while the line of gadget-laden men snakes around the pillars and posts. This the upside of the downside of the unequal gender balance in the technology industry. A more common example is restrooms. Women’s facilities routinely have baby-changing tables; more often than not, men’s restrooms do not. This is a clear indication of who is expected to change babies’ diapers. This design ensures that a particular gendered practice of parenting remains in place. One could argue that this makes sense statistically, because more women than men change babies. But this is a chicken-and-egg problem; if there were more gender-neutral changing facilities, would those statistics change over time?

Aesthetics. We have all heard
that to appeal to the female
market we need to make cor-
ners rounded and pinkify every-
thing. Drag queens and other
self-conscious performers of
the “feminine” (Miss Piggy is
perhaps my favorite embodi-
ment of this) all know that to be
truly female you have to render
everything pink. An aside: Lady
Penelope’s FAB1 was decidedly
pink. Personally I am all for
pink, and I couldn’t care less
whether that is a physiological
or a cultural imperative. But I
am not powerless in the face of
pink. This is a preference and a
choice, and if the product is not
pink, I don’t feel like it there-
fore cannot have a place in my
life. Moving beyond color, it is
an accepted view that women
tend to be more playful with
appearance and tend to tailor
environments—real and vir-
tual—more than men. Brenda
Laurel, the creator of “Purple
Moon,” a game designed specifi-
cally for girls, reports that girls
tend to spend more time creat-
ing and designing the game
environment and their charac-
ter appearance than boys do.
Extending this, women spend
more time filling out their pro-
files online, and tailor their ava-
tars more frequently and with
more embellishments.

March + April 2010