Recently I sat in a meeting that included members of an organization's senior leaders and members of the administrative staff. The purpose of the meeting was for an administrative assistant to present the results of a research project she had been assigned. The research had been fruitful, and the staff member had identified a long list of resources for the managers to consider.

After the sincere thank yous, came the requests:

"Can you type up the links and send it to me in email?" one executive asked.

I said nothing but wondered why the Microsoft Word document, with links embedded, would not suffice. I also wondered why the executive wouldn't do what I would with information from the document that was handed out - pick a source of interest and Google it.

For many years, I accepted the oft-repeated "generation defense" at face value. After all, I am a cusp baby, a Gen-Xer: The year I entered Stanford was the first year that Macintosh computers were made available to all students in the library. I bid the typewriter good riddance with no regrets, but sympathized when people ten or twenty years my senior cried confusion over computer technology.

Two observations have eroded my sympathy. First, I have been forced up to speed in a variety of applications that did not exist when I was younger. I learned about basic HTML coding, wikis, and blogs in the context of jobs. Second, I have met quite a few recent graduates in high-level positions (particularly in the nonprofit world), who are befuddled by digital tasks as simple as creating a MySpace page.

What gives? My hypothesis is that technology threatens to eradicate one of the cornerstone social rewards of hierarchical workplaces: the right to command others to perform drudgery.

As a newly minted female college graduate in 1988, I did what many other women did: pretended not to be able to type. To admit a typing skill, I feared, was to be relegated to clerical positions in those workplaces where computers had not made it to the desk of every professional and manager. Now, as basic computing - especially email - has become a necessity for upwardly mobile workers, the border line has moved. Everybody types now. However, in environments that are not explicitly technical, lack of familiarity with one's computer has become a status symbol.

Managers navigating the alleged Boomer, Gen-X, Gen-Y rifts: Raise the bar on technology. There is really no excuse for allowing capable, senior-level workers to offload to recent college graduates tasks like Google searches and resizing images in documents, or to refuse to use the intranet. That will do a lot to increase the sense of equity.