“Women’s Work”
Why the First Laptop Had Such a Hard Time Catching On (Hint: Sexism)
Interesting observation why businessmen weren’t on the laptop bandwagon early on:
Though Hawkins doesn’t quite say it. There is a distinct gendered component to this discomfort. Typing was women’s work and these business people, born in the 1930s and 1940s, didn’t scrap their way up the bureaucracy to be relegated to the very secretarial work they’d been devaluing all along.
Because — and here comes the psychological reason — they were not good at the work that their female employees had been doing. And that made them feel bad.
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Interesting. I would love to see the research backing the conclusion, yet do not tend to doubt it, per se. I would bet that we could find a number of not only ‘[i]sexism-leaning[/i]‘ causes for a number of things that on the surface, did not seem to be anything other than ‘[i]free-choice[/i]‘ (if you catch my drift within this particular context), but some ‘[i]racism-leaning[/i]‘ causes too.
It wasn’t just the laptop. In the early 80s, this was a large part of the resistance to the personal computer at the executive level. The idea was that executives, to a man, did not type. They had secretaries, all women, who typed for them.
I can understand why they didn’t want to read documents online. No one likes having one’s eyeballs ripped out of one’s head, but they wouldn’t examine spreadsheets in VisiCalc. These, like word processing documents, had to be printed out for them, which defeated the whole purpose of a spreadsheet program.
At a lot of companies, the people had to buy their own personal computers and sneak them into the workplace because of this resistance. This led to battles with the IT department which was both contemptuous and threatened, but they’ve had their revenge.