'Can you touch-type?" It's a simple question, but when I ask around, I am struck by how many women say they taught themselves in secret. Some former grammar-school girls over 35 have even told me that they were told not to learn at all – they were supposed to become executives with secretaries. The teaching of typing in schools remains haphazard. How did we end up with such an odd relationship with the instrument at the heart of most modern jobs and communication? Especially one that was a tool of female emancipation, offering women a respectable line of work in offices.
The modern typewriter's QWERTY keyboard was designed by an American, James Densmore, in around 1870. Laid out to prevent keys jamming and improve flow rate, it remains the standard today, seeing off its only serious rival - the 1930s Dvorak, which claimed to require even less finger action than the QWERTY. Women's expected accomplishment at piano playing at the time was directly linked to the typewriter's 10 finger flow, and late 19th-century advertising for the first mass-produced models featured women demonstrating that even females could operate them with ease.
Historian Anna Davin has written that when the British civil service took over operating telegraph and postal offices in the 1870s, the official in charge, Frank Scudamore, sought out women clerks for their typing speed and dexterity. But crucially, Scudamore said the wages: "which will draw male operators from but an inferior class of the community, will draw female operators from a superior class." Women would spell and type better, raise the tone of the office, then marry and leave without requiring pensions.
So the trap of the over-educated but low-status secretary was born. The BBC's typing pool may have been the entry point for some successful female broadcasters and executives such as Natasha Kaplinsky, but in Rona Jaffe's Mad Men-era novel, The Best of Everything, sexual predators prowl its perimeter. In the seminal 80s film, Working Girl, the secretaries bemoan their job title – "I prefer personal assistant" – but the only way they can get taken seriously is by pretending to be an executive.
Male executives, meanwhile, were keen not to be seen at a keyboard. In the 1980s, IBM researchers found them hostile to the "secretarial" word-processor image of PCs. The advent of spreadsheet software is thought to be what first made office PCs acceptable to them. Then, as we entered the digital age, men were suddenly glued to the keyboard. In the mid 1990s, British tech entrepreneur Ed Maklouf arrived at Stanford University, in Silicon Valley. "If I had any residual idea about the supposed femininity of touch-typing," he says, "it disappeared the moment I walked into a room full of coders, and saw them all attacking the keys as though they were in battle."
Like generations of women before me, I learned to type on a black, spider-like manual machine, in a typing school. The positions of the letters embedded themselves into my finger muscle memory, ready for a lifetime of typing scripts and news copy. But for many women before me, it was a skill not to express one's own thoughts, but to take down and shape those of a male boss.