Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!uwmcsd1!ig!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!skyler From: skyler@violet.berkeley.edu Newsgroups: comp.society.women Subject: Technophobia Message-ID: <12787@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: 30 Jul 88 07:55:07 GMT Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU Lines: 86 Approved: skyler@violet.berkeley.edu (Moderator -- Trish Roberts) Comments-to: comp-women-request@cs.purdue.edu Submissions-to: comp-women@cs.purdue.edu A friend writes: I think computer anxiety, like math anxiety, would also be a very worthy topic on comp.society.women. Here's a theory for you: I don't think there is much difference between men and women in this regard, but men in the workplace, maybe even in school -- especially college -- have two escape routes: there are ways to disguise the anxiety and deflect assignments that would press them too hard; there are ways to claim to be "above" the kind of task that requires computer familiarity (whereas I think that the same situation becomes a barrier to women); and men of course are faced with an aculturation, at least in technology-honoring groups, that says they should be able to do it so they are bound to work at it! (This man obviously doesn't count too well, either. That's at least three isn't it?) Hmm, several other things come to mind. One has to do with the fact that I am about to make a major career change and that one of the tasks that I will face is earning the cooperation and respect of technoids -- engineers of various kinds -- when, although I've been a computerist for 30 years, I have been on the commercial, data-procesing, and systems side of thigngs for the last 15! (I get to get back into systems development and technology stuff after moving away from life as a technoid a long time ago -- except for my ability to stroke it nowadays thanks to things like Usenet and microcomputing.) The new job will involve my sensibilities as a generalist and involve me in system-architecture work, but I suspect that one of my early duties will be to earn the technical respect of people who have spent their work lives in the engineering community. But I already know I can do it, even though I don't know what the details will be, even though it means learning a lot of things that I've no experience with, and even though I expect that I will have to do a lot of scrambli er, scrambling at the beginning. Of course, it helps that the company that is hiring me thinks I can do it to, or we wouldn't be at this stage! But I have a lot of reinforcing experiences, including learning that the messes and failures that I also accumulated in 30 years of work weren't fatal after all, and I haven't stopped learning and improving (nor messing up, in all probability). If this seems a little incoherent, it is because I didn't make the contrasting connection to the problems of women, perfectly as capable as anyone, being denied the kinds of experiences that lets them know and feed their competence at similar technology-oriented things. (The same company has a concerted balanced-workforce program in place of its previous affirmative-action programs, and I know women there who are on the track to becoming chief engineers, someday. But it can easily take another 20 years before the presence of women throughout the engineering community will be unremarkable and also not a source of resentment to those who see the advancement of women as a 0-sum situation. (If there really were a quota system and all that, this WASP male wouldn't even have a job offer in this time of tight employment and *very* selective hiring, and promotion.) Enough. I just wanted to say that I don't think being anxious about coming to grips with computers is at all unusual, whether you are a man or a woman, though I think the men who are anxious about it have more evasions that they can use and also have more reinforcement to toughing it out. And there are a lot of technoids who become pretty anxious about having to change to another form of technology (e.g., learn a different computer or programming language). As adults, I think we forget how hard it was, and especially how long it took, to develop proficiency at commonplace things (learning to read, drive an automobile). Achh -- I can't shut myself up! I'd like to know a lot more about the kinds of anxiety and nervousness that people experience in having to deal with computers at first, especially women, since I'd like to see if there are better kinds of support and assistance that can be offered to help people who'd like to get over it, get over itt, or at least conquer it if not eliminate it. And, if you don't think the statements about how we need, and will get, natural language interfaces, artificial intelligence, and elimination of programming as expensive labor aren't masks for computer phobia/anxiety (and resentment of dependence on technoids who appear to "like" math), I suggest that you think again about where the appeal of all that magical, you won't have to understand it to use it, control over technology is addressed. (This is a noisy line, so if that sentence doesn't make sense, I will blaim the telephone company because I can't see what I am doing very well.)