Ken,
are you claiming that “designing for the female market” is equal to “subdividing the world into a narrow and demographic slice”?!

For clarification:
Females make up half of humanity in all kind of different roles and settings. Woman are not a small group, nor a homogeneous group of users. For most parts their requirements for products and applications are not distinct from “male” requirements (i.e. my husband’s requirement to juggle childcare schedules is pretty identical to my own, as is his desire to fit a cellphone in his pocket, though he doesn’t share my need for female hygiene products .

Thus rather than considering “woman features” as an exception of the norm, we should try to identify and accommodate requirements relevant to a significant part of the user base, such as “parents” (and dissuade marketing from concentrating on pink covers and rhinestones .

Try reading “If men could menstruate” by Gloria Steinem. It holds up even after all these years. It shows how we can turn things on their heads when gender gets involved.

Also I’d read the presentation of self in everyday life by Goffman. It shows how we “give off” the impression of gender. By that token, you may also try Gender Trouble by Judith Butler (warning! heady academic stuff!).

These are all thought starters really. I prefer to read widely and then try thinking more narrowly only when specifically applying ideas.

As a designer, I agree with your general thesis. The ideal in design is to create an overarching universality that appeals to us as humans. However, good design also must considers the needs and lifestyle of the product’s specific target audience. As with ergonomic design, for example, we often choose a (statistically significant) compromise knowing full well that it will fit a very small minority perfectly.

For better or for worse, subdividing the world into narrow and presumptuous demographic slices, each with its own “monolithic experience,” is the nucleus of contemporary marketing theory. Broadening a product line in an attempt to hit the centers of statistical preference clusters does not inherently imply bad design.

Yeah, the whole ‘pink for girls’ thing is cliche. No doubt. They may well be incorrect using these assumptions to tailor the design to better suit more potential buyers. Statistically, though, more women buy pink products than men. That’s a tough point to argue.

The point is not that “some women like pink (though apparently not hot pink)”. The point is that “appealing to women” is somehow a different category than the default “make an appealing product.”

This is a classic case of making woman “the other.”

Some women like pink. Some men do too. That is not the problem. The problem is designing a product for the mass market and only realizing after the fact that this product does conform to some imagined notion of what women are and want.

There is no statistically valid problem with this; the problem is making the feminine gender a single, monolithic experience. This IS bad design because it does not serve actual users of the product.

Product designers who think “designing for women” is somehow different than “designing for people” do bad design. Designing for people who need small sizes is not a “women’s design”.

The more colors you make a product, the more SKU numbers, different packaging, production quantities, etc you’ll need – so it costs money to offer a variety of colors. In a lot of cases though, a Pink product isn’t any different – just Pink.

In your second enumeration you disengender the feature you’re describing. What you say makes sense, but it no longer addresses the needs of a woman (specifically). To engender a product, you need to leverage a quality that is specific to that gender – like women’s greater penchant for empathy, emotion, or verbal communication, etc.