alphanumeric to numeric

[LucaEviews]

We have data about gender called 'female' in which we have female and male. We want to make this alphanumeric values numeric.
We already used valmap: female has the label 1 and male has label 0. In this way we could converse female to 0 and 1. The problem is Eviews don't recognize this 0 and 1 as numeric, but recognizes it as alphanumeric. We have to multiply this values, but right know it doesn't work because you can't multiply a string I guess. How can we solve this problem?

[startz]

@recode(gender="female",1,0)