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."
