Broad Band

by Claire L. Evans

  iVillage went first, filing its S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1999. Expectations were high. Candice Carpenter was an ace hustler, with an unparalleled ability to portray a company “with deep losses, few physical assets, little proprietary technology, extravagant rates of spending, a high employee ‘burn rate,’ and powerful emerging competitors” as worthy of substantial investment. On the eve of iVillage’s IPO, which opened after an all-time spike in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, she’d already led the company through numerous funding rounds, culminating in a flashy mezzanine round of $31.5 million.

  iVillage set its offering price at $25 a share, and when the markets opened, bidding began at $95.88, making Carpenter, her business partner Nancy Evans, and their investors multimillionaires in a matter of seconds. Back at the iVillage office, employees were so delirious with joy that Carpenter told a reporter she was “peeling them off the ceiling.” Her own stake was worth eighty million dollars. It would be one of the most successful IPOs in the history of Silicon Alley.

  Women.com was watching closely. “I was upset that iVillage went public first,” Marleen says. She and Ellen had been tracking their rivals, eager to see how a woman-run Web business would fare in the indiscriminating crosshairs of Wall Street. iVillage’s stratospheric success was a good sign, in some ways: it showed that the market took women’s media seriously and was willing to stake big money. But Marleen wasn’t certain lightning would strike twice. “It affected me,” she admits. “I said, ‘Oh shoot, we better get out there.’” Women.com Networks, Inc. filed their own S-1 only two months later. “You know when the time is right because the investment banks are coming suddenly to visit,” Marleen explains. “It was the right time. It was probably the only window we could have used.” That October, Marleen and Ellen watched their new stock ticker spool across the screens in Times Square: WOMN.

  Women.com’s IPO was nowhere near as splashy as iVillage’s, but it was perfectly reasonable: the company’s initial $10 offering price per share nearly doubled on the first day of trading, and climbed to $23 by the end of the month. On the back of a high-profile advertising campaign that followed, women.com even nosed past iVillage in the Media Metrix top fifty, prompting iVillage to take out a full-page response in the Wall Street Journal implying that women.com had earned its place only by merging with Hearst. THERE’S A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AGGREGATING WEB SITES AND BUILDING THE LEADING BRAND, read the headline. But despite such antagonism from its primary competitor, industry analysts predicted that Women.com Networks, Inc. would be a key Internet player for years to come.

  Barely more than a year later, everything fell apart.

  Marleen audibly exhales when I ask about women.com’s fate. “Not my favorite topic,” she concedes. “I’d never in my life been in a company where revenue actually declined in a quarter,” she says. “I wasn’t alone, but I had to report that as a public company. Our stock started sliding, and I could see the handwriting on the wall.” She initiated an idea to her board: in order to become un-fucked, women.com needed a merger. “Once you’re hurt by the markets, you become one of the living dead,” she says. “I moved quickly.”

  On February 5, 2001, women.com made an unexpected announcement: the network’s biggest competitor, iVillage, would acquire women .com in a complicated stock deal valued at forty-seven million dollars. While the merger was still pending, iVillage received a notice from NASDAQ saying that their company stock was teeteringly low, on the brink of being delisted, and almost immediately after the merger went through, the newly doubled company fired half its staff. The Wall Street Journal drew an unflinching conclusion: “The Internet cannot sustain several major ad-dependent sites catering to the niche market of women’s interest.”

  Things may not have been so dire. After all, plenty of ad-supported women’s sites and apps thrive online today, serving puff content, incisive feminist commentary, and everything in between. The difference between these and the women’s sites of the early Web is that the latter imagined themselves as portals: one-stop shops where women could get all the Internet they needed. This might have worked in the very beginning, when women were still in the minority online, but as the Web grew up, so did its users. After a while, a woman’s portal began to seem like a misuse of the medium. Why would a woman interested in finance need to surf women.com’s money pages when she could just go directly to Bloomberg? Who needed fashion tips from iVillage, for that matter, if Vogue had a Web site? It’s not that the market couldn’t support more than one Web site for women. It’s that women, once they got online, could take it from there.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE GIRL GAMERS

  Computers have no gender, naturally. But the collective social understanding of who computers are for—who uses them, builds them, or buys them—shifts from generation to generation. In the nineteenth century, computers were actually women, and in the 1950s, they were a woman’s game, until programming was professionalized and masculinized. The ARPANET, built on a technical backbone radiating from military and academic centers, was male dominant because the people designing that infrastructure came from environments that favored men. Early hypertext was designed by women on the peripheries of computer science, but it took a man to popularize their ideas—until finally, in the early years of the Web, access to personal computers let women back in, and a generation of female culture workers and entrepreneurs made their impact yet again. In all that time, the technology has always reflected what was put into it, and by whom.

  As the researcher Jane Margolis notes, “Very early in life, computing is claimed as male territory. This claiming is largely the work of a culture and society that links interest and success with computers to boys and men,” leading to the cumulative discouragement of women, what Margolis evocatively calls the “bitter fruit of many external influences.” This discouragement permeates technical culture at every level: in school computer labs, in the way a home computer might be placed in a young boy’s room rather than in his sister’s, in a mass-market media that lionizes male geeks, and even in computer operating systems themselves, which the sociologist Sherry Turkle points out are so brusque they speak of crashes and executions, and go so far as to ask if we would like to abort ailing programs. It also starts young, with the earliest stirrings of a child’s gender socialization.

