The rise of techno-femme

I recently asked a happily married female acquaintance of mine what three things she would try to save if her house was burning down.

'That's easy,' she replied without hesitation. 'My mobile, my Palm Pilot and my iBook.' The fact that she'd brave the flames for her shiny gizmos - while, presumably, leaving her hapless husband to fend for himself - illustrates the arrival of a new breed of woman. She's on more than nodding acquaintance with CD burners. She's a connoisseur of competing digital networks. And just try to prise her away from her PlayStation 2. She's consigning the term 'boy-toy' to the dustbin of history. She is techno-femme.

The arrival of techno-femme was heralded by a study carried out by psychologists at the University of Hertfordshire last year. They wired up a selection of women to a machine called a 'psycho-galavanometer', which recorded arousal ratings, recorded in units of EDA or Electro-Dermal Activity, when they were presented with gifts from their male counterparts. The traditional instruments of wooing - perfume, chocolates, flowers - barely registered on the dials, with readings of 60, 130 and 205 EDA respectively; but the reading leapt to 300 when a DVD player was proffered, and smoke started issuing from the equipment when the latest cellphones and palmtops were produced, with off-the-scale readings of 328 and 335.

In comparison, 'traditional' female gadgetry - toasters, electric kettles - completely flatlined (though any of those primary-coloured mixers or wheatgrass mulchers that Nigella coos over would surely have got any Notting Hillbilly's juices going).

'Times have certainly changed from the days of our mothers and grandmothers,' announced a shaken Dr Adam Johnson, who led the study. 'We're seeing women become more technology-minded and going for more practical, hi-tech gifts.'

You can see techno-femme's influence in many grown-up toys that used to be the sole preserve of the geek and the nerd. Whether it's the new VW Beetle or Mini or the latest laptop, the common design denominators are gentle curves, tactile textures and stripped-down functionality; no go-faster stripes or knobs that go up to 11 in this brave new world. And, according to figures from the market-research firm Jupiter/Media Matrix, women outnumbered men online for the first time last year, with the number of teenage girl surfers more than doubling from 1999; the latter group is also largely responsible for the worldwide epidemic of Instant Messaging. 'We're finally shaking off the prevalent belief that women are uncomfortable with technology,' says social-trend guru Faith Popcorn, whose piquantly titled book, EVEolution, urged tech-companies to market more sympathetically to women. 'They're fine with it, but they just use it in a different way - for them, it's primarily a tool for communication.'

No wonder, in that case, that techno-femme's number-one widget of choice should be the mobile phone, with 76 per cent of women now availing themselves of the opportunity to shout their exact whereabouts into their lozenge-coloured, handbag-friendly, pink fun-fur-covered talisman, as opposed to 73 per cent of men. 'It's the ideal instrument for combating female techno-fear,' says Phil Brown, managing director of Nokia UK. 'Because women love to text, and, I believe, they like to talk a bit as well.'

However, he stresses that, despite other companies' sometimes ham-fisted attempts to target women - the Samsung A400, a mobile stamped with a dainty rose design that calculated biorhythm and ovulation charts, as well as producing a 'fatness calculator' if you tapped in your height and weight, springs to mind - Nokia's own niche marketing is less reductive. 'We target certain lifestyles,' says Brown, 'some of which are more women-friendly than others.' He mentions the 8210, the first phone in Nokia's 'style' category, that came with a suitable array of shimmering baguette-bag-matching covers, and sported rounded, trouser-pocket-friendly edges.

'But,' he says, 'it's hard to target to women or men specifically without stereotyping, so we try and avoid that trap.' For instance, Nokia's 'trendsetters' group - comprised of the people who want the latest, whizziest product with the wackiest features - was once, as you might expect, composed largely of men. Now, the sexes are on a par.

It seems, however, that, while techno-femme is happy to embrace the practical gizmos, she's not yet ready to ascend to true nerd-dom and simply get off on technology for technology's sake. While 30 per cent of men now own some form of PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), only 18 per cent of women have yet taken the plunge (this despite the best efforts of Claudia Schiffer, who launched a limited-edition metallic blue Palm Vx on her website last year, though it's hard to think of a less female-friendly celeb-inspiration. Now, if Kathy Burke had launched one?).

'Men are still, typically, the early adopters when it comes to gadgets,' says Popcorn, 'but women will usually embrace a particular device quickly once its utility has been demonstrated.' The trick, as with alco-pops or hard drugs, is to hook 'em while they're young. A whole raft of electronic gewgaws are now aimed at - and wholeheartedly embraced by - tweenage girls; the lucrative 8- to 12-year-old market. Companies such as Girl Tech and Tiger Electronic have seen their Non-Stop Girl computers, postage-stamp-sized music players with Britney ring tones and bright pink V-Mail pens which record messages and transmit them up to 100 feet, fly off the shelves. Techno-tweens have even invaded the last bastion of geekville - computer games. Interactive epics such as Sims, in which you 'care' for a whole family, making sure no one loses their job and the kids aren't abducted by social services - Ken Loach meets the Tamagotchis - are hugely popular with girls, as are a series of games based on the Nancy Drew mysteries.

'We're banishing the myth that girls are computer-phobic,' says Megan Gaiser, chief executive of Her Interactive, which developed the Drew games (and half of whose game developers are women). 'But they are critical of the shoot-'em-up content of many current games. Girls are interested in the social aspects of creative play. There's a whole generation of girls growing up thoroughly technology-literate.'

Tomorrow's bachelorette pads will be full of this new wired-up generation doing its hi-tech-with-just-a-hint-of-pink thing. But behind the new dawn of female-friendly twinkling screens and micro-organisers, there's one statistic that makes for uneasy reading. A recent survey from AT&T found that the only social group that clicked the TV remote as often as their male counterparts were women aged 65 and over. We know many techno-tweens. We welcome the techno-femme. But are we really ready for the techno-gran?