We talk about living in a technological age, a wired world, as though this is a new phenomenon. We forget, it seems, that women have long been wired or, some would argue, tethered to technology–by kitchen appliances, which defined them as homemakers; or typewriters, which cast them in the role of Girl Friday.
What’s different now, many believe, is that technology is at last giving those who have access–and more women are gaining access–direct control over many aspects of their lives.
The growth of the Internet, the ubiquity of computers and advances in wireless telephony are expanding women’s ability to participate more fully in an ever-changing world. Take, for example, the executive who logs into her company’s computer system to watch a recording of a conference that happened while she was on a business trip to Brazil. Or the working mother who takes a few minutes out of her day to view real-time video of her children at day care. Or the doctor with a rural practice who goes to a Web site to get information on a new treatment for one of her patients.
Today’s women are becoming more like “Star Trek’s” Capt. Janeway than June Cleaver, and technology is making that possible. Over the last 25 years, the exponential growth of computing and information technologies has accounted for the greatest social and economic transformation since the Industrial Revolution.
In the past six months, 9 million women have gone on-line for the first time, according to “The Internet Life Report,” released recently by the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. Roughly 55 million Americans go on-line every day, half of them women, the report says.
Expanding technology is a major factor behind the explosive growth in women-owned businesses.
“Women are starting businesses at twice the rate of their male counterparts,” says Joan Steltmann, market development executive of Internet initiatives for IBM in Chicago. “From an Internet perspective, women are more likely to have created a Web site for their business. Women are getting the message that the Internet is a powerful tool.”
Of all the new Internet users in the past six months, 61 percent have Internet access only from home, says Susannah Fox, director of research for the Pew Internet Project.
Also, of the women who have a computer at home, 21 percent use it to do work at home, says Forrester Research analyst Ekaterina Walsh.
Indeed, telecommuting is now seen as a viable option, partly because the Internet lets employees stay apprised of what’s going on at the office or in the world beyond, says Dianne Lynch, Wired Women columnist for ABCnews.com. Because technology has made geography almost irrelevant, Lynch, who lives in Vermont, says she is able to work and do interviews with people all over the world without leaving her kitchen table.
In this way, the Internet and other innovations are leading many women back to the domestic front. While the effects in this instance are different, it’s not the first time technology has been intertwined with women at home.
Labor-saving’ devices
The concept of a wired woman almost certainly began when a select group of housewives first plugged in one of the new electric appliances in the early 1900s. Electric toasters and vacuum cleaners came on the scene in 1909 and the first refrigerator for home use was being marketed in 1913, according to the National Academy of Engineering. As these inventions made their way into more American homes, women came to know the power of technology.
From the 1910s to the ’40s, innovation gave way to all sorts of household wonders–garbage disposals, dishwashers and clothes dryers. Also, during that time, domestic electric power was becoming commonplace and the industry’s male engineers and sales staff began to devise marketing strategies that would get women to use more electric-powered devices.
What quickly became apparent, however, was that men had many misconceptions about the work women did. So the industry began to hire women for its marketing campaigns. Still, “men remained firmly in control of how housewives received the electric message,” writes James C. Williams in “His and Hers: Gender, Consumption and Technology” (University Press of Virginia, 1998).
That marketing message often portrayed the appliances as “labor-saving,” but women, especially in the first half of the 20th Century, soon found that notion to be largely untrue as they took primary responsibility for using and managing this growing assortment of devices.
“What ended up happening was not a decrease in women’s work,” says Sharon Alter, a professor of history and political science at Harper College in Palatine. For one thing, “the idea of cleanliness changed. The same amount of time or more time had to be spent washing because (family members) were now changing clothes more often.”
Later, as Americans became more affluent and appliances more efficient, women still were preoccupied with housework, Alter says. Stoves had to be cleaned and refrigerators defrosted. Also, the mass production of garments led people to buy more clothes, which created larger loads of laundry to wash and iron, she says.
It’s no wonder, then, that more than ever, women seemed to be defined by the “cult of domesticity,” a phrase adopted to describe women’s restriction to the domestic sphere around the mid-19th Century, when the Industrial Revolution created factory jobs that largely excluded them.
Clerical jobs open
While “labor-saving” technologies kept many women busy inside the home, other new technologies began to open limited opportunities for them outside the home. The late 19th Century introduction of the telephone and the typewriter helped spawn industries that went looking for workers.
“Before the 1910s most office workers were men,” Alter says. A good example would be the clerk Bob Cratchit in “A Christmas Carol,” she says.
Before the telephone became indispensable in the 1920s, most business correspondence was sent by “fleet-footed messenger boys,” Sadie Plant explains in her book “Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture” (Doubleday, $23.95).
