A new series of three General Electric (GE) ads has been running on late night television for the past few weeks. The ads, which aim to update GE’s public image and attract young tech talent, feature a young software developer, “Owen”, explaining his new job to family and friends.
Owen’s friends want to hear about his new job, until they hear that he’ll be working at GE. Their disappointment is obvious and immediate. Owen tells them about all the meaningful work he’ll be doing, developing a new language to make planes, trains and hospitals work better, but it’s no use. In one ad, his friends gush with enthusiasm for a buddy who has just landed a job working on an app that puts silly hats on cat pictures. In another, his proud parents pass down an heirloom sledgehammer, believing he will need it for the new job.
GE’s aiming to appeal to people who want to change the world. The message is right there at the end of the ad, “Get yourself a world-changing job.” For that goal, Owen, though charismatic, is not the right persona.
Apart from his appreciation of genuinely meaningful work, Owen conforms nicely to today’s software developer stereotype. He’s young, lanky and informally dressed. And, of course, he’s male. The developer buddy who’s working on the cat picture app is also male.
Women do appear in that ad. They ooh and aah over cat pictures. What they do for a living is anybody’s guess. (Maybe they're meant to be developers, too, but then again, maybe not.)
It’s true that the majority of people in computing professions are men. Still, women are roughly 20% of today’s computer programmers and software developers, and 30% of web developers, a total of 300,000 full-time working developers. Why exclude them?
More importantly, the people most receptive to GE’s world-changing job message are women. A 2010 report by The American Association of University Women pointed to a number of studies indicating that women are more likely than men “to prefer work with a clear social purpose.”
GE has had had better moments in advertising. In a 2014 ad, “What My Mom Does at GE”, a little girl gives a seemingly imaginative and fanciful account of her mother’s work, all of which happens to be true.
GE really is looking for developers, with over 200 developer openings listed on its website this morning. There’s work for a wide variety of data analysis and information technology pros, too. (And that means women, because half of analytics professionals are women.) A lot of work. The company has more than 1000 openings in information technology alone.
It’s good to see active hiring, and the message of meaningful work matters. It should include the people who care about it most: women.
