Although I had observed disaffection expressed towards computers by many adult females, within and outside the university environment, it had been anticipated that the differences between the sexes in computer use and computer dependency would have been significantly less within the younger generation of school children, but the results indicated that this was far from so. The teachers believed that distinct attitude differences still existed between the sexes even for adolescents who had grown up with computers in their schools and homes. Although some of the differences were seen to be caused by school organization, teaching methods or availability of resources, many of the attitudes appeared to be more deep-seated.

One of the most significant of the findings from the interviews was that computing was almost universally considered by both sexes to be a masculine activity which males found easy, and the more closely a subject seemed to appeal to male modes of thinking and working the more alienated females appeared to become. The females appeared to be more oriented towards practical uses of the computer and were said rarely to be interested in their intrinsic merits. Not only did the school situation inhibit the use of computers for practical purposes, because of the restrictions of the examination curricula and lack of software, but so too did the use of a home computer at the time of these interviews. In 1984-5 word-processing software, for example, was not freely available for microcomputers and was very expensive, while most cheap software tended to be in the form of games. In addition most home owners did not own printers, which at this time were often more expensive than microcomputers, thereby rendering word-processing software almost useless. Without a desire to play games or to program there was little of a practical nature which could be carried out on a small computer.