Promotion to women

Sometimes geek communities wish to promote a cause or product to women. This guide suggests how to do this in an inclusive, appealing way. Note that while this guide suggests more pragmatic reasons for inclusive marketing, this doesn't imply that there aren't also moral and social justice reasons for it.

Suggestions on how to promote to women:

• Invite women explicity, e.g. ask individual women to submit a paper for a conference
• Have clear diversity statements, and stick to them.
• When selling/giving clothing, have women's styled clothing available. (This is the shape of the clothing, not a different design altogether). see Tshirts

Crucial mistakes to avoid:

• General segmentation into "people" and "women", for example, people who like a wide variety of colours and fun functioning quality products and can listen to and evaluate nuanced arguments versus women, who will buy/believe anything that's pink.
• Treating women as if they only get involved in things or buy things because of other people, ie, treating them as a carer for their family.
• Tokenism: your campaign or promotion should avoid having many many images or voices of men, and only one or two women
• Sexist advertising: your campaign or promotion should avoid only having extremely conventionally attractive women, especially if this is not true of men or their images which you use.
• So simple, your mother could do it: don't segment into "cluey women" and "women who have had children". Most women have children at some point, and if they don't they usually have women friends who do. Likewise, don't segment into "cluey women" and "women over the age of [60/50/40/sometimes even 30]". Most influential women (like influential men) are older.