Now the fear for moms is not in techs but in children: too many questions about health, futur, education…lot of confusion in running a real family with more than one child!

I know countless women who can hold an intelligent conversation but mention tech and they go blank, just can’t be bothered to make the effort to concentrate for long enough to understand the basics. Most are just lazy, it’s pathetic. How often do you have to dumb down the conversation at a dinner table because women are there?

“If it was easy everyone would be doing it” the old saying goes, and understanding tech isn’t always easy. Where men are EXPECTED to understand everything and most take that on as a competitive challenge, the brainless female stereotype actually lets helpless women off the hook. They aren’t EXPECTED to understand anything so use that, to what they think is their advantage, and take the lazy way out, someone else can always help them out, just claim to be having a “blonde moment’.

There is no reason females CAN’T understand tech, but it requires quite abit of effort and if your entire ambition in life is to punch out kids (i.e. be a Mom) as opposed to earn a living in a competitive technical field, why would you need to understand tech at all?

(BTW I wouldn’t classify using a PC/ATM or a phone as ‘tech’, they’re fool proof appliance these days. Perhaps fixing a PC that’s refusing to co-operate might be a better classification of smarts)

My mom is pretty pitiful at using her computer, but she does manage to surf the web, receive emails (I’ve never actually gotten an email from her!), videoconference, etc. She can’t transfer the files from her SD card to her My Pictures folder despite many hours of training (It once took me 51 minutes to walk her through it over the phone!). But the important thing (god love her!) is she tries and every couple of months I’m surprised to learn she’s able to do something new. I attribute the steep learning curve to age, education and occupation…NOT gender!

I, for one, can’t wait for my kids to exceed my understanding of technology. It would be great to have someone other than me to be the go-to person every time my Vista Media Center goes haywire!

As a relatively new father, I’ve had the same experience – applications I might have made time for a year ago now get a shorter amount of time to prove valuable, or they get deleted/ignored.

It’s a lazy way of claiming mainstream adoption – then again I’ve spoken with plenty of new parents of both sexes who readily admit that their brains struggled to cope with a new child, whether it’s using the web or standing in a supermarket trying to remember why on earth you’re there (When in doubt, buy nappies and baby food just in case!)

The argument isn’t about using ‘so simple a mom can do it’, it’s about every generalisation of all Generation Y as digital natives who collaborate and use P2P for music, or all old people as technology-challenged, all males as tech geeks or DIY experts, etc, etc…

My mother falls in between those two categories. In a year or so she got a Macbook, she has become pretty savvy about everything including FLickr and what not. Only if to keep track of her son and send emails and photos. Stacey is right — people just assume certain things about a gender and that’s it.

Maybe I should generalize and say journalists who generalize are the source of this problem? But then I’d be just as guilty.

Having consulted for mega software companies, I can tell you that their predominantly male management don’t ask much about customer experience when assessing competitive intel; they only worry about the numbers. Which may explain why they are struggling with their business models these days as well as adoption by women. If a company takes for granted, ignores, discounts or blows off a potential constituency which is more than 50% of the total potential customer base, they deserve what they get.