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."
