It’s not exactly a world changing observation, to be sure, but it is an interesting one.

50 years ago, very few men could type. Almost all typing was done by women.

Now just about everybody types.

Inch by inch, we move toward gender equality in a host of ways. When we compare today’s workplace, for example, with the one portrayed on the TV drama “Mad Men,” depicting a New York advertising agency in the early 1960s, the contrast is striking. Men dominate the agency. They are the decision-makers and the bright creative types (only one woman has broken in so far). All of the other women at the agency (called “girls,” regardless of their age)? They type.

….

Today, boys all learn to type at an early age. In the era of computer technology, it’s unthinkable for them to dictate their words, or write them out in longhand, and expect an underling to input them into the computer. Men in every profession now want and need to use the technology that’s still mainly accessible through typing, and they spend hours sitting in front of keyboards in the workplace and in their homes. Everywhere there’s a computer hookup, there are men busily typing away.

Of course it’s a banality to point out that technology does indeed change the gender balance. When washing was still done with a mangle, when food preparation took hours each day then someone or other was going to be needed to run the house full time. Further, when most paid work required gross physical labour, it was going to be the man who went out and did that and the woman who worked the house.

We can look back on the past century or so and see that as that farm and blue collar labor became less and less important in the economy, as the household technologiesadvanced, this is what freed up the world of paid work for women.

Perhaps less of a banality is to wonder how much of the sea change in working and domestic life has in fact been caused by changes in attitudes and how much was always there, but is only now being enabled by technology. Maybe we always wanted to be (roughly) equal as we are, but just couldn’t be as we hadn’t invented the things that would enable us to be so?