Another feminine disease?
Computerphobia
by Frank Hilliard
here is something very odd going on in the computer world that I suppose I've noticed for years, but only really hit home in the past few weeks. If you're a man, you probably how what I'm getting at, but it sounds sexist or chauvinist to say it, so you haven't bothered to ask the women you h o w for an explanation.
Well, here goes nothing.
Where, exactly, are all the women in the current computer revolution? Computer stores across Canada are boiling with business, new outlets are springing up like mushrooms, software and hardware are causing a sales frenzy, and all of this is taking place in an almost exclusively male environment. Oh, there are a few female sales clerks, even a few women doing program demonstrations, but the vast majority of salesmen and customers are, in a word, men. Every time I've gone into my local computer store in the past three months, the lineups in front of the sales and service counters have been exclusively made up of men.
"Well, men like computers," one woman acquaintance told me.
Oh, I thought, good answer. Is it something to do with the size of our fingers?
The specific trigger that provoked this line of thought was what happened when a new Local Area Network (UN) was installed in the office where my wife is a manager, and a new computer put on her desk.
"What kind have you got," I asked innocently over the dinner table.
She didn't know; she hadn't turned it on.
What she did want was my help in moving it from the middle of her desk into the corner, where it wouldn't be so much "in the way".
The next day, we went in to her work together and I began setting up the desktop on her 486133 which was running Windows fir Workgroups, Version 3.1. I then began to have a look at the Mail program, which was new to me because my machine is a standalone.
"Aren't you finished playing with that?" she asked.
That was when it hit home. Women have a totally different view of computers and computing than men, don't use them the same way and, frankly, can't understand what all the excitement is about.
To the average woman, a computer is something you work at. They go to work, sit down, work, work, work on the computer, get up and go home. Period. Not once in the day does the typical secretary close her word processor, close Windows and go down to Dos to poke around and see what other programs are on her machine or available across the network. And because she doesn't look, she doesn't find out.
Women executives have exactly the same attitude, the same feeling that computers are instruments of servitude and toil. Indeed, the mark of a woman executive is that she doesn't use a computer. The ones I h o w would rather dictate their letters so that a "typist", one of the lower orders presumably, can transcribe them.
Recently I had to send something on diskette to a company secretary in another city. I had formatted my document in AmiPro, one of the big three word processors, but I was unsure if the word processor the secretary used had an AmiPro filter.
I called up and asked. She had no idea. Indeed, she didn't know where in Microsoft Word to find out what formats Word would import.
She is not alone.
Another woman acquaintance of mine had a computer at home and wanted to send me a file over the telephone. Fine, I said, dial me up and I'll put my comm program in answer mode. Then just use the prompts.
You can guess what the problem was. She had never used her communications program or her modem before, even though they had been on her machine for months.
The men of my acquaintance, on the other hand, have not only used their modems for months or years, they have upgraded them for faster models with a 16550 UART chip. They have explored every nook and cranny of their programs, opened up their CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC. BAT and WIN.INI files, optimized their memory, added RAM, bought sound cards; well you get the idea. They have been into the guts of their machines both literally and figuratively. Now most of them are trying to figure out how to use the Internet.
I keep telling all the women I know that computers are a power thing, a product that can increase their knowledge, productivity and enjoyment. I tell them computers are particularly suited to a woman's manual dexterity, mental agility and, with a modem, to the female strengths in interpersonal skills and networking. After a!!, what is the Internet, if not a network?
Computers can, specifically, help women by providing them with the same non-sexually biased information doorways as men, surely a commendable capability. Computers even the balance between men and women precisely because, as machines, they have no gender bias. This, it seems to me, is a great opportunity for women to empower themselves.
But it won't happen any time soon unless women in genera! get over the emotional feeling that computers are expensive typewriters that somehow represent a second-class working status. The irony in all this is that it's the secretary with her existing skills who could become a corporate terror if she started utilizing the information already on her machine, but it's the boss, with the door dosed to his office, pecking away at the keyboard, who will actually wind up holding all the power.
ApriI 20. 1994. Reprinted with permission.
Frank Hilliard is a member of Big Blue &
Cousins. His first book, DEELEY: Motorcycle
Millionaire, is due out this fall.
