Feminist Looking Glass

Last week, I wrote about a survey that had asked nearly 1,000 middle school students to rate the way they used cellphones.  The result was that both the girls and boys used their cellphones to talk and text, but, the boys, in addition to talking and texting, also used the phones to “play games, share photos and videos, listen to music and send e-mails.”

I took issue with the assumptions that the author (sociologist Shelia Cotten) had used when talking about what the results meant.  She said she was surprised that the boys used the phones just as much as the girls for talking and texting because she thought that more “girls [than boys] would use cellphones for talking and texting because females are socialized to communicate more with others than males.”   She also said that her assumption for why more boys than girls used the phones for game-playing, music, and e-mail was that “[f]emales traditionally have perceived themselves as less skilled in terms of technology, especially with regard to computers.”  My point was that it would have been better for the author to talk about the stereotyping that underlines “socialization” rather than her “assumptions” about perceived differences.

In any event, her assumptions about electronics use don’t necessarily hold up.  I just saw an article in the United Kingdom Marketing Week that talks about the “2009 UK National Gamers Survey.”  According to Stephen Yap, one of the managers of the group that funded the survey, the results show that “[gaming] has increased in popularity across all age groups. It’s also interesting to note how popular gaming has become among women of all ages.”  And, interestingly, using the word “communication” just as the cellphone author had done, Yap says that gaming provides “a channel for communications” for women.

The survey shows that, in the 12-19 age group, the percentage of females playing electronic games “only slightly lags behind the numbers of male players.”  In the 20-49 age group, the percentage of women is also fairly close.  In the 50-plus age group, the percentages are almost the same.  As far as the amount of time that “gamers” spend on the games, the figures are “similar across all age groups.”  (And, in a result we would rather not see, the females aged 20-34 spend as much time playing games (2.4 hours per week) as they do reading magazines (1.4 hours) and newspapers (1.4 hours)).

The interest of the gaming industry, of course, is sales.  That’s why the article says that “[t]he days of games being the domain of a moody teenage boy appear to be over. Advertisers that are brave enough to enter the world of gaming could potentially discover a large female audience that is more than receptive to their messages.”

For me, all that matters is that girls and boys have equal opportunity to do the things they want.  And one of the requirements for getting to equal opportunity is that there be no stereotyping.  I don’t think that the cellphone and gaming surveys are particularly important and I don’t even know if they have been supported by other studies.  But, for those people who think that females aren’t as interested (or as capable) in technology as males, surveys like the gaming study can help to break down those stereotypes.  And, as I said when ending my post about the cellphone survey, the only statement that I really liked from that survey is that the results “point out how much more needs to be done to teach girls about technology.”