Technology and sexism – let’s try to be positive

The other day I had an interesting chat with Belinda Parmar, founder of Lady Geek, a new enterprise that ‘helps technology companies understand and sell to women.’ One of her current frustrations is the pinkification of technology, because the laydeez like everything pink, right?

Our conversation sent me down memory lane to the 80s and 90s, when being female in a technology, camera, phone, or record shop gave me 0.01 percent of an idea of what it must have been like being black and deciding to go into a whites-only restaurant just after segregation laws had been lifted. Technically I was allowed through the door, but that was as far as it went.

Tottenham Court Road was the worst, a frenzy of being totally ignored, stared at but ignored, or talked down to like a child, all with the added thrill of wondering which of my secondary sexual characteristics the bloke, or blokes, was going to look at next. It got to the point that I just wouldn’t go there under any circumstances. Up until 1994 I’d been using hand-me-down Amstrads from my dad, but then I decided to get my first computer. Guess what? I got a Mac, because they were generally available from small sellers where there was some chance of reasonable treatment. (I remember they were in PC World, but I didn’t like the atmosphere in there.) For what it’s worth, I’ve been using Macs ever since. QED?

Then there were the mobile phone shops. About 10-12 years ago I decided to look into getting a phone, but my experience of going into Carphone Warehouse and the like was utterly repellent, chiefly because trying to get advice over the counter involved negotiating some sense out of the three or four (or five or six) overexcitable teenage boys who worked behind the counter. Ditto the ignoring, the talking down and the trying to hustle me, with a soupcon of examining my SSCs. (see above). Ditto no phone bought. Luckily some friends gave me one.

And that brings me to camera shops. In the early 90s I was in the first phase of my photography. I was planning a big trip to India with my Ricoh SLR, another hand-me-down from my dad, as it happened. I decided to go to Jessops, partly because it was the only camera warehouse of its kind at the time, I think, and partly because I had been to Chris Jessop’s 18th birthday party, ten years before. Don’t knock Leicestershire networking. I was looking for a telephoto lens. Young, and admittedly knowing very little, I ventured into the store in the West End. I came upon a bearded man who looked utterly disgusted to be serving me. He cut me off short, waved one unsuitable lens at me and then another, while talking over me as if I was a total fool, and then just walked off. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, or something like it, ‘You’re being very rude and I’m going to complain about you.’ Now, that was a good start. But it all fell apart when I asked him to give me the number of the ‘complaints department.’ This was 1993 and customer services were still in nappies. He scrawled a number on a torn scrap of notepad and thrust it at me. I went immediately to a phone box to call, and of course the number was invented, non-existent. I was younger then. I know I should have been more assertive and had it out with him there and then, but what if I had had to mention f-stops or depth of field during my complaint? My self-confidence sapped, I exited the shop and went up the road to Fox Talbot, who gave me what I needed, second hand, and were very nice. I didn’t set foot in Jessops for another ten years at least.

And then we come to record shops, those festering armpits of dorkdom. There were many years when I simply wouldn’t set foot in one. Whether Record & Tape in Notting Hill Gate, or that jazz place in Covent Garden, when I once had the audacity to ask for something by Robert Johnson, my abiding memory is stale rudeness and a clumsy but very sincere culture of exclusion. And that’s just the people who work there. What is it that comes over men when they go into a shop that just happens to sell records? I have actually been pushed out of the way because some anorak has decided that he just has to flip the exact rack that I’m standing at. I went into the hip-hop Record & Tape and was astonished to be standing next to a very tall, very large, young guy who insisted on resting his hands, at the ends of very long arms, on either end of an entire display rack of CDS. His arm span must have been at least six feet, but since he had only one set of eyes, he seemed to be scanning every artist’s name individually. I was standing so close that I was almost touching him, and yet he was totally oblivious to me. Well, I suspect he wasn’t, actually. HIs girlfriend was standing behind him and was getting pretty annoyed. I hope she dumped him pronto.

Those were (mostly) the old days. I have since then spent money in Jessops – although by the admission of one of their assistants, I suspect after a drunken Christmas lunch, they are the ‘worst discounters in London’ and I buy all my photographic stuff on the internet now, as with my phones. I have been to Record & Tape and have at times been treated with politeness and professionalism.

However the upshot of all my stories about is that all those businesses lost my money and my trust. It was truly as if my cash was worth less than a man’s. Baffling, and really, really stupid. Of course, feminism is fraught with false peaks – now we just have to get past the pink laptops.