Dear Pinterest: Don’t Change Just To Get Guys To Like You

by Jessica Goldstein Posted on January 23, 2015 at 11:53 am Updated: January 26, 2015 at 9:27 am

How popular is Pinterest? With women, very: the social network had 72.5 million visitors in December, and about 71 percent of them were women. Pinterest is the most “female-skewed social platform” on the internet.

Pinterest would like to change that. In a Wall Street Journal story, a spokesperson for the site described how “We’re really trying to unpack and understand that so we can communicate to [men] that Pinterest is absolutely for you.”

Pinterest wants to be the first place everyone goes for “discovery” on the web. But manly men don’t want to come to Pinterest “in part because of the stigma that Pinterest is a clubhouse for women,” the Journal reports. Like all things women like in mass quantities, Pinterest has become a shorthand for a silly, frivolous mockable thing and the silly, frivolous mockable demographics who enjoy it: women planning weddings, people who make crafts out of Mason jars, women who care about fashion and make-up, people who actually get inspired by inspirational quotes, women in general. Men have picked up on this and they are staying far, far away from the pinning platform. According to a Pew study, only 13 percent of online men in America use Pinterest.

The article quotes Joan Meyers-Levy, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota who “specializes in gender differences in information processing.” From the story:

Pinterest’s busy design may create an information-overload for men. “If this was a magazine, they’d turn the page,” Ms. Meyers-Levy said. “It works for females because they like detail, they like more complexity.”

Yes, men hate clutter, they turn the pages of the magazines with the clutter inside them, that’s why noted gentleman’s rag Esquire looks like this:

Of course they could never face a page as “information-overloaded” as this:

Why does Pinterest have to change? A blank Pinterest page is about as gendered as a Google Doc. There’s no reason for a guy to feel like he doesn’t “belong” there, unless he’s the kind of person who is so insecure in his masculinity that he can’t possibly occupy a space that isn’t overtly male-dominated or centered. If men are looking for a space on the internet that caters to specifically, typically-coded “male” wants and needs, they can go literally anywhere.

Women navigate male-dominated spaces all the time. As a result, women get catcalled on the street, harassed on public transit, groped at bars, and slammed into on the sidewalk.

What happens to a man who tries to enter a mostly-female space? Let’s ask one brave dude who traverses the glitzy, girly waters of Pinterest. Nicholas Hardesty, an “avid” user interviewed by the Journal, says his male friends “don’t make fun of me per se, but give me a sideways glance or a little bit of a ‘why are you on there?’”

OH NO NOT THE SIDE-EYE. ANYTHING BUT THE SIDE-EYE.

All our ostensibly “neutral” online spaces are typically hostile to the wants and needs of women (see: Twitter’s harassment policy that doesn’t treat rape threats as “violations” of the code of conduct; Facebook’s refusal to remove pages that celebrate sexual violence and photographs that glorify rape; LinkedIn’s slow response to victims of domestic violence and stalking who want the ability to block individual users from seeing their profiles; Instagram’s unevenly-applied nudity policy that bans visible pubic hair and overweight women while allowing naked thin, waxed, conventionally hot bodies to populate the platform.) Pinterest, interestingly enough, was designed by three men, yet, perhaps because of its majority-female user base, is virtually free from the types of problems that plague so many other social networks.

Maybe the reason women like Pinterest is because men haven’t crashed the party to screw it up. It doesn’t seem like there’s a particularly good reason to cater to the kind of man who has a problem with visiting an online space disproportionately occupied by women. It’s not like walking into a Lululemon, bro; no one but the NSA even knows you’re there!

I get that there’s advertising money to be made, and that you theoretically double your opportunities for revenue when you double your user base. But, wait, do you? Plenty of astronomically successful empires got that way by catering exclusively to women. Imagine if Oprah had worried that her show was too “feminine” to attract a male audience. Fortunately, she never worried about that because she was too busy running an empire, minting money, and listening to an audience that is still routinely ignored in so many venues.

Women make up 85 percent of all consumer purchases. And women are, still, more likely to be primary caregivers than men, which means they typically are buying not only for themselves but also on behalf of everyone else in their lives. In most families where couples divide decision-making on buying major items for the home, women call the shots. Research indiciates women will control two-thirds of the consumer wealth in the U.S. within the next ten years and will “be the beneficiaries of the largest transference of wealth in our country’s history.”

Right now, 42 percent of female internet users in the U.S. are on Pinterest. Clearly there’s still room for growth in the female marketplace. The only site with a higher percentage of the online U.S. female audience is Facebook. Doubling down on women seems like a much smarter business move than trying to please everyone and failing to win over anyone.