Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!skyler From: skyler@violet.berkeley.edu Newsgroups: comp.society.women Subject: Re: Women Wizards? Message-ID: <11796@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: 8 Jul 88 04:36:52 GMT Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU Lines: 41 Approved: skyler@violet.berkeley.edu (Moderator -- Trish Roberts) Comments-to: comp-women-request@cs.purdue.edu Submissions-to: comp-women@cs.purdue.edu I think that one thing which may well prevent women from becoming wizards is purely and simply technophobia. My mother is _convinced_ that she cannot handle any equipment more complicated than a toaster oven. (This, from a woman who was working at her father's lab using an electron microscope in the forties.) She simply won't use the stereo unless someone else is around to turn it on for her. It doesn't matter that all she has to do is push one button--the fact that it has so many buttons completely intimidates her. She is also intimidated by cars. I was determined not to be like that, so I learned a lot about cars from (male) friends of mine who loved to work with them. They loved teaching me about cars. They thought it was great that I wanted to learn and were never condescending. My mother couldn't believe that I understood about cars and whenever I took a long drive she would try to talk me into taking some male along-- any male, whether or not he knew anything about cars. For her, it was connected to genitalia. I think that it is also connected to gender. It is male to be good at dealing with mechanical/electronic things. So, a woman has to give up some of her femininity to be good at those things and risks not being attractive to men. By being good at male things, a woman competes with them and might alienate them. I think that I have gotten over many of those attitudes, but I think they creep out sometimes. And those attitudes also justify a certain laziness in myself. I initially learned about Unix just to learn how to word process. A friend sat me down at a terminal with three sheets of paper that had commands on them. Slowly, I have learned more but mostly by friends (mostly male) showing me how to do something. The laziness comes in when I sometimes feel as though I don't want them to tell me how or why something works--I just want them to make it work. Obviously, not all women are like that. But, I think that if you pushed you would find that many women feel that they give up some femininity to be good at computing. -Trish