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There’s no reason I couldn’t buy a hot-pink cell phone, or one of the furry, pastel-coloured carrying cases that accessorize such handsets. I guess because my name is not, say, Barbie, I would choose the more traditional grey or silver model, but at least the options are available. Try finding a hot-pink BlackBerry. I don’t think one exists. And that may be part of the problem.

In truth, I suspect there would have to be something more to explain statistics released from the CRTC this week that show far more men – around 75 per cent of the user base – buying PDAs like the BlackBerry than women. Cell phone purchases, on the other hand, are more evenly divided, with almost half (48 per cent) of the sales going to women. The CRTC report didn’t draw any conclusions or make any recommendations based on these numbers, but by publishing them the regulator is provoking the industry to fill in the blanks. What does gender have to do with the device?

The most rational approach to this question would be to look at the balance of power in the enterprise. According to a book from Statistics Canada released this past March called Women in Canada: A Gender-based Statistical Report, about 37 per cent of those in managerial positions in Canadian business are female, which is up 30 per cent since 1987. Unfortunately, though, most of that growth occurred in the early part of that period. StatsCan said the share of women in the boardroom actually fell between 1996 and 2004. Perhaps more women would be likely to own a RIM device if they were invited into the “CrackBerry” culture that pervades the C-suite set. While cell phones have achieved a mass-market appeal based primarily on voice, the BlackBerry is still, by and large, a corporate appliance.

The other way to explore the difference in purchasing is to take a page from Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus and indulge in some armchair sociology. Could it be that women, who are almost always described as more effective communicators, more apt to prefer a device that lets them talk instead of type? (Some BlackBerry devices have phone functionality, but that’s not what made them a bestseller.) Maybe men, who are supposed to be so great at math, are drawn to the sales figures, cost estimates and other numbers that regularly get e-mailed back and forth between their BlackBerry and their back-end office systems.

It would be difficult to prove either hypothesis, but the CRTC report hints at something more important. The cell phone is still a personal purchase, while the BlackBerry is often part of a enterprise device strategy. For example, when’s the last time you heard of a cell phone “deployment” at a major firm? If IT departments are making decisions about how their company’s data will be distributed and shared by out-of-office workers, to what extent will the success of their project depend on the gender makeup of the affected employees? If our understanding of this issue deepens over time, it could influence the degree of device convergence around cell phones with PC-like (or BlackBerry-like) functionality, rather than a PDA.

Gender is such an intangible factor that it may never really help us develop a mobile computing strategy. There are just too many exceptions to whatever the rule is supposed to be. Take me, for instance: I don’t own a BlackBerry, and I’m not really interested in getting one. But then, maybe I’m just not man enough.

sschick@itbusiness.ca

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