Winsome, Gender and Technology

We’ve spent the last 3 days at the Thames Boat Show marketing our pedal skiff ‘Winsome’ which we’ve developed in partnership with Swallow Boats Ltd.

Winsome (named after my late aunt) is a 17 foot elegant pedal boat which two people can propel in a relaxed and laid back fashion whilst sipping wine or reading the Sunday papers. You can see more about the product here.

The Thames Boat Show focuses on traditional looking wooden boats and kits and the clientele is usually fairly heavily dominated by men often trailing slightly reluctant looking wives and kids. However, we were delighted to discover that Winsome seems to appeal to women just as much as men – maybe even more. I was also intrigued by the fact that the visitors at the show revealed such marked (but familiar) gender differences in the kinds of questions they asked about the boat – both before and after they tried it out.

The men focussed on the technical questions – “What gearing ratio are you using?” “What size is the propeller?” “How many knots will the boat do?” and “What material is the gear box housing?” Meanwhile, the women (equally engaged) focussed on asking about the kinds of places you could go in such a boat, how many of the family could come along and the kinds of trips we had already done.

This is exactly in line with research studies I have done recording men and women conversing about a range of technical artefacts. Although the popular view is that men are more interested in technical artefacts than women are, we actually found no disparity in the levels of interest. The difference was that the men’s interest focussed on the technology itself – its features, its performance and how to operate it. In contrast, the women showed little or no interest in features or performance. They enthused about the uses they had found for an artefact – i.e. the interesting or useful things it enabled THEM to do.

We are hoping that coincidentally with Winsome, we have designed a product which engages the interests of both genders – it involves some novel and intriguing engineering AND can take you to novel and intriguing places!