Confidence Gap

However, if women have caught up to men in their use of the Internet, their confidence is lagging badly behind. In 2001 and 2002, Northwestern University sociologist Eszter Hargittai put 100 people of different ages, education levels and ethnicities through a test of online computer proficiency and then asked her participants to rate their skill at navigating and harvesting information from the Internet. She found that although the online skills of men and women were roughly equal, women, as a group, rated their proficiency significantly lower than men did.

And these differences have not shrunk as women's use of the Internet has grown. This year Hargittai went back to retest and interview almost half of the subjects who participated in her 2001-02 study, after they had accumulated five more years of Internet use. She found that although men's and women's relative skill remained roughly equal, five more years of experience had not changed men's higher regard for their own skills.

"By underestimating their ability to effectively use the Web, women may be limiting the extent of their online behaviour, the ways in which they use the Internet and, ultimately, the career choices they make," she reports.

Code Dreaming

So is it nature or nurture that fashions feminine indifference - and diffidence - to technology? Are the differences in approach encoded in our DNA or are we simply victims of the way we were raised?

Margolis and Fisher note that as early as kindergarten, girls use computers skilfully for writing stories, but boys race to computers for free time and play. From the moment the computer is first introduced into children's lives, girls see it as a tool, while boys see it as an end in itself. Overall though, girls get less chance for hands-on exploration of the computer than boys and miss out on working alongside their fathers at the computer the way the boys do.

And the early years are just the start. By primary school the researchers found adults were projecting unconscious expectations about boys' expected success in computer science and that those expectations tended to deepen into self-fulfilling prophecies. "We found that very early on computing is claimed as male territory. At each step from early childhood through college, computing is both actively claimed as 'guy stuff' by boys and men (and parents), and passively ceded by girls and women," Margolis writes in a preview of the book.

In fact the intensity of interest in computers is so high in men and boys that the authors invented the term "dreaming in code" as a working metaphor for how male behaviour becomes the icon of this computer-oriented world. They conclude women cede the field not through genetics or circumstances but as the bitter fruit of many external influences.

Yet Dr Louann Brizendine, an American neuropsychiatrist, is convinced there are real biological differences between the sexes. In her new book, The Female Brain, which she has described as a "kind of owner's manual for women", Brizendine outlines her beliefs about the biological reasons that girls gravitate to dolls and boys to trucks, not to mention the hormones that make teenage girls obsessed with shopping and the sending of mobile phone text messages.

"Common sense tells us that boys and girls behave differently. We see it every day at home, on the playground and in classrooms. But what the culture hasn't told us is that the brain dictates these divergent behaviours. The impulses of children are so innate that they kick in even if we adults try to nudge them in another direction," she writes.