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Google Glass: Just For Men?

This article originally appeared in my regular column at Forbes.com:

Friend and fellow communications writer Sarah Buhr just raised an interesting point this morning in a guest OpEd for USA Today: Hey, Google Glass—Where the ladies at?

She makes a good point. While the marketing videos from Google show a fairly diverse set of “explorers,” the first wave of recipients are decidedly male.

In a statement to ABC News, Google said the following: “Glass is designed by and for people from all walks of life and we hope everyone will have a chance to enjoy it down the road. Our next step is to make Glass available to participants of our #ifihadglass initiative, which was designed to bring a diverse group of people into the Explorer program.”

Google wouldn’t comment on the ratio of women to men in the first round of distributions, but ABC notes that while the #ifihadglass initiative opened up Glass availability to the public, the current wave of glasses are going to those who signed up at the Google I/O developer conference last year, and not surprisingly, the entrepreneurial world continues to hold far fewer women programmers and product developers than men.

Are you listening, women entrepreneurs? Here’s your opportunity: Google’s contest allows anyone to submit their ideas of what they would do with the glasses. Also, Google is planning to hold a women in technology gathering at its upcoming Google I/O Developer Conference next week, May 15-17, in San Francisco.

I love Sarah’s article. I sense more than a few entrepreneurial opportunities here: in her OpEd, marketing professional Elizabeth Ziegler Murphy sheepishly admitted she would never wear GoogleGlasses because they were too unattractive. “Why couldn’t they put them in a frame style people actually wear?”

Salt Lake’s own Cydni Tetro, Entrepreneur in Residence for Disney and Executive Director of the Women Tech Council, will be demonstrating one of the prize Google Glasses at the Council’s May 23 networking event.

On a Facebook post, Tetro mirrored Murphy’s statement as well: “When will these be available in designs from Kate Spade?”

Are you listening ladies? Thank you, Sarah, for getting the dialogue rolling, and let’s hear it, Google, for women entrepreneurs.