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.
