Women are the early adopters of all kinds of technology. We talk on our phones and send more text messages than men, spend more time using location-based services, and own the vast majority of Internet-connected devices, including e-readers and health gadgets. Not that you would know any of this walking around the International Consumer Electronics Show, the colossal gadget convention that wrapped up last week in Las Vegas. CES is a four-day festival of tech at its most hyper-masculine, complete with booth babes, the most ridiculous TVs ever, thousands of square feet devoted to classic man-toys like high-fidelity audio equipment and car tech.
What little there was for women spoke volumes about how gadget makers see us, its female consumers. Industry assumption No. 1: To get more women to buy wearables, give us more glamorous options. A handful of companies displayed fitness bands and smart watches specifically for women, who, the exhibitors claim, are turned off by black rubber and steel form factors. Chief among them this year was Misfit, which unveiled an activity tracker gleaming with Swarovski crystals designed to be worn either wrapped around the wrist or as a pendant. Gorgeous, the gadget mag Wired applauded, holding up Zsa Zsa Gabor-esque Swarovski Shine as evidence that 2015 is the year "wearables will stop being so ugly."
Source: MisfitMisfit unveiled the Swarovski Shine at this year's CES That’s been the speculation for the last several years: Women will fall in love with fitness trackers as soon as they get pretty. There's a lot to find ridiculous in that argument, starting with the fact that few self-respecting women would wear the above watch to participate in any actual fitness. I’d also argue that the women who do care about their biometric data already have some attractive options. The elegance of Withings’s new unisex Activité Pop has the potential, if smartly marketed, to capture women without looking like a spendy bangle from Bergdorf’s. Jawbone claims that users of its Yves Béhar–designed Up are split roughly equally between men and women.
Source: FitbitTory Burch for Fitbit Yet the tech industry continues to insist that a device must be disguised as something precious and Luddite for women to adopt it en masse. Over the past year, many other tech companies have made overtures to women by teaming up with fashion designers to produce stylish activity trackers—among them, Intel, which enlisted the fashion-forward Open Ceremony to create a device called Mica, and Fitbit, which commissioned Tory Burch to lend her name and a metallic skin to a fitness bracelet. In the end, it's not clear whether the makers of fitness bands and smart watches actually want women to take advantage of their full features or if they just want them to buy a new bracelet. It's possible they don't care either way. A sale is a sale.
CES has speaker panels, too, small confabs about the Internet of Things-this, connected home-that. There were dozens, but only one about lady tech. Hoping to hear some new ideas about how gadget makers might better woo their female customers, I hiked over to “Women and Wearables." At the very least, I figured, someone might be able to make a cogent argument for why they thought prettifying gadgets was the way to go.
But none of the big players were there, and the organizers were clearly challenged to fill the panel with people qualified to talk about women and tech. Two of the speakers—the only men in the six-person group—had little to say about how to get women to love tech, although one of them held up an sports bra with a detachable heart-rate monitor. Fortunately, the other four made sense and, in talking about their products, pointed to an alternative if not wholly less problematic approach to wearables for women: the right gadget, they suggested, could alleviate a measure of anxiety particular to overextended, hyperconnected women.
Source: InteraxonMuse headband “One of the big issues that we have as women is wanting to do everything and be perfectionists,” said Ariel Garten, one of the panelists and the CEO and cofounder of the Toronto-based startup Interaxon. So she invented Muse—a $300 EEG headband that senses brainwaves and delivers feedback—to help women silence their inner critic. "There’s this little voice inside our heads that says, ‘Oh, you should have done better.’ With Muse, what you learn to do is shut down that voice. You can take your brain somewhere else and have—sometimes for the first time—dominion over your own brain.” Garten maintains that by knowing when they’re calm and focused, Muse wearers can train themselves to replicate that brain pattern to control their stress level.
Ugly fitness bands have nothing on Muse, which shouldn’t be worn in public outside a Star Trek convention. Still, if I, a working mother, were given a choice of a jewel-encrusted step-counter or a non-chemical means of managing daily stress, I’d opt for the latter. But emotional well-being isn’t easily quantifiable, so companies—a growing market for fitness devices—are more likely to buy their employees fitness trackers to encourage physical health, and lower their insurance premiums, than to offer onsite yoga classes.
Source: SAFE Family WearablesPaxie wristband for kids Another device promised to alleviate a different kind of female anxiety, especially when tethered to her child like a house-arrest anklet. “When I became a mom, this mamma bear instinct came out to protect my child,” said panelist Jennifer Lazarus, chief marketing officer of SAFE Family Wearables. “You don’t want to leave your child, but circumstances require [it], so having a device where you can check in and see where your child is at all times is useful.” Her solution: a wristband called Paxie that monitors the GPS location, heart rate, and ambient temperature for kids aged 18 months to 12 years. The $175 band ships in May and comes with three interchangeable skins to make them look cool. If a kid isn’t convinced of their fashion cred, tough—the bands require two hands to remove, and doing so will send an alert to the smartphone-wielding helicopter parent. (For new mothers who obsessively hover over their baby’s silent cribs looking for signs of breathing, there’s Sproutling, a $299 anklet that tracks heartbeat, body temperature, and noise level in the room to predict a baby’s sleep pattern. Scheduled ship date: March.)
And when we're with our kids, we still struggle to stay present while we balance demands of parenthood, work, friends, and spouses. Clichéd? Sure, but also resonant. Rather than rifling through a handbag for a smartphone to capture moments of family togetherness, why not just wear a Wi-Fi-enabled clip-on camera that automatically snaps two pictures a minute? Corina Standiford, another panelist, raised a little more than $550,000 on Kickstarter in 2012 to launch the gadget, originally named Memoto; it’s since been rebranded as Narrative. “We see a lot of moms use this to really stay in the moment and capture those really silly, candid, real photos of their children,” said Standiford, Narrative’s director of communications. “When you take out your phone to take a photo, a lot of times the kids stop, or they put on a cheesy smile.” As any Muse-wearing mother will tell you, cultivating calm and focus is easier if you're not yelling at children to stand still for just one second, please. Is that too much to ask?
Source: NarrativeNarrative, a clip-on, life-logging camera The irony, of course, is that these products created in response to a woman's anxiety at being stretched too thin may only make it worse. Like many parents, I live in a state of perpetual compromise, incapable of devoting as much time as I'd like to either my 14-month old son or my job. I could track the exact location of my child while I'm at the office, and that might assuage some of my maternal fears; it would also add another distraction to an already packed workday.
Here's what else an anti-anxiety headband won't do: counteract the Lean In pressure felt by working mothers. The problem for women who feel like they have to do everything is that they feel like they have to do everything and that's impossible. More and better devices may offer us ways to do marginally more, but to what end? Even if our wearable camera takes photos automatically, we still have to go home, download all those photos, sort them, crop them, label them, back them up, send them to the grandparents, print out a photo book, and so on. The hardware is not the problem.
Unfortunately, playing on women's anxiety — about our bodies, our hair, our skills as mothers, our professional ambition — does work. Women's magazines are expert at this; so is the fashion industry. It's disheartening to see another industry piling on, but it's not the dumbest strategy. What's more, emotional well-being is slippery. Whatever you do, if it makes you feel better, then it's working. If that's a security wristband for your second-grader or a bedazzled smart watch for you, so be it. I'll just be over here, monitoring my brainwaves.
