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The responses to the publicity from the general public yielded a sample of people of whom few were female; too few in fact to allow their subsequent data to be analyzed separately. When females are underrepresented within a group under study their data is frequently ignored as unimportant. However, the fact that they were so heavily underrepresented was a very significant result, and merited its own investigation. Two major factors were thought to be responsible for this discrepancy between the sexes. Women were considered to have had less opportunity than men to use computers while at work, and if used they were thought to use them in a less creative manner and with less autonomy than males. Both could be seen to inhibit women from viewing the computer as a machine for leisure and enjoyment, and as a consequence they would have been less likely to have become dependent upon them. A secondary school population was specifically selected to examine sex differences, because both boys and girls are offered equal opportunity to use computers for the same tasks while at school, thereby eliminating the factors considered to be instrumental in the adult population. Although seemingly non-discriminatory, the use of computers within schools and the interest levels observed still persisted in showing extreme differences between the sexes even within this young age group who had grown up with the technology. One can therefore assume that factors unrelated to opportunity were in effect, which could also have been active within the adult population. These differences appeared primarily to be due to a basic contrast of needs and interests, together with strong socialized sex-role stereotyping rather than to inherent differences in ability. The results indicated that females were more likely to require a useful end-product from their computing efforts and expected computers to be more controllable and more easily used than in fact they were. Together with initially being more inhibited by the technology, they were more likely to doubt their capabilities to use the computer and were more easily frustrated when programs did not run at the first attempt. They expressed less desire to understand the basic workings of a computer, tended to see it primarily as a tool and expected it to produce the desired results rapidly without too much effort on their part. At the time of this survey it is fair to say that without expensive software, a printer, and adequate support material in the form of well-written manuals, there was little which could be easily accomplished on a microcomputer; therefore their needs were difficult to satisfy. There is no reason to believe that these theories apply any the less to adult females than to schoolgirls.
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