  In the mid to late 1990s, while the women of the World Wide Web were fiercely staking their place in a rapidly evolving information ecosystem, another battleground for the hearts and minds of female computer users began to emerge. It wasn’t online, and it wasn’t in academia, either, although it would have an indelible effect on both. Rather, it was a fight to reshape the very first impressions that computers make on girls, and to redirect their passions toward the screen with an activity that justifies access and representation alike: playing computer games.

  COMBAT EPISTEMOLOGIST

  Brenda Laurel tells two different stories about the first time she saw a computer.

  In the first one, she’s twelve. It’s Halloween in Ohio, 1962. Describing her costume—an ear of corn—she says, drily, “It was the Andy Warhol period.” Her mom built it from a chicken-wire frame stuffed with kernels of yellow cotton. Brenda could hardly see out the eyeholes, but she was convinced she’d earn first prize in a costume contest held at the local supermarket. By the time she’d waddled over, however, another kid had won. Brenda’s mother, a “little-bitty feisty woman who thought the world was pointed at her like a gun,” complained to the man in charge, the manager of a hardware store. As a consolation, he handed Brenda a prize from off the shelf: a little plastic box with the word “ENIAC” stamped on it. “It’s a computer,” he said.

  The toy ENIAC came with a stack of cards, each printed with a question. He took one from the top of the stack—What is the distance between the Earth and the moon?—placed it in the machine, and turned a crank on the side. The answer spat out of the other end: it was p
rinted on the reverse. Brenda didn’t catch the trick, and she had no way of knowing that the real ENIAC would have come up with its answer with the help of a group of women programmers. But she marveled at the idea of a machine in relation to the cosmos. “I had an epiphany,” she remembered. “For a moment I was transported out of my chicken-wire cage, out of the age of schoolbooks and typewriters, and into a glorious time when computers would answer the really hard questions for us.”

  In the second story, she’s older. It’s the mid-1970s and she’s getting her PhD in theater at Ohio State, a fitting pursuit for the would-be winner of a costume contest. One of her closest friends, Joe Miller, has a job at a nearby research lab, and one night he brings her in, after hours, to show her the second computer that she ever saw. It was painting, as she describes it, “pixels from Mars.” Just as she’d imagined about the toy ENIAC of her childhood, this was a machine that spoke to the stars. She fell to her knees. “Whatever this is,” she said, “I want a piece of it.”

  Fortunately for Brenda, Joe started a small software company, the kind that existed before the monopolies of Apple and Microsoft. His shop wrote programs for the CyberVision, a primitive home computer system sold exclusively at Montgomery Ward that has been all but forgotten. It plugged into a normal television set—the existing television remote control played double duty as mouse—and its programs came on standard stereo cassettes, or “Cybersettes,” running audio and data on separate channels. As a personal computer, the CyberVision was wildly ahead of its time. It offered a whole suite of programs: home finance software, color games, educational tools, and animated fairy tales for children, all rendered in blocky pixels on 2K of RAM.

  This last piece was Brenda’s first foray into the art of software. She’d done fairy tales in theater, and her wandering production of Robin Hood’s tales, staged at intervals among the oak trees of the Ohio State campus, was a hit with children and adults alike. Despite Brenda’s lack of programming knowledge, Joe asked her to come work for him, to design CyberVision’s pixel fables. It became her education. “Without knowing it was hard,” she immersed herself in the world of computers, doing “everything from graphic design to programming to making coffee.” In those days, code was hand diagrammed with pencil and paper before being hand converted into the assembly language understood by the CyberVision’s CDP1802 microprocessor, an integrated chip used in a number of hobbyist and consumer-level microcomputers in the 1970s. As she squeezed Goldilocks and the three bears into four-color pixel animations, Brenda showed herself the ropes.

  Placed prominently in the 1978 Montgomery Ward spring catalog, the original CyberVision sold ten thousand units in its first year, not bad for a computer company from Columbus, Ohio. But the market for personal computers was small, and the competition steep: Sears had the Atari systems, Radio Shack was pushing its own Tandy computer, and the golden age of arcade games was well underway. When CyberVision folded in 1979, Brenda still hadn’t finished her dissertation. But no matter—she was a game designer now. When she moved out to California to work for Atari, she saw the ocean for the first time.

  We sit in her garden and talk over iced tea; Tejava and pomegranate juice, the house drink. She sucks on an American Spirit, sitting unnaturally straight. She’s recovering from back surgery, her second, and her shock of curly silver hair is accented with pops of magenta and aquamarine. As we talk, two muscular cats with Japanese names clamber around the garden, which is really a forest: five acres of pristine land near the Portola Redwoods, a senselessly beautiful two hours’ drive from San Francisco. As the sun moves across the picnic bench, it strikes a pile of abalone shells tossed in the sawdust behind her. Brenda and her husband are abalone people; they free dive off the Northern California coast to wrench the opalescent shells from rock faces with a pry bar. The trick, she tells me, is to catch them unaware. Even bivalves lock down when they sense the current of change. It took Brenda four years to pull her first abalone. One day, mid-dive, she remembered that she’d been born left-handed. She switched the pry bar from right to left and pried that sucker in one brute pull, ka-chunk. None of these things are metaphors for how Brenda works, but they do add up to something: a woman with stealth and force when it’s needed, with a hidden prying arm and a garden full of rainbows, each of them a death.

