Friday Feminine Gamification Viewpoint: Building Confidence
Confidence is a deep rooted feeling and can be rocked quite significantly through lots of what may seem trivial or meaningless comments. For women confidence and self-esteem are what I can gather from my circle of friends, former co-workers serious stumbling blocks in careers and life in general. In an earlier blogpost on this theme we looked at women taking part in competition and often opting out, because they didn’t feel to could do fantastically well and hence would open themselves up for criticism, laughter and a whole bunch of other mind-bogglingly unhelpful thoughts.
The sanitary towel brand, Always, recently came out with this clip, which on my Facebook feed seems to have become a rather full-time feature: #likeagirl
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The campaign is poignant and shows how a subtle dig can affect someone for quite some time, yet when questioned people gave it meaning and also took the opportunity to change their original perception or at least the girls did. Have you got a culture, where subtle comments, lack of role models and negative connotations are key? And yet, you are wondering why the ladies don’t support your kind of game? Tough guy macho culture organisations do find it hard to relate to ladies, for this very reason. Some of the recent media cases in technology are backing up the need to make a real change and introduce some positive game elements, so both genders can thrive.
Here is where games have already found a way of giving us confidence in initially learning and continuing to play a game. you usually find a tutorial or incremental from easy to harder transitions and a lot of positive reinforcement in feedback. Each time you play and you don’t make it, you tend to know exactly why because of the feedback the game has given you.
When you are designing a gamification campaign for your business, can you give easy entry, positive role models and clear feedback on what it would take to succeed?
I follow a number of groups and blogs on the topic of encouraging females in technology and the key element that keeps popping up as a theme is that girls are looking for role models. It is great to then see an initiative like the trailer for a movie called “she started it”, where entrepreneurial girls are featured. On interesting fact which is also mentioned at the beginning of the clip is that gender bias starts to develop from age 4 onwards, so to encourage the next generations, we may need to focus on the younger groups. In any case have a look and see if this clip can inspire your internal or external facing campaigns towards encouraging ladies to participate:
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