Gender in IT

Inspired by a tweet from an old colleague of mine – bemoaning articles (such this one) which talk about how men and women interact differently with IT – I thought I'd post an antidote, a column I wrote back in issue 210 as a new, happened-to-be-female columnist started in the magazine.

Not that I want to drive you away, but if you flip the page just for a sec you’ll see that MacFormat has acquired a new columnist… and it’s a girl. I know: a female, in a computer magazine. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria; everything we have held dear, all our frames of reference, all the basic human dignities that our forefathers fought and died for, swept away by a single email. It’s a momentous day, ladies and gentlemen.

And it’s a damn fine day. You could cut the testosterone in most computer magazines’ staff lineups with a knife. With a big, serrated, blood-stained, Steven Segal-style knife. Grrrrr. This, however, is a bad thing.

It’s a bad thing for all sorts of reasons. It’s tiresome, unrealistic and dull, and reinforces the idea that women are somehow special flowers in the world of IT, which seems to lead to companies thinking that they ought to design stuff especially for women, rather than, you know, for human beings. (Worse, ‘designed for women’ usually means ‘exactly the same design and moulds, just with lilac and hot pink’; we all know that the more vibrant a colour, the sassier, more in-control and highly-emancipated the woman carrying it is.)

This passive-aggressive misogyny is disgraceful. Did you see Dell recently creating a special micro-site for women, called Della? Vomit-inducing. Genuinely hideous from its soul to its CSS. (It has since been re-spun as a lifestyle site, with no special mention of what the little ladies want from a laptop.)

Still, of course I can’t pretend to know what it’s like to be a woman – weekly meetings of the High Heels and Hard Disks club aside – any more than I would try to feign brotherhood with a Jew or a Geordie at anything other than a basic human level.

Nor do I expect Susie to be some sort of ambassador for her sex. That’s the kind of thinking that I’m against; women aren’t some amorphous mass that requires special rules of engagement.

I do, however – having met her and a few of the rest of the Mac|Life crü in San Francisco – suspect she’ll be a damned fine columnist, and I’m thoroughly looking forward to reading her every month. Hope you are too.