  In California, Brenda strategized software for the Atari 400 and 800 computers. Since Atari had originally made its name in the arcade, the company wanted its new personal computers to run its most iconic games, and Brenda spent a lot of her time and energy porting Atari titles over to the computer. It drove her crazy: the way she saw it, the games already ran better on a console that cost a tenth as much. By the time her team made it to Ms. Pac-Man, she went to the president of the computer division and said, “You know what? I can’t stand it anymore. Let me show you.” She pulled out the whiteboard and listed all the things she thought Atari should be doing in home computers: personal finance, education, word processors. “And the guy said, ‘Your salary’s doubled and you’re reporting to me.’”

  These are the kinds of leaps Brenda makes: with both feet. When she decided the department’s corporate overseers were gunning for her job, she took herself across the street to Atari’s research lab. It was headed by Alan Kay, a computer scientist known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and for designing the overlapping windows of a computer desktop. Kay took Brenda under his wing, buying her several more years at Atari. In Kay’s lab, she designed an artificial intelligence system, based on Aristotle’s Poetics, to generate compelling new scenarios for computer games. From there, she jumped to Activision, where she produced games like Maniac Mansion, and then Apple, where she brought some of her more radical friends—like LSD pioneer Timothy Leary—into dialogue with the human-computer interface group. Somewhere along the line, she finally finished her dissertation, which argued that computer programs are like theater: they both have scripts, and neither perform, or are performed, the same way twice.

  Brenda’s house is several miles down a one-lane road through a madrone wood. There’s a labyrinth chalked onto the driveway and a shelf of classic Star Trek memorabilia in the living room. On her office door, a plaque reads BRENDA LAUREL, PH.D., COMBAT EPISTEMOLOGIST, and in a low closet underneath the stairs, she keeps baskets of fabric, long spools of maypole ribbon, and plastic flowers, their green wire stems akimbo. We have to pull it all aside to get to the plastic tub in the back, stuffed with memorabilia of a different kind. She’s promised me we can go through the archives.

  Everything in the box is purple. There are toy figurines, vacuum-packed in clamshell plastic. There are sets of trading cards, collections of opalescent beads in purple velvet baggies, and CD-ROMs in purple boxes with names like Rockett’s Tricky Decision and Rockett’s Adventure Maker, a couple of the titles she produced when she was the head of her own computer game company, Purple Moon. As she’s jamming loose ribbon and tulle back into the cupboard, I read the company’s mission statement, printed on the back of a disk: Deep friendships. Love of nature. The confidence to be cool. The courage to dream. It’s what girls are all about. And it’s what girls share when they discover Purple Moon adventures. Which is why Purple Moon is just for girls.

  PURPLE MOON

  In 1992, Brenda got a job at Interval Research, a Palo Alto think tank funded by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. Interval was all R and very little D: researchers wandered into the weeds studying technologies that were still far from being commonplace, like telepresence and interactive video. Brenda had just come in from the weeds herself. She’d founded a virtual reality company, Telepresence Research, that had folded within a year. She often calls herself a member of the “Crash Test Dummy Club,” those breakneck dreamers who try to make things before they’re economically feasible. It’s an “uncomfortable but fine, wild ride,” she says. Painful as the consequences may be for them, crash test dummies always see what’s coming up ahead.

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p; Brenda noticed something while trying to develop virtual reality: men and women seemed to experience it differently. “When I interviewed men about VR,” she tells me, “they would typically say it was an out-of-body experience.” But when she talked to women, “they would typically say they were taking their sensorium into a different environment.” It was a nuance, but it was enough to get Brenda thinking about gender and technology and how small imbalances in how technologies are designed have a larger net effect on who uses them, who benefits from them, and who profits. At Interval, she narrowed her focus further, opting to study the generation of children just then coming of age in a personal-computer-driven world—children like her own daughters. During her first four years at Interval, Brenda asked a small question with big implications: Why didn’t little girls play computer games?

  Games provide many kids with their first hands-on exposure to computers. But just as Brenda was starting at Interval Research, among fourth- through sixth-grade students, heavy users of computers were overwhelmingly male. Researchers at that time found that while girls tended to see the computer as a means to accomplishing a task, like word processing, boys were more likely to “play games, to program, and to see the computer as a playful recreational toy,” behavior that breeds familiarity, then mastery. This trend toward socializing computers as the pursuit of male nerds emerged from the long, slow masculinization of software engineering, and it continued to be perpetuated in popular culture, in films like War Games, Revenge of the Nerds, and Weird Science, in which nebbish boys “program” their dream woman, and from the marketing of computers and computer games throughout the 1980s and 1990s.