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New Technologies, Old Culture 195
sites with cars, sports, pop music. The only time girls got
actively involved was when they were using the Internet
for horoscope information. Girls have a different attitude
towards technology than boys. Boys are comfortable with it
and like to play with it. Girls are not comfortable with it
and would much rather giggle together and talk. Boys
teach other boys how to use the Internet and how fun/
useful it can be. Boys don’t teach girls for obvious reasons,
and few girls, if any, are highly skilled in the technology
and able to teach others. Thus girls don’t learn to be com-
fortable with the technology in a non-threatening way.
Girls are expected to go home after school. Boys are able to
come after school to the center to play with the Internet.
Once a boy tried to access a site on explosives. A message
appeared on the screen, “You are forbidden to go here.” For-
bidden by whom, to this day we still do not know. The Min-
istry of Information censors our Internet guides. Here, look
at this Web magazine. The cover advertised a story that
discussed love on the Internet, and looked at how boys and
girls are developing relationships through the IRC. The
Ministry censored this.
Nassima’s narrative on the surface seems to reinforce stereotypes
about girls and their relationships with technology and science. She
notes that girls are unlikely to use the Internet in their free time,
and are unlikely to teach other girls how to use it. These conclusions
contrast highly with the fact that when young Kuwaiti women at-
tend the university, large numbers of them choose to major in fields
like computer engineering and pre-med, and perform well. At Ku-
wait University, for example, there are more women than men in sci-
ence and medicine programs, and female students in the sciences
continuously outperform male students in terms of grades and test
scores. In 1997, for example, Kuwait University raised the test
scores required for female entrance to the Engineering department,
while they lowered standards for male students, because women
were scoring better on entrance exams than men and the school
wanted to balance enrollments. The reason given was that adminis-
trators wanted to avoid placement problems for graduates, stating
that the market couldn’t support large influxes of female labor.
Nassima’s own story of being a self-taught Internet expert, very
comfortable with the technology and able to teach girls how to use it,
challenges the narrative she herself constructs about the Internet