But after the World War I economic boom, businesses realized that the expanding telecommunications network could be handled by women, who could be paid less. By 1946, thousands of women were working as “telephonists, receptionists and switchboard operators.” There also was a beneficial side effect related to the typewriter’s introduction, Plant notes: Female literacy rates were increasing.
“The future was at her fingertips,” writes Plant, a lecturer in cultural studies at the University of Birmingham in Britain.
At her fingertips, yes, and still about a half-century away. But whatever its fragile beginnings, the e-volution of woman was under way.
Like most beginnings, it was not pretty. The early communication devices were often crude and unreliable, and the associated tasks, repetitive and mind-numbing. In some instances, women office workers were “kept in a cage or booth,” under strict supervision, Plant writes.
During World War II, a manpower shortage sent unprecedented numbers of women into industrial jobs. After the men returned from war, the government and the press urged women to return to the home. Many did, but by 1950, having tasted the fruits of their labor, women made up about 33 percent of the work force, according to Department of Labor statistics.
After the Vietnam War, even more women worked outside the home, although the largest percentage still held low-paying clerical jobs, as secretaries, keypunch operators, receptionists.
The computer age
A decade later, just as the women’s movement was helping to expand access to education, punch cards were becoming obsolete and desktop computers were gaining cachet. Secretarial pools started to vanish along with the noisy adding machines and electric typewriters that had provided a kind of musical score to the workings of business and commerce for more than 60 years.
Now, armed with advanced degrees, women began the transition from clerical work to the traditional “male” professions: medicine, law, business. The world of work was changing. Women’s ambitions and opportunities were too.
By the mid-1980s, even the traditional women’s office jobs required computers to get the work done. As this shift occurred, large numbers of working women acquired the skills to compete in an increasingly computer-dependent society.
As software and hardware became more user-friendly and more affordable, and users’ knowledge became more sophisticated, many tasks–word processing, desktop publishing, spreadsheet analysis–could be performed at home with the same efficiency as they could in the office.
Now, many companies allow employees to spend at least part of their workweek at home, in some cases providing the computer equipment. Indeed, many of the women interviewed for this article were working from home when contacted.
Now, says Wired Woman columnist Lynch, “The cult of domesticity is being replaced by the cult of technology which, instead of closing doors, is opening doors for women.”
Snapshot of the future
The technological revolution happening now “will change (women’s) lives forever,” says Jodi Turek, who with a partner established the Womensforum (www.womensforum.com), which provides support to women who are Web-based entrepreneurs.
How will it change their lives? By putting more control into their own hands. Women now can manage a career and a household with much greater ease: They need not be physically present to attend a company meeting. Appliances can be programmed to turn on or off from remote locations. E-commerce sites let them skip a trip to the grocery store or mall. Funds can be transferred between accounts when the bank is closed.
While the information age is gradually transforming women’s lives, some want to make sure that women help transform the technology itself, rather than having the passive roles they had in the past.
It’s crucial for women to help create the search engines and other devices through which information is found, says Joan Korenman, director of the Center for Women and Information Technology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Korenman says she started the Center (www.umbc.edu/cwit) because she did not want women to become “a new class of illiterates in the information age.”
In the last few years, that prospect has seemed to fade. Michelle Parlow of Downers Grove exemplifies why.
The CEO of New Emerging Technical Solutions, she felt the shifting winds several years ago and started a business built around Internet-based technologies. After working for a company that helped businesses become Y2K-compliant, she started her firm, which works with manufacturers and distributors to help them become Web-enabled. She says she also became conversant in “all the computer languages” that drive e-commerce.
“I’d rather be an educated person than ignore technology and what it can do and how it can affect my life,” she says.
Parlow believes technology can level the playing field on which women must compete, especially in business, but she is not naive about its dangers.
“There are problems with the Internet,” she says. “But life is risk.”
The problems–insecure sites, for example–are being addressed, she says. The Internet’s flaws cause extra discomfort now largely because the medium is new.
“But it would be foolish to think that the world isn’t going to evolve to doing business this way.”
And hidden among the risks are rewards, says Ellen Spertus, assistant professor of computer science at Mills College in Oakland, Calif.
“Having computer skills,” she says, “makes you very powerful.”
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Highlights of the Tech.Woman series.
WEEK 1: An engine of change–How women’s progress parallels technological innovation.
WEEK 2: The Chicago connection–Six leaders in the local technological community.
WEEK 3: High-tech help wanted–Women could hold the key to the worker shortage.
WEEK 4: Open for e-business–Women capitalize on Internet opportunities.
