So, with the IT industry and e-business in particular desperate for skills, has gender, at long last, become a nonissue? The Net economy opens frontiers for women unafraid of risks.

Three years ago, a gifted math student enrolled in a high school computer programming course. After two weeks, she quit. Why? She was the only girl in a roomful of boys and was ostracised by them. "They're mean at that age," said Renee Roberts, who taught the class at Harwich High School, in the US. Roberts remembers trying to dissuade the girl from dropping out.

She also remembers that the girl adamantly refused to return. "They weren't talking to her. They were treating her like she was an outsider. They treated that class like it was a private clubhouse," said Roberts, who's head of public relations for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference and director of internal training and strategic education partnerships at Segue Software.

The same scene is being repeated too often across the country, and it's indicative of what experts say turns girls off about high tech: the perception that computing is nerdy and antisocial and that it has no place for them. This negative image is reinforced by the media, according to Travelscape.com Chief Technology Officer Michelle Decker. "When you see a story on cable news about a dot-com startup, what you always see is a guy who has obviously been sleeping in his office for days," Decker said.

Indeed, research shows that girls make up only 17 percent of those who take high school computer science advanced-placement tests, according to a report from the American Association of University Women titled "Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age (2000)."

And the trend continues in secondary education. According to 1996 Department of Education figures, computer science was the only science or engineering field in which the proportion of women earning bachelor's degrees shrank between 1983 and 1996.

Losing half the population

Experts argue over exactly how many IT jobs languish unfilled in the United States. The Information Technology Association of America estimates the number to be about 840,000, although some critics claim that this number is inflated because it includes low-skill categories such as the publishing crews that put together books. Think "Windows for Dummies."

But even if the numbers are fuzzy, the consensus is firm: Losing half the population is not an option for the high-tech work force.

"The issue is, we're dealing with a crisis here," Roberts said. "There's this huge growth of high-tech companies. There's this huge, unmet demand of jobs going begging, and yet we have more than half our population declining to be in this industry. You have to ask yourself, 'What's wrong with this picture?'" What's wrong with the picture is one thing. How to fix it is another, and there are signs that e-business might be one answer.

The new economy "is breaking open these spaces in technology where nobody is qualified," pointed out Karenann Terrell, director of e-vehicle product management at General Motors' e-GM unit, in Detroit.

Often in these new e-business frontiers, the need for talent and the rush to innovate are so great that people like Terrell are, for the first time, given free rein in all decision making. "[e-GM President Mark] Hogan said from the first day, 'I need you to be on your feet and running immediately,'" she said. For Debbi Gillotti-chief operations officer at Internet database company Viathan, in Seattle, and former CIO at Duracell, a subsidiary Gillette, entrepreneurial businesses feel like a better fit because she sees in them more role models, both in terms of age and gender.

At Duracell, "I'd enter a meeting of my peers at the officer level, and I'd be 10 or 15 years younger than my peers," Gillotti said. "I found that negative because you didn't feel you were part of that era. It was very male-dominated. There just weren't any role models of females in technology."

Seeing people closer to her age and more women, as is typical of start ups, gave her great role models, she said.

Experts agree that the e-business economy is more welcoming to women than old-school corporate America. "I think the Internet economy is great for women," said Telle Whitney, general chair of the Grace Hopper Committee and vice president of engineering at Malleable Technologies, a chip company that was just bought by PMC-Sierra.

"It's much more wide-open territory. You see women in positions of authority much more frequently than, for example, in semiconductor [companies], where I work. There's a lot more opportunity in an Internet company, even without a technical degree."

No gender-tinted glasses

So, with the IT industry and e-business in particular desperate for skills, has gender, at long last, become a nonissue?

After all, the IT industry is famished and simply desperate for skills; it certainly isn't pausing to consider gender in such a skills crunch, is it? Indeed, David Florea, a systems administrator at The Private Consulting Group, summed it up this way in a reply to eWEEK's call for nominees for these articles: "What [does gender] have to do with information technology?" Florea wrote. "If you don't want people making judgments on the basis of (fill in the category here) ... quit TALKING about it!! You, like us out here in the trenches, should be in search of EXCELLENCE, and that alone."

However, statistics show it's not that simple.

