computer programmers

Men create, program, and market computers, make war and

produce science and art with them; women microwire them in computer

factories and enter data in computerized offices; boys play games, socialize,

and commit crimes with computers; girls are rarely seen in computer

clubs, camps, and classrooms. But women were hired as computer programmers

in the 1940s because

the work seemed to resemble simple clerical tasks. In fact, however, programming

demanded complex skills in abstract logic, mathermatics, electrical circuitry,

and machinery, all of which . . . women used to perform in their work.

Once programming was recognized as “intellectually demanding,” it became

attractive to men. (Donato 1990, 170)

A woman mathematician and pioneer in data processing, Grace M. Hopper,

was famous for her work on programming language (Perry and Greber

1990, 86). By the 1960s, programming was split into more and less

skilled specialties, and the entry of women into the computer field in the

1970s and 1980s was confined to the lower-paid specialties. At each stage,

employers invoked women’s and men’s purportedly natural capabilities for

the jobs for which they were hired (Cockburn 1983, 1985; Donato 1990;

Hartmann 1987; Hartmann, Kraut, and Tilly 1986; Kramer and Lehman

1990; Wright et al. 1987; Zimmerman 1983).

It is the taken-for-grantedness of such everyday gendered behavior

that gives credence to the belief that the widespread differences in what

women and men do must come from biology. To take one ordinarily unremarked

scenario: In modern societies, if a man and woman who are a

couple are in a car together, he is much more likely to take the wheel than she

is, even if she is the more competent driver. Molly Haskell calls this takenfor-

granted phenomenon “the dirty little secret of marriage: the husbandlousy-

driver syndrome” (1989, 26). Men drive cars whether they are good

drivers or not because men and machines are a “natural” combination

(Scharff 1991). But the ability to drive gives one mobility; it is form of

social power.

In the early days of the automobile, feminist co-opted the symbolism

of mobility as emancipation: “Donning goggles and dusters, wielding tire

irons and tool kits, taking the wheel, they announced their intention to

move beyond the bounds of women’s place” (Scharff 1991, 68). Driving

enabled them to campaign for women’s suffrage in parts of the United

States not served by public transportation, and they effectively used

motorcades and speaking from cars as campaign tactics (Scharff 1991,

67–88). Sandra Gilbert also notes that during World War I, women’s ability

to drive was physically, mentally, and even sensually liberating:

For nurses and ambulance drivers, women doctors and women messengers,

the phenomenon of modern battle was very different from that experienced by

entrenched combatants. Finally given a change to take the wheel, these post-

Victorian girls raced motorcars along foreign rods like adventurers exploring

new lands, while their brothers dug deeper into the mud of France. . . .

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Retrieving the wounded and the dead from deadly positions, these oncedecorous

daughters had at last been allowed to prove their valor, and they

swooped over the wastelands of the war with the energetic love of Wagnerian

Valkyries, their mobility alone transporting countless immobilized heroes to

safe havens. (1983, 438–39)

Not incidentally, women in the United States and England got the vote for

their war efforts in World War I.

Social Bodies and the Bathroom Problem

People of the same racial ethnic group and social class are roughly the

same size and shape — but there are many varieties of bodies. People have

different genitalia, different secondary sex characteristics, different contributions

to procreation, different orgasmic experiences, different patterns

of illness and aging. Each of us experiences our bodies differently, and

these experiences change as we grow, age, sicken, and die. The bodies of

pregnant and nonpregnant women, short and tall people, those with intact

and functioning limbs and those whose bodies are physically challenged

are all different. But the salient categories of a society group these attributes

in ways that ride roughshod over individual experiences and more

meaningful clusters of people.

I am not saying that physical differences between male and female

bodies don’t exist, but that these differences are socially meaningless until

social practices transform them into social facts. West Point Military Academy’s

curriculum is designed to produce leaders, and physical competence

is used as a significant measure of leadership ability (Yoder 1989). When

women were accepted as West Point cadets, it became clear that the tests

of physical competence, such as rapidly scaling an eight-foot wall, had

been constructed for male physiques — pulling oneself up and over using

upper-body strength. Rather than devise tests of physical competence

for women, West Point provided boosters that mostly women used — but

that lost them test points — in the case of the wall, a platform. Finally, the

women themselves figured out how to use their bodies successfully. Janice

Yoder describes this situation:

I was observing this obstacle one day, when a woman approached the wall in

the old prescribed way, got her fingertips grip, and did an unusual thing: she

walked her dangling legs up the wall until she was in a position where both

her hands and feet were atop the wall. She then simply pulled up her sagging

bottom and went over. She solved the problem by capitalizing on one of women’s

physical assets: lower-body strength. (1989, 530)

In short, if West Point is going to measure leadership capability by physical

strength, women’s pelvises will do just as well as men’s shoulders.

The social transformation of female and male physiology into a condition

of inequality is well illustrated by the bathroom problem. Most

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