The poorly thought-out tech product for women hardly needs an introduction. Rare is the week that goes by without a company (or a Kickstarter) deciding that there just aren’t enough products for women amid the macho-dominated technology landscape and rolling out a new pink monstrosity.

It's probably unfair to say that many of the most offensive products targeted at women cropped up because someone’s wife, girlfriend, or mom casually complained once that her smartphone wouldn’t do what she wanted, and suddenly she needed a solution tailored to her feminine ways—but it’s easy to envision that backstory for many of them.

Products that target women tend to fall into three basic problem categories through flaws of logic and, in some cases, morality.

Problem 1: Looks like a “woman’s product”

The simplest tactic used to target women is giving the product a stereotypically feminine design—pink, purple, sparkly, curvy, and so on. Contrary to popular belief, women are not biologically wired to like stuff that is pink or tiny or pretty. Some, however, are culturally wired for these things, as history and research on product segmentation show. They've been conditioned to believe pink and delicate things are made for them because the two are so often linked, and eventually this conditions what they choose for themselves. But that does not necessarily make it okay to reinforce this coding through your product marketing.

This pink coding is different from simply making something available in pink. Apple's rainbow of iPod nanos is one thing; releasing a smartphone in black and then some months later in pink is another, more insidious, thing.

Take Dell’s Della notebook, which was an Inspiron 10 Mini in pastels swaddled in marketing that involved calorie counting tips. Nokia made a special female-centric ad for its Lumia 800, and then there were the BIC For Her pens. There are plenty of people pointing out how absurd these things are, so if you haven’t already learned those lessons, I recommend reading up.

Problem 2: Looks even more like a “woman’s product”

More insulting strategies for targeting women involve changing the product itself—for instance, taking a product that has the same functionality but is simply designed better and then targeting it at women. This suggests that only women care about how something looks or—worse—that women will not or cannot use something if it is ugly.

Neither of these things are true. Many people, not just women, like things that are designed well, and many people, not just women, will avoid buying something if it is not appealing. If you are a man, think back to a point in your life when you were shopping and said, "This thing is nice, but it’s hideous and appears to have been designed by an alien merely guessing at how humans work—therefore pass.” Were you, at that time, a woman?

Take the Memi smartbracelet, which recently appeared on Kickstarter. It does look great compared to most of the smartwatches out there. It has pared-down functionality, but it's also a good deal cheaper than competitors like the Pebble smartwatch or the Samsung Galaxy Gear. Is it a desirable product? Yes, absolutely; it was successfully funded. Does it have to be marketed only to women? Probably not.

The good news is that this product, like many female-targeted products, may have a wider demographic than the creators initially might have guessed. People who may care about how something looks—artists, creative directors, designers, architects, and plenty of other people who merely have good taste—are not all women and will be delighted to use your better-looking but still-capable product.

Problem 3: Works like a “woman’s product”

The third sin of targeting a female demographic is making a product that is functionally worse than products in the same category (and then optionally applying either of the two problems above). Technology that is complicated or difficult to use is a man’s game, goes the theory. For women, it must be dumbed down to make it easier to use, or perhaps women simply don’t care if something has less functionality than the comparable “men’s products.”

Examples of this abound. Take smartphones targeted at women, or the mystifyingly bad ePad Femme tablet, released in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. HTC gave us the Rhyme, which was a worse smartphone than its contemporaries by most measures but which made up for that by having very fashionable purple accessories that women AND their Rhymes could wear together like a grown-up version of My Size Barbie. Microsoft has wisely not released its prototype bra that uses vital sensors, not for general health monitoring purposes, but to predict and prevent "emotional eating."

Plenty of women prefer products that are functionally complex, either because they enjoy the features or because they have specific needs. Conversely, there are plenty of non-women who would rather have simpler products because they do not need their smartphone or tablet to be a black hole of settings and workarounds. If "simpler" describes your product, congrats again: your target demographic is actually much larger than you originally might have anticipated. It is possible to sell something that is functionally simpler, or maybe even more well-thought out, and get interested buyers who are not women.

We can all do better

But "segmentation!" you say. Segmentation drives sales up all day, everywhere. (If you aren’t familiar with segmentation, it’s parents having to buy pink toys for their girls and blue toys for boys instead of one toy to share for everyone. A recent feature from Polygon on video games for girls did an extensive examination of product segmentation, as does the book Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein.)

Sure, perhaps it makes good business sense. As exemplified by many female-targeted technology products, though, it’s also very difficult to do without being insulting. Maybe you’ll sell boatloads of pink and terrible gadgets by clothing them in patronizing, insulting marketing. In that case, welcome to the dark side. (Or as the case may be, the pink side.)

Even if market research and consumer surveys point to women loving these things—pink things, little things, pretty things, simple things—that doesn’t mean those preferences aren’t driven by cultural pressure, stereotypes, and conditioning. By marketing a product this way, you’re either working with blinders on or have a deep and abiding cynicism for the way marketing works.

During one moment in the TV series Mad Men, Don Draper says that advertising agencies who market products using maxims like "sex sells" are the same ones who "think that monkeys can do this." "Sex sells" works, on some level. But like pinkifying or dumbing down a product, it's a lowest common denominator of targeting a demographic.

No one has to make a tech product with the sole purpose of elevating female-focused marketing from the fluffy, pink depths to which it has sunk. But it would be great if future products at least didn’t make things worse.