La Feminista

Today a guest speaker came and gave a talk on the future of operating systems. While the subject was interesting, there was something the speaker kept saying that really distracted me. He talked about how installing programs on unix can be a pain; you have to copy things to bin, lib, etc, ... directories. He said, "My wife doesn't want to do that when she installs programs." When he said that I was taken aback. Why does it matter what his wife wants to do when installing programs? He kept talking about difficulties for users of operating systems and used his wife as an example over and over. He once used his mother-in-law as the example. I couldn't figure out if his wife was a computer admin or a regular user. Towards the end, someone asked him a question and he explained that his wife is an RN and uses a computer for her work.

So, was he just nervous and forgot to tell us what kind of user his wife was? Or should we assume that his wife is a non-expert computer user because she's a woman? (The former is probably the truth; he didn't seem like a bad guy.) I know you probably think I'm paranoid, but when you are sometimes the only woman in a room of computer scientists, or (more usually) one of very few women in a room of computer scientists, and you end up at conferences at hotels like this, you tend to get a little paranoid. Also, I have a bee in my bonnet from perusing slashdot last week. Every now and then, someone posts something about someone's girlfriend testing some software and even she could use it.

Please everyone out there, when you describe the user of your system, stop using your girlfriend, your wife, your mother-in-law as the "clueless" computer users. Why don't you just say, "a typical non-expert user" or something like that? It is really getting under my skin that we should just assume that these women aren't experts because they are women. It's like the Geico commercials -- so easy a {caveman, woman} could do it.