Bell: On my second day in the office at Intel, my very first boss sat me down and said she needed my help with two things. One of them was what the company in those days called “Rest of World.” It meant everything that wasn’t America. The other thing was “Women.” I remember asking her, well, which women did she mean? She said, “All of them. If you could work out what they want, that would be great.”
Since then, I’ve maintained an interest in looking at how “women” use technology. It’s been a scholarly and intellectual interest as well as a historical one. In the last 150 years, women were the ones who domesticated electricity, for better or worse. They worked out how to cook with it, how to iron with it, how to run their households with it. They were the ones who sorted out what it meant to drill holes in walls and turn on or off the lights.
And then the data from the telecom industry suggests that women were the early gatekeepers of telephones when they came into the household. They made the phone calls. To this day, they’re the ones who call their in-laws, talk to their own families, keep up with all the social stuff. In the 1980s, Telecom did these amazing studies that proved that women knew where cordless phones were in the house when no one else could find them.
All of which is to say: There’s been a long history of women as the tamers of the big technologies—electricity, telephony, television, and arguably, I think, the Internet. For them, it’s not the glossy new thing, but something that becomes part of daily life.
