YOU CAN’T TALK TO WOMEN
The title of our panel was quite clearly link-bait but at least we didn’t give it the full-on Daily Mail “10 reasons why your girlfriend says you can’t talk to women”. Given the build up to Social Media Week that was unlikely. I should explain.
It started with a drink and a journalist
One of our party tricks at Relative Insight is to take your Twitter feed and determine to within about 5 years how old you are, and whether you are male or female. It comes from our work with crime agencies, where it’s used more seriously to find and track bad guys online. It’s extraordinarily accurate, or at least we thought it was until we realised that female journalists often come out as male. The first time this happened I was being interviewed for Sky News, and it was one of those embarrassing situations when I realised my analysis might upset the journalist just as I was saying it. She took it with good humour, thankfully, and they even used it in ads for the segment. But when we dug into why this was the case we discovered it was because she posted a lot of headlines, and it turns out headlines heavily skew any result male. So we optimised our profiling tech, started putting brands through it, and thought it would be a good idea to put a panel together for Social Media Week to talk about it.
No pressure
The build up to the panel was quite frankly terrifying. The thought of being the only bloke on a panel discussing the impact of gender filled my head with images of a tweet-storm with prominent feminists I know and admire decrying my every word. Thankfully I managed not to embarrass myself too much, though much of that was due to the expert insight of my fellow panellists Emily Forbes of SeenIt and Yelena Gaufman of Havas, and our superb moderator Jen Smith of Maxus.
Great questions from an engaged audience
We had some great questions from the audience about our thoughts around the impact of gender on brands, and it was great to see Yelena challenging my view on the importance of this. Emily rightly pointed out it seems a day doesn’t go by without another story in the press of sexism from a brand. The subject provoked many conversations among the immediate audience and beyond around this and the wider impact of feminism. Some notable quotes from the event:
“Start with the nuance of people’s dreams/hopes/aspirations instead of starting with what gender they are” — Yelena Gaufman
“Female editors don’t resolve the masculine nature of headlines, they still use a masculine tone” — Rich Wilson
“Highlight real issues, don’t just pick a theme. Social media enables people to have a real-time response” — Emily Forbes
“Tesco has changed the voice of their self checkouts to male because female voice is deemed bossy,” — Jen Smith
“Wow. Do we define men in charge as bossy? Then why is a woman’s voice deemed bossy. That’s ridiculous.” — Rich Wilson
“Fact: 3% of creative directors are women” — Jen Smith
“A brand should be human and it should care. Is that male or female?” — Yelena Gaufman
“Why are we referring to women as a mass audience when data now allows us to dig much deeper than that?”— Jen Smith
“Feminism is the new sex, it’s used to sell things” — Yelena Gaufman
The brand gender research continues
Our work at Relative Insight analysing gender in brands is by no means complete, and we continue to put more brands through our linguistic profiling tech to get a better understanding of why brands come across as male or female. If you’d like to learn more and profile your brand then drop me a line.
Rich Wilson is co-creator of his two sons, Relative Insight, and many other tech startups.
