Claudine Cassar, who set up and still runs one of Malta’s largest website building operations, spoke at a Microsoft seminar a few days ago about the negative messages being given to girls where anything involving information technology is concerned. Girls, sge said, are routinely and systematically dissuaded from taking up IT-related training and from thinking of any sort of career in the field. She herself had been told she was wasting her time speaking about the subject because girls are simply not interested in IT.

The preponderance of men in information technology is not entirely to be blamed on girls being put off the subject by accident or design, however. Wherever you go in the world, in information technology there tend to be around nine men to every woman. In the vast majority of IT offices and workrooms – as far as I can make out – the only women present are those handling the marketing or client account side of things. Those actually working on IT development, software and various applications are men, and generally men in the same age group, too. The reason for this is not negative versus positive messaging, but Mars versus Venus, the differences between the male brain and the female brain. And by those differences, I don’t mean that men like technical subjects and women don’t, but that this particular field – interaction with masses of IT-related data via a computer – is more likely to prove attractive to the male brain than it does to the female brain. And not all men, either – IT-related work is certainly not for everyone, but of those it is most likely to suit, the vast majority are men.

It is pointless quibbling with this. The reason that by far the great majority of people involved in dress-making are women (or gay men) has little to do with negative messaging or stereotyping. We may once have thought it did, but in this era of greater freedom, we have to admit that there might be another reason. I think it should be quite obvious, today, that the reason is not gender brainwashing, but that sewing simply holds no appeal for the great majority of men, whether they are gay or straight, and that the few exceptions who find it interesting are gay, but they are exceptions even among gay men.

This is not about ability, but about appeal. The thing is that women are no less able to find their way round IT systems than men are, just as men are no less able to make a cushion or learn how to whip up a shirt on a sewing machine. But being able to learn how to do something, and being good at it, does not mean that this is something which appeals to you, something which you might actually want to do every day as a job or career, or even just for fun. Men are more likely to enjoy jobs which keep them fully focused on something that doesn’t talk back at them and with the minimum of interruptions (like a computer screen), whereas this is precisely the kind of job most women abhor. Women enjoy exactly the kind of interaction that men detest and find irritating.

But that said, I do agree with Claudine Cassar that there is plenty of negative messaging out there and that girls are put off certain subjects and careers because they are seen as ‘boys’ stuff’. When parents do this with their daughters, I suspect the real reason is that they fear their girl may be typecast as masculine, might even be showing traits of being a lesbian, could even be mistaken for a lesbian even if she isn’t one, that boys will be put off her, that she will not find a boyfriend or husband, and various other forms of catastrophising of the kind to which parents of a certain type (which means the majority in Malta) are predisposed. If girls want a career, then their parents encourage them to become lawyers, because law has for some years now been seen as a career eminently suitable for women. Up to a couple of decades ago, parents of career-motivated girls would push them to become teachers. Now they push them to become lawyers. If they go into IT, they worry they might not find a boyfriend. But here’s the thing, if boyfriend-hunting is the main thing on these atavistic parents’ minds, then IT is the way to go for their girls: it’s all men in there. They’ll be spoilt for choice.