<html><head><meta name="color-scheme" content="light dark"></head><body><pre style="word-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;">\centerline{\bf\TeX\ as a Feminist Issue}
\medskip\noindent
I work in the Polytechnic of Central London's Computer Centre as an
Applications Programmer and I've been wrestling with \TeX\ since early 1986,
long enough to have been taken over by the \TeX\ world,  to have become
unhealthily obsessed.  For me, working in computing is a feminist issue.
Not only is computing dominated by men but it's seen as a {\it science}
and so a male preserve in all senses. But that is not why I believe \TeX\
is a feminist issue.  \TeX\ seems capable of changing the world in a way 
that particularly affects women.

Look about at the academic \TeX\ community.  At first glance it appears that 
\TeX\ is by men and for men.  How many women do you notice contributing to the
distribution lists?  I am on \hax\ and {\sc uk}\TeX\ and I do find
myself scanning for female names amongst the Peters, Grahams, Michaels and
Phils, not to mention Malcolms.  Barbara Beeton is of course a heroine but 
apart from her I seem to remember about four women on \hax\ and
one on {\sc uk}\TeX. This is not to say that women are not reading the lists.
List contributions often seem to be a particularly macho affair; try not
to mail a question without pointing out why you think the question should
never have arisen and what you would do to fix it.  I know this is an
exaggeration but the tone of many of the contributions shows me that they
are most unlikely to have been written by women.  

Count the women on the \TeX\ Users Group Steering Committee and Site 
Coordinators list.  There are only three (or possibly two if Rilla is a male 
name) out of the total of twenty eight.  Sebastian Rahtz commented in the 
last issue of \TeX line that at the Seattle TUG Meeting men discussed {\tt
dvi} driver standards and women discussed standards of macros.  I was
surprised and pleased to hear that women dominated any of the discussions,
(and not at all surprised by which standards they were interested in).

Installing \TeX\ in 1986 was a tricky business.  The distribution tape that
I got assumed that you knew not only what \TeX\ was but also {\IniTeX,
\WEB, \Tangle, {\sc Vir\TeX} and so on.  Pointers were given to where files were
without any description of why you might need them.  At one point, having
decided I wanted to know a little about \TeX\ before I rushed out and bought
a laser printer, I tried to get Andrew Trevorrow's \DVItoVDU program going.
I kept notes on the problems I encountered.  These started:

\item{1}What, which, where pixel files?
\item{2}Looks like I need \MF\ to create them (from reading {\tt pxl.inf}
file).
\item{3}No documents on \MF, try {\sc TUGboat}.
\item{4}Cannot find \MF\ program in source or executable.
\item{5}Seem to have some documentation in \TeX\ format, but can't preview it
because no pixel files \dots                              

\noindent
All this seems laughable now, but I really was going spare then.  If I hadn't
gone and spoken to William Black at Oxford I don't think I'd have got anywhere.
That combined with my programming abilities of course and knowledge of the
VMS operating system. My initial problems may seem irrelevant to feminism but 
if the only way to get a system running is through programming ability and 
contacts in the \TeX\ world women are going to be at a disadvantage.  There
are less of them and certainly far less qualified in Computer Science.

Where \TeX\ really becomes a feminist issue is over the problem of who uses
\TeX\ and how.  \TeX\ exists to format text.  Traditionally the people who
enter text onto computers and the people who type text out on word-processors
and typewriters are {\it women}.  Hundreds of women in offices all over the 
world sitting over keyboards using their hard-won typing and layout skills to
produce mountains of paper.  Now what has happened?  Suddenly a tool exists
(and this applies to all sorts of desktop publishing software as well)
that not only is esoteric and needs skill to use, but also allows
far greater control over and quality in the output, and {\it men} start to enter
their own text!  Male research students typing their own theses instead of 
paying typists,  male lecturers typing their own notes,  male writers typing
their own books.  And of course they are most likely to be male because
we're talking about {\it scientific} typesetting here.

My first reaction to this is great joy.  It's about time the boring job
of copy-typing disappeared.  A work's author is likely to take more care
over its appearance and correctness than anyone else.  Why should tasks
be subdivided into interesting and boring parts, and the majority of the
boring parts handed to women?  But this being a male dominated society we
live in, things are not so simple.  What will happen to the displaced typists?
Surely they too should have the opportunity to use \TeX?  And of course
once the novelty of \TeX\ has worn off the boring bits are handed back to
the women.  We get highly paid programmers and designers to write the macros 
and build up the style sheets and then the typists get to use them without
a proper explanation of how \TeX\ works or what they can do to manipulate
the results themselves.

In our Computer Centre our head's first reaction to \TeX\ was very
enthusiastic.  Having seen a demonstration that I gave and printed out a
letter for himself using the standard letter macro, he decided that we should
offer a `typesetting service' on a small scale to the rest of the Poly.
We would undertake to produce pretty laser printed output from people's
rough drafts.  The person to do all the work was a woman who is employed
here as a data-entry clerk.  She duly started to learn \TeX\ and was enjoying
it.  Picking the different typefaces and learning tricks of layout are far
more satisfying (and I'm sure less bad for the health) than typing in files
of meaningless numbers.  She has never done any programming and the approach
was new and intriguing for her. But when it became clear to our head that even 
after a week she could not produce fancy ruled tables he decided not to pursue
the matter.  I did suggest that she be sent on a \TeX\ training course,
but it would have cost more than we get for our whole Applications Programming 
team annual training budget.

I give this story as an example of the problems lying in the way of any
individual woman trying to use \TeX\ to her advantage rather than letting
\TeX\ lead to a decrease in demand for her skills.  It is difficult.  Even
those women who can get to a training course may find it inappropriate.
The Advanced \TeX\ course that I went on last year was addressed to
programmers.  The opening remarks were about structured programming and
the format of dvi files, neither of which are extremely relevant to a very
skilled technical typist.

What I would like to see happen is \TeX\ being made more accessible to
everyone. By this I mean the whole of \TeX{}.  I don't think people necessarily
need protecting from complexity, that often make things less flexible and
less interesting.  I would like recognition to be given to the skills of
typists, they often know far more about what makes good layout than we 
programmers, and can type a lot better.  Electronic publishing is recognised
as taking skills out of the hands of printers and I would like to see those
skills given to a wide range of people, not just concentrated in the hands
of a few men once again.  Care should be taken by those responsible for
introducing new technologies to make sure that their effects are beneficial,
it doesn't do to just let things loose on the world and see what happens.
Things are not equal.

Practical steps to be taken are:
\item{$\bullet$}make the distribution tapes self explanatory,
\item{$\bullet$}carry on with the work on standardisation which can only make things
easier for newcomers,
\item{$\bullet$}design training courses both with and for non-computer people,
\item{$\bullet$}watch out around you for who is being taught what, and try
to stop obvious injustices,                        
\item{$\bullet$}have a feminist revolution.
\smallskip
\noindent
Meanwhile; is anyone else interested in this issue?    I would be very interested in hearing from women
using \TeX\ to know what you think about the way that \TeX\ is presented
and taught.
\smallskip
\rightline{\sl Maria Tuck}

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