And, to explain his shock, he said, "But you can't make a doctor out of a nurse." And that's the key to why women are so pessimistic about computerization as traditional support work is being automated right, left and centre. Because women are trapped by the socialization patterns: the sex-role stereotyping, which ordains that women will be the support staff while men will be the decision-makers, women will be the helpers while men are the doers, women will be the nurses while men are the doctors. This stereotyping is the foundation of the support-staff job ghettos in which women have been confined since they first entered the labour force as domestic servants. Attitudes such as that manager's will perpetuate that pattern and exclude women from a meaningful place in the computer age, unless affirmative-action programs - compulsory affirmative-action programs, designed along the lines of the Consent Decrees in the U.S. - are implemented immediately. But equally important, women need help in facing up to and overcoming the conditioning which so orients them toward, and makes them feel insecure away from, the support-staff roles.

The extent and pervasiveness of the problem is well documented in the Science Council report on women in science education, called Who Turns the Wheel. One of the studies it refers to involved a survey of school readers in Manitoba, which identified only three female roles involving leadership and control, versus support, dependency and lack of control. These three roles were queens, princesses and witches. Some role models!

Instead, young girls are oriented to see the wife-mother role as their primary role in life. This has two consequences. First, when women consider working outside the home, they regard it as a secondary, peripheral and fringe activity - or as an "until" activity, "until I get married, until I have a baby, until the mortgage is paid off. . . ." This notion thrives even today, and in the teeth of the reality that 60 per cent of women work because they have to. They're either single, single parents, or married to someone whose income is such that if there weren't two incomes, the number of families living below the poverty line in Canada would double. Seeing work as a fringe activity, they prepare themselves accordingly: i.e., ineffectively, with unfocused knowledge and commitment. And then, when they do look for work, they look for something compatible with the wife-mother image: other words, as support staff - the office domestics. And of course, they accept being relegated to the fringes of employment, to represent 75 per cent of part-time workers.

Women face a formidable challenge in making the transition to the computer age. Being women - being tougher and stronger and more capable than we would ever give ourselves credit for - we'll make it, though. Furthermore, we have to. For if we are not part of the process of implementing computer technology and shaping the computer age, I fear terribly that age could see the triumph of the "control in domination ethic, which characterizes our society, and which has been responsible for the suppression of women in it.

In the last few months, I've had the opportunity to meet women from across the country who are concerned about the effects of automation and computerization on society in general and women in particular. I've participated in conferences, workshops, panel discussions. And I've sat up late at night talking, probing more and more deeply into what I found is a common concern: how to reverse the trend in computerization from extending the regime of centralized "control over" and replace it with an ethic of self-control for creativity; or, put another way, "power to", or "empower", rather than "power over."

When I was in Vancouver, Anne Ironside, a dynamite lady who is associated with something called the Knowledge Network, as well as the Women's Resource Centre, gave me a paper by a theologian called Elizabeth Dodson Gray, about the story of Frankenstein as originally penned by Mary Shelley back in the 19th century, at about the time when Charles Babbage was designing the first prototype computer. The theme of Mary Shelley's story is not technology gone mad (technological determinism) as the Hollywood version would have us believe. Rather, it is the need to parent, to take responsibility for technology. The high point of Shelley's story is when the artificial man, the monster, confronts Frankenstein, his creator, to state his case: namely, that the invention of something powerful and novel is not enough. Thought and care must be given to its place in the sphere of human relationships. In her analysis, Elizabeth Gray stresses the parenting process, the nurturing that is essential in implementing technology.

I take this to be the feminist perspective on technological change, and I see it as part of our mandate. This is why we must speak out and be involved in how computer technology is implemented: not only to head off massive unemployment and under-employment among women, but also to ensure that the technology becomes a tool empowering people, enabling them to do more, rather than a dominating force replacing or degrading them.

Thank you.