teaching women computing

the special needs of women

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  • limitations
  • the ways of men
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limitations

Just when I think that women have come into their own, I run into something like this. A friend of mine, well into her forties, wants to go out for a night on the town. I find out though that I will have to do the driving. Seems she doesn't drive "far" and doesn't really drive at night. I try to explain to her that the rules and challenges of driving are the same five miles from her house as they are five hundred miles from her house. And, if she can drive two miles at night to the supermarket, she can drive twenty miles at night to a club.

I run into this with computing as well. Women seem absolutely petrified of computing. I guess women, especially older women, are not comfortable with machinery. It's not uncommon to hear older stories of women getting their first car and running it until the tank is empty and they're stranded on the highway. Or even newer stories of a woman running out of motor oil, seizing a brand new engine.

Women seem more comfortable with dedicated dumb terminals, or PCs rigged to display only one interface, the kind often seen in intensive database work. The desktop of a Windows machine seems to frighten, or at least stultify, the feminine amongst us.

the ways of men

Men are taught through their fathers, and often through their livelihoods, about tools and tool use. They are familiar with standards, and the idea that some complication runs the simple interfaces that we work with. A woman just opens a refrigerator door, but a man will notice the bulb, think about the empty space that needs cooling, and often contemplate a better machine.

One must take this into account when teaching women computing. A room full of men can just be given the process of clicking here or there to make their application work. It is more instructive to explain to a woman why the desktop is the way it is, and what the expected advantages are to the flexibility of the modern operating system.

Men will poke at things. If shown right clicking, they will eventually left click just to see if the mouse blows up. Once their attention is drawn to anything labeled settings, for better or for worse, they will view the various settings options. Men are more capable of recognizing tools, interfaces, and metatools than woman are. Women need to be shown these things. After they learn and understand a collection of tools, they will be able to explore on their own like their male counterparts.

needs of women

A female user needs to understand the underlying robustness and fragility of the various components of the modern graphical operating system. By educating a woman user to the point that she begins to think and react to this tool as a man would, women users can finally obtain the mastery over their machines that they deserve.

This is where the educator must do more than teach from a list of objectives. Educators need to have an appreciation of the background and lack of tool using abilities of the female student. The teacher needs to understand the system and applications more than just enough to transmit the topic information. Background, color commentary, and history of the topic will gear the female student toward understanding the material at hand.

This may sound somewhat paternalistic and sexist, but it is reality. Women, especially older women, do not have a history of tool use, nor of constructing things. Women also tend not to choose careers in making things. A female student needs the time to be inculcated with the why of modern computers. They need analogy and lateral ideas to connect the cold world of point and click with more familiar things, like vcrs and televisions.

More so than an indictment of women, I point the blame at computer use educators who only understand the thin skein of computers and none of the meatier issues of hardware, design limitations, and the role computers in society. Too often we expect that if one is teaching first grade, they need only a second grade education. However, for women to be truly competent with modern computers, they need a ground-up education of how "things" work and why one would build a machine this or that way.

Do not forget the nature of women, and you will turn the usually painful experience of learning into a joyous one.