Dell’s new “Della” Web site patronises women
Update 14th May: Late yesterday, Dell removed the elements I was complaining about! Not sure if I can take credit, but a win regardless.
Still work to do there though Dell-folks.
Earlier this week Dell launched a new Website subsection targeted at women called ‘Della‘. The site is incredibly patronising and grossly sexist, offending me and many other women, both techies and non-techies alike. You can see the PDF here, or a transcript in HTML below:
Dead Sir/Madam,
Re: ‘Della’ Web site
I am writing to you in two capacities:
1) My company, Memset Dedicated Hosting, is a significant customer of yours. We are one of UK’s top Web & IT hosting companies, and have a strong ethos of corporate responsibility. We exclusively use Dell servers for our infrastructure, and even in this recessive climate we expect to spend several hundred thousand pounds on Dell equipment this year.
2) I am a spokesperson for Intellect’s (the UK’s high tech trade association) women in IT forum, and I am also closely involved with the British Computer Society’s Women’s forum strategic panel. In short, I am a strong voice in the movement to challenge the stereotypes and sexism that pervade the UK technology industry, and to encourage more girls towards careers in IT. These are my views, however, and you will get more diplomatic letters from those organisations individually.
My female colleagues and I (IT professionals and non-technologists alike) find the Della Web site to be patronising and sexist in the extreme. As IT companies, we all have a moral corporate responsibility to challenge the incredibly damaging stereotype that “women are clueless about technology”, and it is all the more important with a product that will certainly appeal to impressionable girls!
The “tech tips” section leaves me positively fuming with its derogatory implication that most women are vain housewives who need to be treated like children when it comes to computers! Here are some of the particularly offensive “tech tips”:
2. Get healthier: Use your mini to track calories, carbs and protein with ease, watch online fitness videos, map your running routes and more.
3. Eat better: Find recipes online, store and organize them, and watch cooking videos.
4. Get organized: ‘Remember the Milk’ is a free, tweakable online task manager that’s easy to use.
Please remove the offensive content immediately. I realise that it is part of the US Dell site, but we are in a global economy and the Internet does not recognise International borders!
You are already getting significant bad press as a result of this site’s launch:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/12/dell_launches_della/
The Register is the UK’s leading technology news Web site, incase you did not know.
Further, I strongly urge that Dell Europe sign up to the Code of Best Practices for Women and ICT, produced by the EU Directorate General for Information Society and Media, and launched by Commissioner Reding last March, at a conference in Brussels. Please see the document “Cyberellas are IT”, downloadable here:
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/itgirls/doc/proceedings_09.pdf
Please feel free to contact via telephone on +44 1483 608010 or via email at md@memset.com to discuss this matter, or preferably just remove the insulting content elements.
Yours sincerely,
Kate Craig-Wood
Managing Director
Memset Ltd.
Please write your own letter to these misguided fools to help them realise their error!
Kate.
It appears that Dell have removed the most offensive / patronising elements from the ‘Della’ tech page – the ones I pointed out in fact!
[...] The previous version of the page, according to the wonderfully sarcastic Register, had two more tips, one of which told us ladies that a netbook can be used to “find recipes online, store and organize them, and watch cooking videos.” Watch. Cooking. Videos. My god, the internet is fabulous! If I’d only known there were cooking videos out there! Because I spend my whole life cooking, and then working out! That’s all I want to do, because I have a uterus. (Edit: Kate wrote in with more details of the deleted garbage here.) [...]
Dell seems so out of touch in this capacity…but i doubt anyone will get more than a wrist slap…I wonder how many senior managers in dell are women…or at any level of the organization, surely if they were thinking about launching this website they would have at least done some internal polling/opinions…if they asked any woman who worked there they should have been told how insulting it was, but apparently there weren’t any women available for internal reviewing…
(I’m not saying that there are no women working at dell just that apparently they weren’t thought to exist when this site was designed)
Hmm, I’m a woman and I wasn’t offended (except that it’s Dell, yuck) I’m a gamer, I do image retouching, graphics, digital art, page design and a bit of A/V as well. I’m also a mom who likes to cook for my family, since I have a family I do also need to budget, I have health troubles so I try to stay relatively healthy and in shape, I have many appointments to keep in order and I happen to enjoy a few “shallow and girly” things like makeup and style.
I don’t wear just one hat as a woman and I’m not offended by someone suggesting that I may wish to do things other than the standard “fight the man/be the man” things that women are supposed to do these days, hell I know men who enjoy the things that you were disgruntled about!
I think you need to let go of your own self esteem and confidence issues and realize that not all women are made the same, not more but certainly no less–just different and I really think that you need to stop trying to dictate what I (as a woman) am supposed to like/use MY computer for.
No offense is meant by this comment but seriously, lighten up a bit–some women (and men) actually DO the things that you were so upset about, whats wrong with Dell pointing out that its OK to do those things and that their product is perfectly well suited for it?
Not everything that happens in the world is meant as some kind of attack on women or “feminism” and sometimes you just have to let it go and develop more defined priorities within your causes.
@Sam My reaction was shared by a number of girl friends of mine and female work colleagues. I’m the first to admit that I like my technology to look good (Mac Air, Android G2 Google-phone, iPod, Ducati etc
, but that site really took the piss.
They have removed the most grating elements now, but the new version is still pretty awful. It is just about suitable for marketing to little girls, but not grown, educated women! My view appears to be in line with the comments on the ‘tips’ page: http://content.dell.com/us/en/home/lifestyle-tips.aspx
I think it’s awesome that in a time when customisation of technology has advance to the borders of Web 3.0 that some genius in Marketing has managed to get sign off for “Mrs Beaton’s guide to spending money at Dell”. I am by no means a technical genius and like others like technology that looks good and is easy (god bless the i-phone) but it does strike as a little odd that a business such as Dell would ‘dumb down’ so badly and in such a gender focussed way. That being sad isn’t there an adage about no publicity being bad publicity? (Unless of course you expensed your moat cleaning!!)