Though the turnout was low the conference did spark off an article on 21st-century IT girls in

Though the turnout was low, the conference did spark off an article on "21st-century IT girls" in last month's Cosmopolitan. "There is a way of dismissing subjects they don't want to handle."Women are asking not to be left behind, but their media aren't listening. "A lot of the failure of the women's media to cover technology goes back to gender stereotyping, based especially on a limitation of women's intellectual life," says Howard. Incidentally, this month's issue carries a feature on Robin Cook's love life and William Boyd's favourite coffee bars. Now is that fashion, would you say?Marina Gask, editor of Sugar, which sells to nearly half a million teenage girls every month, believes that those among them who are keen on computers will "buy a computer magazine"' - but computer magazines don't address girls It's a Catch-22. Gask does admit that Sugar may have "a partial responsibility" to keep its readers up to date with technological developments, and says it's partly a matter of angles. "It's difficult to discuss technology in a way that's appealing."The assumption that talking to women about technology is inherently problematic isn't borne out by research.

Says Helen Wilkinson: "Attitude studies show that women are positive about technology so long as it's made relevant. Women's magazines haven't experimented with technological content, so it's not surprising they haven't got it right."Focus group research sponsored by Sony indicates that women want to see technological issues tackled in the women's press in ways that speak to them. We don't deal in financial matters or in anything technological." Asked whether Elle had ever consulted its readers about their interest in technology, Wilding said it was an "intuitive" understanding that they had no interest. If there's one thing that 30-odd years of the feminist movement has taught women, it's that we don't get anything without fighting for it. This hard-won truism appears to have bypassed much of the women's press, which persists in letting its readers down by refusing to take technology seriously. Would we have hung on the words of Nicholas Negroponte if he had gone and done a full Monty? Maybe not.The responsibility for women's failure to take up technology must lie with us.

Says Catherine Wilding of Elle: "We don't think our readers are interested It's not really an issue We are a fashion magazine. Did anyone think to call John Seabrook or Bill Gates a "bandwidth boy"?Women don't always help themselves to be taken seriously. A couple of years ago the US edition of Playboy ran a series of centrefolds featuring various well-known wired women clad in embarrassingly naff and predictably scanty "cybergear", under the ludicrous pretence of making a stand (well, a splay) for post-feminism. My own book on the digital scene suffered a similar diminution. This very paper's own rather positive review was trivialised by the sub-editor's headline referring to me as a "modem miss". Jim McClellan, whose cyberspace column in the Observer dealt with the wider issues surrounding it, believes that "editors, who mostly come from a literary/arts background, tend to confuse an interest in the culture of technology with an unblinking enthusiasm for it, then tend to dismiss that as too American and avoid it", dispatching it back to the geek gulag of the tech supplements.