According to the AAUW, women currently make up only 20 percent of IT pros. In addition, recent Bureau of Labor statistics show that fewer than 33 percent of participants in high school computer courses are girls.

Finally, statistics show that women's salaries in science and engineering were still lagging behind men's as of two years ago, according to a report titled "Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering," from the National Science Foundation. The study did not consider the question of equal pay for equal work but dealt only with raw pay levels, regardless of job title.

Perhaps Segue's Roberts best summed up the rationale for looking at excellence through gender-tinted glasses with this simple sentence: "It's an issue because it's an issue."

It's an issue even in e-business-which is lauded for being a wide-open frontier where opportunity awaits all and depends only on expertise, blind to race or gender, Roberts said-often because of lifestyle problems. The lack of flex time to accommodate people with children, for example, falls heaviest on women, the traditional primary caregivers.

"I've heard management conversations, even recently, bemoaning the fact that some have to leave work early to pick up their kids from day care," she said. "You'd think by now that someone would wake up and say, 'We need to support families. We need flexible arrangements so people can stay in their jobs and be responsible parents.'"

Still, the women interviewed for this package told eWEEK reporters that gender had nothing to do with their own career advancement, and that e-business startups have overwhelmingly women-friendly environments.

However, they agreed that, in general, life in high tech still isn't equally rosy for both men and women.

"There's been a shift," noted Liz Olig, president of TotalMRO.com, an Internet startup within 73-year-old W.W. Grainger, a business-to-business equipment distributor. "Companies are focused on people who can deliver. If those people happen to be women, corporations aren't afraid to put them in [senior] positions. ... But it's naive to say there aren't areas within business that gender doesn't come into play."

But, inevitably, the cream rises to the top. Phil Doersam, a technical support analyst at Travelscape.com, in Las Vegas, said Travelscape CTO Decker has the leadership and technical expertise to make her an e-business star.

For example, not only has Decker recently guided Travelscape.com through an acquisition by Expedia, she's now overseeing the merging of the two companies' technologies, plus she's heading up the push to implement cutting-edge technology such as voice over IP.

"I've been in IT for 23 years," Doersam said. "I've had to work for a lot of people and companies, and [Decker] just stands out in my mind as an outstanding leader of IT people. The fact that she's a woman is even better, in my mind, [because] in general, women have been overlooked ... in the past."

Wanted: A few good women

So, what can the tech industry do to convince women that they're welcome and wanted in this brave new world of e-business?

Experts say that merely having women in positions of power, especially where they're responsible for hiring, can be a magnet for other technically minded women. That's certainly the case at e-GM, where Terrell has a management staff that's 40 percent female, in contrast to parent General Motors, which has a management staff of which only about 10 percent are women.

That situation is attributable to the domino effect, experts say-when women flock to a company in which they see other women, particularly ones working at the type of job for which they're inter viewing.

"I've seen software groups that are 50 percent women, which is a fairly unusual percentage," Malleable's Whitney said. "That's primarily because women will go into a group like that and like the fact that there's so many other women there."

Another thing corporations can do is stop insisting on hiring technical professionals with résumés a yard long. Even though this may seem like a profitable approach, since employers expect they can turn workers' marketable skills into profits from Day 1 of their hire, what actually happens is they wind up training them in specialised business procedures and proprietary software anyway. "What [corporations] usually do is to train them post-hire, which is very expensive," Roberts said.

A better use of corporate training dollars, according to Roberts, is to set up internship programs, wherein corporations can get to students early in their careers-a prime time to target women, before they're diverged from potential high-tech career paths.

"There has to be a way to overlay corporate and education so these specialties and intensive courses can be taught while students are still in the educational system," she said. "You have to intern them early and show them career paths early and attract them early."

Finally, corporations have to get flexible with working hours. Many of the women interviewed for this week's stories attributed their success in no small part to the decision to forgo having children.

"Early on, I made a decision that I wouldn't have children because I couldn't figure out how you would split your time effectively," Viathan's Gillotti said. "I just saw too many women who were killing themselves, working too many hours and trying to be too many things to all people."

Is it reasonable to believe that companies will begin to take these steps? If they can understand the logic, there's reason for optimism.

After all, any company that enlarges its potential talent pool by half is going to have some clear advantages as the e-business economy unfolds in the years ahead.

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