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Why are women in IT an endangered species?

Ed Frauenheim and Alorie Gilbert CNET News.com

Published: 07 Feb 2005 17:35 GMT

Closing the gender gap
While the statistics for women IT workers are bleak, they have spawned dozens of efforts to attract women to the field and encourage those already there.

One of the newest and most ambitious groups to emerge is the National Centre for Women and Information Technology, a nonprofit based at the University of Colorado at Boulder that received a four-year, $3.25 million grant last year from the National Science Foundation.

The group's goal is to increase the ranks of women in the US computing and IT work force from about 25 percent today to 50 percent over the next 20 years. It's already signed up an impressive roster of participants from more than 20 universities, a dozen high-tech companies and nonprofits such as the Girl Scouts.

Another focus is reforming college computer science programs to make them less about weeding out weak students and more about encouraging all comers to succeed.

Carnegie Mellon University has been something of trailblazer in this respect. In 1995, a paltry 7 percent of undergraduates enrolled in CMU's computer science school were women. Now, after instituting changes -- comparable to affirmative action sans quotas -- designed to attract women six years ago, women enrollment is closer to a third.

While still requiring high test scores, especially in mathematics, the school no longer puts as much weight on prior programming experience. Freshman accelerated-programming classes generally level the playing field by the student's sophomore year, said Lenore Blum, a CMU computer science professor.

"In the '90s, we selected for the geek personality," Blum said.

Gonzalez's alma mater, UCLA, is among the schools working to change the experience for computer science students. In the past several years, the California university has received grants from HP to revamp an introductory course in electrical engineering to make it less intimidating and more effective.

Students can now send questions to the professor during class via wireless instant messaging rather than having to raise their hand -- a strategy designed to aid shy students. The instructor can either discuss the question with the whole class or answer it privately later.

Recalling that she was one of four Latina women from Los Angeles public schools who dropped out of UCLA's computer science program, Gonzalez applauds the idea of programs that accommodate relative computer newbies. As a middle-school teacher, she encourages a new generation of potential women techies by focusing on the fundamentals of the field. "I definitely push math and science in my class," she said.

As reformers work to make the computer science field less guy-centric, hundreds of thousands of women continue to make their living and pursue their passions in IT. Here's a glimpse into the lives of three women in tech.

Intrepid entrepreneur: Stephanie DiMarco
Gender biases in the financial-services industry helped push Stephanie DiMarco to become a leader in the tech world.

With a fresh business degree from the University of California at Berkeley, DiMarco applied for a position as an investment analyst. "The seminal moment in my career was in a job interview, when a guy asked me how fast I can type," she recalled.

An indignant DiMarco decided that she could be her own boss, and in 1983, she co-founded Advent Software.

At the outset, DiMarco's vision was to use then-powerful IBM "XT" personal computers to give software tools to financial-services professionals. The company, which continues to focus on the financial-services industry, now employs about 800. Its chief technology officer, Lily Chang, is also a woman.

As a member of the small club of woman tech CEOs, DiMarco has had her share of slights. In the early days of Advent, she remembers, people often assumed she wasn't the one in charge when she appeared with a male colleague.

But DiMarco says the technology field is still fertile for female entrepreneurs: "The opportunity for innovation is always there."