9. Feminine and Masculine Computer Parts

Mobile Man with Computer Mouse

Many gender studies of computing focus on the aspects of computing work and education that women are excluded from, but this focus ignores the ways in computers and computing are linked strongly with feminine traits and images. An extensive analysis of 1500 computer advertisements published in Computer for All (the longest-running Greek journal on home computing) reveals that there is in fact dramatic overrepresentation of women working at the keyboard-input and printer-output parts of computers, showing that women were not so much excluded from computing as relegated to specific, gender-stereotyped roles. In Greece, as elsewhere, women in the early, mainframe days of computing were disproportionately found in data entry positions, even when they had computing education equivalent with men (though this would not happen until after 1980, prior to that there was no university computer education in Greece), and this gendered division of labor reproduced a salary gap.

The overall numbers of women and men in computer education and the computer workforce has been fairly equal, between 1998 and 2000 the percentage of college graduates with degrees in computer or information technology who found employment was equally high, though there were more men than women in total, yet the division of their labor is gendered, with women ending up in primary and secondary education or in lower-paying office work, compared with men who are more likely to pursue a computer related career, and to become an executive. This pattern of relatively high proportions of women in computer education (about 25% of the students in computer science in Greece are women) can be found elsewhere, including countries that rank lower than Greece on the UN's Gender-Related Development Index like Malaysia and Turkey, but as with Greece women end up in lower-paying occupations like traditional office work, replicating earlier gender divisions of labor and normalizing it.

Women get the order to "print it"

The difference, this chapter argues, is imagined or constructed rather than natural, and will examine how the public image of computing was created with this difference in mind. Earlier studies of computer advertising have focused on the masculine image of the computer, seeking to compare men and women featured in either quantitative (number of appearances) or qualitatively (measures here have included height of men compared to women, positioning of women so they have to look up at men, body language, and age), yet these methodologies disregard the role that the computer itself plays in mediating the relationship between men and women and how this mediation aids in co-constructing gender and the computer.

The difference, this chapter argues, is imagined or constructed rather than natural, and will examine how the public image of computing was created with this difference in mind. Earlier studies of computer advertising have focused on the masculine image of the computer, seeking to compare men and women featured in either quantitative (number of appearances) or qualitatively (measures here have included height of men compared to women, positioning of women so they have to look up at men, body language, and age), yet these methodologies disregard the role that the computer itself plays in mediating the relationship between men and women and how this mediation aids in co-constructing gender and the computer.

Connecting female faces to the computer screen

From 1983 to 2003, computer advertisements reveal that impressive technical change in computing technology has been coupled with equally impressive social and cultural continuity. One persistent theme found in computer advertisements is men very explicitly not typing, rather they are talking on the phone in front of the computer, clicking the mouse (implied through the use of one hand while the other holds a phone, reaches for something, or merely rests), or not using their hands at all (usually these show men reclined with their arms around their neck, though one 1989 ad for Profex featured a man in a comfortable chair and wearing bathing suit, touching the computer screen with his feet and holding a drink.) Men were shown talking on the phone while women were more often shown waiting for a call. Men, women, computers, and phones rarely appeared all in the same advertisement, particularly in closed-space environments that placed men and women near each other physically, and phones are notably absent from ads which feature all women or all men, suggesting that the phone served as a symbol of communication between genders and was a tool through which men gave orders to women.

In a sharp contrast, women were always depicted facing the computer screen directly, most often typing with both hands, and are typically placed in closed-office settings and have little space available to them. While men are shown with cups of coffee or financial graphs that they read with a relaxed posture, women are intensely focused on their work and are displayed with flowers and often an instruction manual, as if to show that she may need to look up some instruction or copy data from it. In ads that featured men, women, and computers, women are mainly shown sitting, with men standing over them, and in cases where both the man and woman are sitting, the keyboard is still always placed in front of the woman.

"Size is decisive" advises the model-gymnast

The implication of the positioning of women in these advertisements is that they are doing routine clerical work or data-entry, and this interpretation can be confirmed when one considers that the only exception to the rules of who types or interacts with the computer is when the user depicted is clearly a high-status creator like a scientist or engineer, because in these cases men are shown facing a screen full of technical diagrams as opposed to the lines of typed text that women are shown with. Themes present in advertising for office computing were also present in those for computer education, with female students pictured sitting and typing at a keyboard while a male professors stands to lecture. Students were almost never depicted as adult men unless it was about higher-level training for computer technicians or programmers, and the computers shown were larger, more varied, and placed in open unstructured spaces, whereas women were shown in orderly environments using generic PCs.

Men similarly did not interact directly with printer-outputs in advertisement, either positioning themselves standing over a woman who was to print from the computer, or sitting as she stood at the printer, if they were in the same image with the printer at all that is. Printer advertisements often relied on posing women in explicitly sexual positions, particularly employing sex as a means of advertising color printing ability, and when they did choose to feature men, they were shown as boyish, nonserious, or silly looking.

Hard-drives on the other hand were only shown with serious-looking men and used terms like endurance and professionalism as selling points. Women's hands were connected to keyboards, and their faces to screens, either being shown on the computer screen itself as a digital substitute for a real woman, or embracing the screen while it showed some friendly image that was meant to be feminine coded (a heart, for example). When monitor ads featured men, they also featured technical drawings on the screen, or in the very rare case that the man's face was on the screen, he was depicted as a teacher.

Much as a woman typing at a keyboard was eventually replaced by just an image of her hand pressing the keys, a woman's eye came to replace her entire face in advertisements for screens as screens were increasingly sold independently. Even as we lose sight of the entire woman performing computing tasks, her hands are always at the keyboard or printer and her eyes are always focused on the screen, while men continue to avoid staring at the apparently feminine part of the computer, further illustrating the connection of women to the routine, manual aspects of computing and men with the supposedly intellectual and creative aspects. Men are aligned with the mouse, a free-moving and unrestrained component, and the hard-drive, the invisible brain that makes the computer actually work, while women are aligned with the static and unmoving parts of the computer which do not think for themselves.