Tech That Wasn’t Built for You Feels Different

Tech culture spent a long time in a particular state of denial about who it was for. The assumption baked into most of the coverage—the reviews, the launch pieces, the gear worship—was a specific kind of male reader who cared about specs the way other people care about sports statistics. Women were present in the industry, obviously, using the products, making the purchasing decisions, but the media apparatus mostly ignored that and kept writing for the imagined guy in the hoodie.

The correction was always going to come. What’s interesting is what shape it takes. The cheap version is pink packaging—literally or figuratively, the same product reskinned and aimed at a new demographic. The actual version is a different set of questions: what does this thing do for your life, does it solve a real problem, how does it look and feel and fit into the way you actually live?

Vreni Frost’s Tech And The City—launched as Germany’s first tech blog specifically for women—was trying to be the actual version. Women approach technology differently than men, she said at launch. Aesthetics and functionality both matter. We want to move away from badly designed websites toward tech topics with emotion, inspiration, and fun. The coverage ranged across home laser hair removal devices, productivity tools, and sex toys tested by readers—a spread that most tech outlets wouldn’t have touched, not because the subjects weren’t relevant but because their imagined reader didn’t include anyone who’d care.

FemTech as a category has had a complicated trajectory since then—some of it genuine, some of it the pink-package problem in a new coat. But the underlying impulse was right. Tech media that assumes a single kind of reader produces a single kind of blind spot, and that blind spot compounds over time.