The bloke who used to be head of IT at my old office, Pete, had a very clear idea of why he spent so much of his time trying to undo the crashes that I, or other "laydeez" had caused by trying to log on. "They just ain't compatible, girls and computers," he used to whine, as he thundered across my keyboard for the fifth time in a week. "Women just don't have the right sort of brains."

The latest research studies in the US, however, show that there is now "gender parity" in internet use and at first glance, these statistics suggest that, far from being web illiterate, women are (surprise, surprise) just as competent as men.

At a recent conference organised by Marketing Week, entitled Women on the Web - reaching beyond gender stereotypes online - Philip Bird from Microsoft's MSN, gave these new statistics further relevance.

"What is happening with the net in the US today," he stated unequivocally, "will happen here 14 months later. In the UK at present there is still a male bias - but I expect it to be a 50:50 ratio very soon." (Cue a mass pinging of braces across adland)

Such conviction (or is it merely optimism?) was echoed by other speakers at the event - to the glee of the gathered managing directors and brand managers. According to Hilary Groves of iVillage UK, "Women are one of the fastest growing internet segments".

Her arrival in Britain is testament to her company's confidence. Her month-old website, a translation of a hugely successful US site, has stormed into the British market.

A closer study of American statistics reveals that 60%of American women go online everyday. This research, carried out by the Pew Foundation, a charitable trust looking at the sociological impact of the net, found that US women favoured sites where they can shop, chat, download music or get health or career advice. They also discovered that over half of the group was logging on from home. Could this be the key to the explosion in female web use? Because, in the US, high-speed access is very often unmetered and usually free. Can we really expect the US experience to be replicated in Britain any time soon when, unlike Americans, most of us still have to pay BT for our home internet access?

What we certainly can expect is that a large number of multinationals will take the US experience as gospel and forge into the British market, hoping to tap into the incredibly lucrative market segment that is the female consumer.

Current British figures show that 36.6% of the 10m people online are women. They are ordering their groceries, making Tesco the biggest success story in e-commerce history; they are checking out their healthcare facilities through sites such as Wellbeing, an alliance between Boots and Granada; they are buying exclusive fashion through sites like Net-a-porter; they can even check up on the latest celebrity gossip.

Jane Procter of Peoplenews.com has established that the majority of her users are women who are logging on from their offices.

"It is evident by the surge of user numbers at certain times of day that most are in an office. There is a huge push when people arrive at work and pick up their emails -then at lunchtime when they want something to read while they eat their sandwiches, and then again just before they leave. Our figures were 250,000 last month which is 30,000 higher than was projected - and we believe 60% are women.'

While the figures concerning women at work are very promising, by comparison, only a small minority are logging on from home.

Chad Wollen from consumer behaviour consultants, the Henley Centre, agrees that women in the home, most often mothers, are yet to be won over. "Everything about the internet is unbelievably fast," he says, "except the take-up by mums - which is unbelievably slow."

But why is this fact so unbelievable, given that many mother's experiences of the web are so often bad.

Take Jill. Jill is a freelance health journalist who should be swanning round the web picking up the most up-to-the-minute research. But what happens.

"I spend the half hour I have, before picking up my kids from school, hunting down Dr So-and-so from some university or other who appears to have done a study which is right up my street. And then I discover that the site hasn't been updated for three years and that Dr So-and-so moved on months ago. I can't afford to rely on information that can't be verified. I tend only to believe some thing now if it is between the covers of a book."

And then take Rebecca. Now admittedly she still hasn't managed to get her head around email - but taking my suggestion to order a book on line, Rebecca spent two-and-a-half hours trying to track it down while her two-year-old twins had a fight on the living room floor. Eventually she gave up and found it at her local bookshop, which took her 20 minutes door to door and got the children out of the house.

And finally, Liz, who is sick of her weekly shop in Tesco but is internet phobic. "You have to shop online," I insisted. "It's so simple - especially after you have done it once."

Liz stumbled at the first hurdle. She tried to order baked beans and was then offered too many choices of size, multipack, brand, etc that she gave up. Now she's even more phobic.

These women aren't stupid. Neither are they technologically incompetent. The Henley Centre has made significant findings in their research into this area.

"There are currently 4m mums online which is up 20% in the last six months," says Wollen. "But only half of them use it every week. This betrays a complete lack of engagement. The internet has not become important to their everyday lives."

There are many theories on why this is the case; that the PC is not accessible enough, hidden away as it often is, in a room at the back of the house; that the mum doesn't feel "techie" enough, particularly in comparison to her husband and offspring; that women don't trust the internet, particularly in terms of credit card security, junk email and viruses. But the most significant finding concerns time management.

"Women are not adventurous," continues Wollen. "They are task driven which means they get impatient. Working mothers, in particular, are so tired and exhausted by looking after their jobs, their kids and their homes that the internet becomes yet another responsibility which ends up being the straw that broke the camel's back."

With, on average, 15 hours less free time per week than their male counterparts, women simply don't have the time to boot up, download or surf. How deliciously ironic that something as archaic as the unequal division of household chores should be standing in the way of women embracing future technology and therefore multinationals embracing women.

Sam Phillips believes that lack of time has led men and women to differ on the fundamental point of the web - with men thinking of it as recreational and women seeing it as functional.

"From the figures I've seen - it seems true that some women don't relax with their PCs. If they don't quickly and easily find what they want, they won't surf the net like a man would - they just find it offline."

Women in offices, on the other hand, are becoming more and more web literate, treating it as yet another part of their media diet. Is this simply because they can do it all on the company's time at the company's expense?

One area of the net which women at home have embraced wholeheartedly, however, is email. But the key here is that email fits into a woman's time-saving strategies, because it's even more convenient than a phone. How ideal can a form of communication be when it allows you to send and receive messages quickly, effectively and whenever you choose?

The speakers at the Marketing Week conference predict that in the future, British mothers at home, like their American counterparts, will be treating the web as a new form of community. Not only will they be able to compare notes with other mothers, on how to get a baby to sleep or give up chocolate, they will also buy underwear, win holidays and get advice on health, beauty and fashion, all from the comfort of their own homes.

But in the meantime, if large multinationals are going to reach this largely untapped market they are going to have to get to grips with how women behave in their homes and the time- saving strategies that they have developed there. Most often they will be doing at least two things at once - whether it is listening to the news while cooking a meal, interacting with the children while paying the bills, chatting to a friend while doing the ironing. Even a visit to the supermarket is a way of entertaining children, certainly more so than watching mum sit in front of a PC for half an hour and then fail to get any Tweenies yoghurts.

The trouble with web access at the moment is that it demands 100 % attention - and many women can't afford to give that. "Technology needs to be better suited to mums," Chad Wollen sums up. "It needs to be as accessible as a PC loaded into a fridge door, always on, (so it doesn't need booting up) and non threatening in style and content."

Clichéd as it sounds, it is only when the internet is full-time, online, on the fridge door that it really will become useful. Until that time the internet is simply not smart enough to match up to women's expectations. So there, Pete.