Shireen Mitchell, "Access to Technology: Race, Gender, Class Bias" (Page 2 of 4)

My Story

As a young girl growing up in a low-income project of New York City, I struggled financially every day. My parents divorced when I was five years old , as is fairly common today. My father never reappeared as a major figure in my life. As a single parent, my mother relied on me to help around the house since she worked long hours and, sometimes, double shifts. One day she realized that I didn't come straight home from school every day; instead, I went to the "arcade room" until my curfew. I was oblivious to the fact that I was the only girl there, but my mother had noticed. After many such evenings, she began to argue with me, thinking that I was seeing a boy and using the arcade as a pretext. I was a straight-A student in school, so I was confused by her concerns. I loved playing the various games, especially Pac-Man and its various spin-offs. Competing against the game and other players was thrilling to me.

It never occurred to me that I was the only girl at the arcade. My mother, however, promptly noticed. She never believed that I was drawn solely to the games. She thought there had to be a sexual motivation and decided to get the home console Atari version of Pac-Man to test her assumptions. She was happy to be proven wrong.

Despite the financial obstacles, my mother invested in various video games and then bought the Commodore 64 personal computer. It came with the processor built into the keyboard and a tape deck instead of a floppy-disk drive. The pre-Windows operating system meant no "plug and play" or "point and click." All actions had to be programmed, but I loved it anyway. Many years later, after hearing an interview about how I became a "techie," my mother exclaimed, "Imagine what would have happened if I just stopped you from going to the arcade or if I had not bought you a computer?" It had been practically impossible to convince her that I truly loved gaming, creating a tremendous source of conflict for years. A similar pattern emerged in my professional life.

Although I indicated "programming" as an interest in my SAT college profile, my guidance counselors steered me towards a more social career, suggesting I could only be successful helping others. During the same time, many of my male colleagues, like Black Planet's Omar Wasu, who had a similar love for technology, were guided towards careers in the hard sciences. As for me, technology became a hobby instead of a career pursuit.

While majoring in psychology in college, I stumbled into a "techie clique." Not everyone in my clique completed college, but, like Bill Gates, they all started tech companies or went on to work in the world of technology. Two went to work for America Online (AOL) long before the World Wide Web became a household word. While I was studying textbooks for my classes they were studying the technical manuals for the latest hardware and software. My competitive nature forced me to keep up with their technical learning, and, of course, I made sure my computer was just as fast as theirs. They offered to help me get jobs with them, but I preferred a career interacting with people, not machines. "Why would someone used to being the Ôonly girl,'" they wondered, " not want a back door entrance to a tech job?" Similar to my days at the arcade room, I was unaware that my gender played a central role in the way people saw me and my interest in technology.

After about five years, the clique started to break up and I decided to start a Web design firm. I held classes at "Sisterspace and Books" as a marketing tool, and my life quickly changed. I was first asked if men could attend the class, which I thought was an odd question. The women attending the class told me that having men present made them feel uncomfortable. I was quite surprised. After several sessions, evaluations, and interviews, I discovered that the women in the class felt intimidated by the way the men aggressively questioned my technological knowledge even though they were beginners. The women students felt ashamed to ask questions. The men, on the other hand, used technical terms they thought they understood. I became determined to find out the source of this divide. I therefore conducted research on gender and cultural "technophobia" and Digital Sisters, Inc. was born.

Today, Digital Sisters, Inc. (DS) is a nonprofit organization that focuses on building self-sufficiency skills for women and children who are traditionally underserved technologically. DS has developed and implemented programs that promote life-skills training and address the impact of the lack of technology skills on families. Our educational philosophy is based on participatory and interactive learning approaches. We offer technology safety curricula and job readiness programs through our lifelong learning initiative and after-school programs.

In our work we have discovered that many low-income single mothers do not provide Internet access to their children at home even if it is available. The mainstream media continues to publicize every computer virus, Internet pedophile, online terrorist, and hate crime activity, thereby overshadowing the positive impact that technology can have on families. Many single mothers feel too inexperienced with the technology to avoid these risks, so they choose to protect their children by avoiding the technology altogether. Many of these women are more afraid of Internet predators than the predators that may be already in their communities. (It has been reported that 90 percent of child abuse or molestation is done by someone the child or mother already knows.) The daughters of these technophobic mothers grow up to become women afraid of and inexperienced with technology.

These single mothers who come to DS access emails for an average of 15 minutes a week, which is not enough to build any type of technological skill. Unfortunately, these women are counted as having some "access to technology" in reports such as the NTIA's. Clearly, "some" is not enough to truly benefit these women's lives.