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Computers are popular these days and they are playing an important role in our work and life. But do men and women have the same attitude towards the use of computers? Read the following text and see what the author has to say about how men and women differ in their use of computer technology.
Gender Gap in Cyberspace
Deborah Tannen
1 I was a computer pioneer, but I’m still something of a novice. That paradox is telling.
2 I was the second person on my block to get a computer. The first was my colleague Ralph. It was 1980. Ralph got a Radio Shack TRS-80; I got a used Apple II+. He helped me get started and went on to become a maven, reading computer magazines, hungering for the new technology he read about, and buying and mastering it as quickly as he could afford. I hung on to old equipment far too long because I dislike giving up what I’m used to, fear making the wrong decision about what to buy and resent the time it takes to install and learn a new system.
3 My first Apple came with videogames: I gave them away. Playing games on the computer didn’t interest me. If I had free time I’d spend it talking on the telephone to friends.
4 Ralph got hooked. His wife was often annoyed by the hours he spent at his computer and the money he spent upgrading it. My marriage had no such strains — until I discovere de-mail. Then I got hooked. E-mail draws me the same way the phone does: it’s a souped-up conversation.
5 E-mail deepened my friendship with Ralph. Though his office was next to mine, we rarely had extended conversations because he is shy. Face to face he mumbled, so I could barely tell what he was speaking. But when we both got e-mail, I started receiving long, self-revealing messages; we poured our hearts out to each other. A friend discovered that e-mail opened up that kind of communication with her father. He would never talk much on the phone (as her mother would), but they have become close since they both got on line.
6 Why, I wondered, would some men find it easier to open up on e-mail? It’s a combination of the technology (whichthey enjoy) and the obliqueness of the written word, just as many men will reveal feelings in dribs and drabs while riding in the car or doing something, which they’d never talk about sitting face to face. It’s too intense, too bearing-down on them, and once you start you have to keep going. With a computer in between, it’s easier.
7 It was on e-mail, in fact, that I described to Ralph how boys in groups often struggle to get the upper hand whereas girls tend to maintain an appearance of cooperation. And he pointed out that this explained why boys are more likely to be captivated by computers than girls are. Boys are typically motivated by a social structure that says if you don’t dominate you will be dominated. Computers, by their nature, balk: youtype a perfectly appropriate command and it refuses to do what it should. Many boys and men are incited by this defiance: “I’m going to whip this into line and teach it who’s boss! I’ll get itto do what I say!” (and if they work hard enough, they always can). Girls and women are more likely to respond, “This thing won’t cooperate. Get it away from me!”
8 Although no one wants to think of herself as “typical”, my relationship to my computer is fairly typical for a woman. Most women (with plentyof exceptions) aren’t excited by tinkering with the technology, grappling with the challenge of eliminating bugs or getting the biggest and best computer. These dynamics appeal to many men’s interest in making sure they’re on the top side of the inevitable who’s-up-who’s-down struggle that life is for them. E-mail appeals to my view of life as a contest for connections to others. When I see that I have 15 messages I feel loved.
9 I once posted a technical question on a computer network for linguists and was flooded with long replies, some pages long. I was staggered by the generosity and the expertise, but wondered where these guys found the time — and why all the answers I got were from men.
10 Like coed classrooms and meetings, discussions on e-mail networks tend to be dominated by male voices, unless they’re specifically women-only, like single-sex schools. On line, women don’t have to worry about getting the floor (you just send a message when you feel like it), but, according to linguists Susan Herring and Laurel Sutton, who have studied this, they have the usual problems of having their messages ignored or attacked. The anonymity of public networks frees a small number of men to send long, vituperative, sarcastic messages that many other men either can tolerate oractually enjoy, but turn most women off. The anonymity of networks leads to another sad part of the e-mail story: there are men who deluge women with questions about their appearance.
11 Most women want one thing from a computer — to work. This is significant counterevidence to the claim that men want to focus on information while women are interested in rapport. That claim I found was often true in casual conversation, in which there is no particular information to be conveyed. But with computers, it is often women who are more focused on information, because they don’t respond to the challenge of getting equipment to submit.
12 Once I had learned the basics, my interest in computerswaned. I use it to write books (though I never mastered having it do bibliographies or tables of contents) and write checks (but not balance my checkbook). Much as I’d like to use it to do more, I begrudge the time it would take to learn.
13 Ralph’s computer expertise costs him a lot of time. Chivalry requires that he rescue novices in need, and he is called upon by damsel novices far more often thank naves. More men would rather study the instruction booklet than ask directions, as it were, from another person. “When I do help men,” Ralph wrote (on e-mail, of course), “they want to be more involved. I once installed a hard drive for a guy, and he wanted to be there with me, wielding the screwdriver and giving his own advice where he could.” Women, he finds, usually are not interested in what he’s doing; they just want him to get the computer to the point where they can do what they want.
14 Which pretty much explains how I managed to be a pioneer without becoming an expert.
