones. What discrimination are we talking about here, really? When was the last time Robert Scoble or Michael Arrington was offered to pose nude for a women magazine? Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think it ever happened at all. Even comScore ignores men sites by not tracking them as a category so maybe its reverse discrimination already?

The only problem I see here is that it may not be the best option to be a woman in technology any more because technology monetizes much worse than those womanish topics advertisers want to be placed near, like fashion or health. So probably we will soon see all those powerful female tech bloggers starting a blog or two about their lifestyle, clothes or children? At least this could bring them nice extra revenue - provided that they are as efficient in talking to female audience as they are in discussing technology with men.