If you're on the road, and happen to be tuning into NPR and listening to
Moira Gunn on Tech Nation, you'll soon feel compelled to pull over and give
your own listening total reign. That's the kind of pull Moira Gunn has
through her humorous and often wise interaction with guests, her
fascinating well of research, and her incisive points of view. This was
confirmed by the most recent talk she gave to a gathering of nearly 50 women
of WIM 40+, a group of women over 40 who now regularly meet to discuss
technological issues and trends affecting them.
Who does Moira take into her technology discussion fold? Prominent
scientists like biologist Sr. Francis Crick and astronaut Alan Shepherd as well as
executive folks like the Yahoo Boys. But beside these eminent scientists
and CEO's, there are regular guys too. Many of them, beneath their "we
mean business; we're gonna charge that hill" exterior, have a palpable
terror and/or a desire to run like hell when it comes to actually mastering
their own anxiety with technology.
Technophobia. It's immediately recognizable when one finds oneself
repeating sentences like "I'm not stupid, I shouldn't be treated like
this." So, says Moira, with good humor, there would no lack of business
for a technophobic reduction clinic. She goes on to cite the studies. In
1993, among the small percentage of computer users, 40% of U.S. adults
declared themselves technophobic. But in 1998, after 85% of the population
were known to use computers on the job daily, 40% still declared themselves
technophobes.
Computer anxiety. Moira tells similar stories about her work in nutrition
labs where food intake was measured through tedious researcher observation.
To get people to utilize a new computer system however, where the
measurement of food would be assessed almost automatically via the
computer, there was complete resistance. People could appreciate the value
of the technology, sure, but took their time in making it their friend.
Lastly, a study on differently-aged people using computers, their levels of
anxiety, and their resulting performances revealed some interesting
findings. The top anxiety group were teenage girls, who felt that they had
to "dot all their i's, cross all their T's" (still!), while the least
anxious, most relaxed group were the teenage boys who unflinchingly
believed in their own posturing. The "mature, over 65" adults who didn't
feel identified with the results, felt surprisingly little performance
anxiety while the middle-agers, male and female, were not as anxious as the
girls but were quite a bit more anxious than the mature group.
But the most interesting aspect of the research was this: anxiety levels
were not predictors of performance. The girls who were the most anxious
did a very good job performing while the boys, with absolutely no visible
anxiety, produced completely unusable data. The other two groups did just
fine. So, there you have it. High or moderate levels of anxiety didn't
interfere with one's actual abilities to accept a change and do the job.
What was also learned was that "techno-stress" itself can be better
managed, and one author, Michelle Wyle, has a book for by the same name to
help everyone through. The book identifies different behaviors, like the
appearance of passive-aggressive behavior, as signs denoting situations
where anxiety is most likely coming to the fore.
Moira then took us on a slightly different track. She spoke of something
she believed in early on in her years--the sameness of men and women. As a
feminist who wanted equal rights, Moira admitted it was hard not to believe
in this equality, and to accept differences. But her own research
convinced her otherwise. The brain, it has been learned, is different in
men and women, made up of different substances and thus, operates
differently. (Read Magic Trees of the Mind by Marion Diamond for further
study). This difference is vitally important to the information age.
Why? Because if the brain matures differently, tracks for learning should
honor this difference, but unfortunately, our educational system has not
yet followed the finding. What are the patterns? At puberty, girls
typically crash, have low self-worth, and hide out a lot while boys, with
their massive self-esteem, just don't suffer in the same way. Girls and
women, it turns out, have a dominant tendency toward right brain activity,
prefer pictorial, messy, intuitive, even unconscious processing, while the
boys and men get it better if the content is presented linearly and in a
scientific manner.
In colleges throughout the United States, ignoring this basic fact has
implications. Serious implications. Women who have different strengths
are railroaded to the slower tracks because they appear to be struggling
with the ordered topics like electrical engineering. In her book, The User
Illusion, Tor Norretranders speaks about how the conscious mind is actually a
second behind the unconscious mind, how we must learn to let the
unconscious parts move on their own, essentially, get out of our own way,
in order to reach the slower, conscious mind. If women lead from this side
(the more intuitive side) and it is not valued, it becomes obvious why they
would be having difficulties. Interestingly enough, women's brains do
integrate the logical, left brain capabilities too but later on, when their
brains mature. But this is often too late for deciding careers; too late
for re-entering the more advanced professional scientific tracks.
Moira concludes that females with self-doubt and low-esteem would benefit
from recognizing their special processing capabilities while learning to
push through their anxieties. Alongside of this she recommends that women
honor their own biological timing, insist that our educational systems
respond to the research, and perhaps most importantly, promote the skills
where women do offer more, naturally. Whether this is picking up on
unexpressed emotional realities, and therefore helping the organization
achieve superior service or communicating key ideas or working triumphantly
in chaotic climates, women have to learn to define and trust themselves vs.
letting others define realities for them-in other words, no longer
accepting the commonplace "good advice."
Finally, Moira got the group to see how a similar reality is being played
out in the computer world. The computer, though harder for right brain
people, actually allows for the exercise of both right and left brain
functioning. Words and Images. Women, of course, can conquer both but in
cultures where only words are emphasized, women have typically assumed a
lower, supportive position, while those with pictorial representation have
resulted in higher status for women (hieroglyphics and Egyptian society,
for example). A cardiac surgeon, Dr. Leonard Shlain, has a whole book on
this topic, entitled The Alphabet and the Goddess. In any case, the
medium itself may be changing how we are processing things.
The web, she adds, is a prime example of our preferences for processing,
and the opportunities within. Its strength is not so much that it offers
all of us a new career choice (in fact, because it is a ubiquitous means
of communication, and not a separate career, it should be conceptualized
more as an "add-on" to what we already do) but that it offers us new
strategies for communicating. Currently, if you're under 40, you email, if
you're over 50, you voice-mail, over 60, you ask "hey, where's my
assistant?". But the power of knowledge and communication still comes down
to a simple truth: people and organizations that trust and respect the
innate capacity toward knowledge will feed it; those that don't,
(organizations and people) will lag behind. This includes how we are to
ourselves. Trust is the key enabler here.
Today, Moira observes, you can still see some old behaviors holding. You
can see boys knocking girls off computers when girls, who work better in
herds, can do better by insisting on having their own space. You can see
how we may continue to think we're getting older when, in fact, our brains
do improve each day as we use them. And you can see how many of us still
worry about not having the company nest but if we're clear about where
we're going, we don't have to feel shunted aside because we'll be on our
way to our own special goals and experiences. The parting thought seemed
to be that the more we know what is primary for us, the more we will make a
place for ourselves, in technology and in the world.
A great message, and a gathering of real substance.
Thank you, Moira!
Hear Moira Gunn on the radio:
12:00 KALW (91.7 fm)
10:00 p.m. Sunday KQED (88.5 fm)
8:00 p.m. Monday KUSF (90.3 fm)
Siliconvalley.com...covers what's coming up on radio
Moira’s shows are in the 7th year of national syndication
Click here for Moira Gunn's book list.
