I was glad to read the insightful title "What Do Women Want? Less Pink, More Tech" on Wired, and I was ready to know about the latest solution to gender gap, if ever exists, on technology adoption. But the study discussed in the article does not meet my expectations. There are some interesting points though.

Just 9 percent of the fair sex want products that "look feminine," like a pink Playstation or Hello Kitty keyboards. The remaining 91 percent seek something sleek and sophisticated, more boardroom than teenage bedroom. The data comes from a study, done by the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi, of 750 British women age 24 to 45.

I always have reservations about studies conducted by advertising firms. But I am delightful that eventually there are some numbers that might influence decision-making of producing all those pink gadgets.

These "empowered" women, 37 percent of the total, owned an average of six devices, including a digital camera, desktop or laptop, multimedia mobile phone, MP3 player, digital TV and handheld game console. Overall, U.K. women own only slightly fewer tech items (11 percent) than men. "What's fascinating to me about this research is the index of just how much technology women own," said Dr. Genevieve Bell, resident anthropologist at Intel.

It might be overoptimistic to state that women are empowered by tech item ownership. How they make use of such technologies is more crucial to understand digital inequality. Do we consider people equally empowered, if some use cell phones to gossip while some upload images taken by cell to citizen journalism web sites?

The study's authors, as well as other researchers, agree on the key to upgrading women tech users from cowed to confident: Simplify, simplify, simplify. "Demands on women's time tend to be greater," said Sydney-born Bell. "If you wanted to design technology that would appeal to women, it needs to work flawlessly the first time out of the box and every time thereafter. They don't have time to faff around."

Simplifying technology is a simplified solution to facilitate technology adoption. It is a universal solution that fails to address the gender-specific problem. What we need is not only user-friendly but also female-friendly technologies. Considering technical culture is historically male-dominant, this is a challenging task. More studies on gender differences in human-computer interaction are thus promising. On the other hand, we should take into account social expectations of gender when investigating technology adoption. While some women are intimidated to violate the gender image by being geeky, do men feel obligated to be, or at least appear to be interested in technologies and tech-savvy?