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
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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