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Of men, women and computers
JOHN Gray’s Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus is, undoubtedly, one of the most popular books of our time, pointing out the inherent differences that exist between men and women. While the book points out several distinctions between both genders, sadly it there is no mention the way they differ via computer usage.
Thus, this scribe decided to take matters into his own hand and went about the task of exploring these differences. With many apologies to the female readers, one would like to begin with some hard-to-digest (and at times, amusing) facts about how men and women differ in their understanding, usage and perception of computers.
First starters, one will find that it’s more than difficult for women to name and identify parts of a computer other than a keyboard, mouse and CPU. They have absolutely no idea about the difference between (and existence of) other common devices like writeable CD drives, zip drives and external modems. They use terms like desktop, monitor, wallpaper and ‘my screen’ interchangeably — even though these terminologies are considerably different from one another. On the other hand, men’s computer vocabulary is much more expansive and consists of words like HDD, first boot device and “primary master.”
Women users are often petrified if they find out that their system may possibly be infected with a virus. For example, when the infamous Chernobyl virus came into the picture , female computer users decided to play it safe by shutting down their system on the day when it was thought to be activated. The opposite sex, however, was trying to figure out a workaround — like changing the system date and upgrading antivirus software.
It is beyond doubt that the confidence level of female computer users is a small percentage of what her five-year-old brother’s would be. For them, the first precautionary measure in case of a computer fault is to turn the power off and let it rest.
Female users believe that this precaution prevents the system from developing further faults because, supplying power to it may amplify the error.
Well, here’s a newsflash — errors are caused by software mis-configuration or driver conflict and not mechanical or electrical defects. Female users are also not quite sure what an operating system is. They think that the computer is all about having Windows in it and without it, their system won’t work. One can almost hear female users retorting “obviously! What’s wrong with that?” Red Hat, Linux and Solaris sound like movie names to them and if some female user is aware of these systems chances are that they probably won’t be able to correctly tell the version of installed Windows.
It’s possible that you may end up knowing all about the MS Office version, should such a query be directed towards them. For them seeing “XP” anywhere while using computers is sufficient evidence that every installed piece of software is of the XP series.
Interestingly enough, females are more inclined towards a program’s aesthetics rather than its actual functional capabilities and they are forever intrigued by the word “multimedia.” In fact, they probably don’t know much about technicalities such as colour depth, resolution or the speed of their internet connection in terms of discrete numbers. A connection that doesn’t disconnect and runs MSN is a “really good” one. It doesn’t matter at all if it downloads at mere 1.5kb/s —who’s downloading anyway?
Females also exhibit the inability to effectively communicate a PC-related problem. “My internet is not working” is usually rhe vague query that one is supposed to respond to.
Men will usually report such an error in terms of the error number generated by dial-up networking.
One is also sure that it was a female programmer at Redmond who developed the MS help system, as the first question the modem troubleshooter asks is: “Is your modem turned on?”
For men, the question of communicating an error occurs very rarely — not because they do not encounter malfunctions, it’s just that they don’t report it. The way out for them is the traditional screwdriver approach — taking on the hardware is the first and last resort.
Trading modems, hard disks, CD drives, RAMs, power and data chords is considered to be the solution of every problem — after all, one peripheral that refuses to work in one’s computer can somehow magically start in someone else’s. Indeed, PCs have made it easier than ever before for psychologists to get an insight into male and female personality differences.
Women are likely to compromise their PC security for they don’t pay much heed to phrases like “file extensions” before opening an email attachment. At the end of the day, it is going to be a female who’ll most probably get ‘hacked’ by a male counterpart.
File recognition is often based on their colorful icons. A ‘W’ indicates a MS Word doc file, a CD icon indicates a CD track, a picture frame for image file and so on — and if they ever view files in DOS, they won’t be able to differentiate one file from the other.
Female users, more often than not, are passive computer users — heavily dependent on brothers and male cousins for almost everything ranging from installation to setting up an internet account.
Hardware is a nightmare for women — a CPU without casing is like a human body without skin to them — frightening to see and more frightening to imagine. Guys, on the other hand, often run their PCs with the casing lying a few yards away, serving as a book shelf.
Programming has always been an uphill task for women (those who actually do programming, change the word to ‘logic development’).
If you tell her that you are a programmer and she will say — “Oh wow!” Even if you use FrontPage to make HTML pages, you are an accomplished programmer.
Men also use computers for entertainment with games such as Commandos, Yuri’s Revenge and challenge the computer with their skills in Fifa and Cricket series. Women usually enjoy playing solitaire, free cell and hearts.
The awareness about hacking is also drastically different in both men and women. For men, its more about finding the latest exploit and trying to break-in. Girls, on the contrary, seem to be highly misguided about hacking and its procedures. Personal experience dictates that they will usually want to know how to hack tino a hotmail account.
Getting to know about personal computers is one thing, and making full use of it is another — and one doesn’t see many women making proper use of their computers. While formatting assignments, they are sure to make the table of contents without using “auto-create-TOC” options, and usually rely on their own logic to implement hierarchy of bullets and numbering rather than letting system take care of it.
To conclude this diatribe, a simple litmus test will help one in judging the competence of female computer users — ask these three questions:
1. how many icons are there on your desktop?
2. do you know the RAM in your computer?
3. what is the available hard disk space in your computer? Now try doing this test on male users the difference will be imminent.
The writer
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