What Do Wired Women Want?

By MICHAEL KRANTZ

When Mariam Naficy and Varsha Rao made the venture-capital rounds in autumn 1998, the funders to whom they pitched their proposed beauty site, Eve.com were mostly male--and often skeptical. "They'd say, 'There aren't many women on the Net,'" Rao recalls.

What a difference a few months make. Most of the Web's early users were men, but by last summer the gender ratio was nearing fifty-fifty. This Great Online Makeover has left entrepreneurs and the v.c. barons who fund them asking one primal question: What do wired women want?

The answer seems to be time, information, community and horoscopes. Some of the Web's female pioneers discovered this golden formula by accident. Candice Carpenter claims she and Nancy Evans launched iVillage.com in 1996 as a gender-blind baby-boomer site focused on parenting, health and work. A year later, though women at the time accounted for fewer than 10% of all Web users, she says 75% of iVillage's traffic was female.

The reason, she decided, was this: by the late '90s, women were swarming into all kinds of jobs--but without surrendering their traditional homemaking and child-rearing roles. Result: the bewildering juggling act that defines today's working mom--and a chance for the Web, in Carpenter's words, to "turbocharge women's choices."

Researchers at Women.com studying women's online usage across the country, learned the same lesson. "The one thing common to all women was that they viewed each session as a search-and-destroy mission," says senior vice president of marketing Anna Zornosa. "They'd come online with a list of five to 12 things they wanted to get accomplished, ranging from 'How do I move my IRA?' to 'My child has this rash'--activities that expressed the range of their entire lives. This medium was built for the modern woman."

It is beginning to look that way. Today's Web offers a distaff cornucopia much like the practicality oriented formula in women's magazines. Behind giants such as iVillage, Women.com Chickclick.com and Oxygen lies a universe of specialized "affinity portals": fashion and beauty sites like Eve.com and Sephora.com BestSelf.com for weight management; TheKnot.com for weddings; Stork.com for baby gifts and so on.

Each has its own design style: eve.com looks like Vogue; iVillage.com like that side table where you throw your purse and the mail when you get home from work. But in substance, they're all operating from the same playbook: cram your site with information arrayed as efficiently as possible for the busy exec who needs to find an idea for her kid's Halloween costume during her 15-min., yogurt-at-her-desk lunch break. "Men are content to explore and play games with this technology," asserts Sarah Cabot, co-founder of the women's-tech site SheClicks.com "Women want to solve problems. The sites that get that are the ones that will succeed with this market."

And what a market. Net execs are betting that once women figure out how much time they can save by ordering online, they'll begin to spend, especially those who are among the 18-to-49 primary household purchasers. "Women are coming online in droves," says Women.com ceo Marlene McDaniel, "and they're going shopping. Sixty-six percent of the women on our site have made a purchase in the past month. That's way up from two years ago."

So is the number of women working for dotcoms. Cabot left iVillage.com to start SheClicks.com Anne Nelson was an editor at Women.com before becoming managing editor at BestSelf.com where almost 90% of her colleagues are female. Eve.com's numbers are closer to 65%-35%, but Rao still considers that a problem. "This is a woman's dream job," she says with a wry smile, "but we're also trying to get some great men."