A few good women
Tech firms want more female computer whizzes
In her junior year studying computer science and electrical engineering, Brenda Liu was convinced she was a misfit--an incompetent misfit, at that. One of only a handful of women in her classes at the University of California-Berkeley in 1998, she was overwhelmed by her workload and regarded any test scores that were less than stellar as proof she didn't belong in a department that seemed to be a de facto boys' club. "I felt, 'This is way over my head. I'm just not good at it, and I shouldn't be here,'" Liu recalls. "I couldn't imagine I'd ever make it into the workforce."
Now a design engineer for integrated circuits at Intel, Liu has since learned that her feelings were far from unique. That sense of isolation and inadequacy is one reason the number of women earning computer science degrees in this country has plummeted over the past two decades--with women dropping from 37 percent to 28 percent of graduates--at the very moment their presence in other scientific and engineering disciplines has soared. "You look at the national statistics," says Rick Rashid, senior vice president of research at Microsoft, "and you just have to be appalled."
Until recently, many in the high-tech industry shrugged off that female brain drain. They could fill top information-technology slots from abroad or American doctoral programs, where foreign nationals still snag half the Ph.D.'s. But suddenly homeland security issues and visa hurdles have clogged that foreign pipeline. And countries like India are luring their U.S.-educated citizens back home to their own burgeoning Silicon Valleys.
Faced with forecasts of a looming brainpower shortage--and the retirement of those baby boomers who are the industry's pioneers--many leading U.S. players fear the country could lose its competitive edge. "Over the next seven years, our hiring needs are going to be huge," says Wayne Johnson, executive director of HP's university relations worldwide. "If you don't have half the U.S. population participating, you have a tremendous gap in filling these needs. What we're doing here is creating a disadvantage for ourselves as a nation."
That corporate wake-up call is music to the ears of Telle Whitney, president of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology in Palo Alto, Calif., who has been sending up alarms about the gender crisis for years--in vain. "Now, it's hitting these companies in the face," she says. "We need highly competent people here, and one of the answers is to attract that 50 percent of the population that's not being tapped." Sarah Revi Sterling, Microsoft's program manager for university relations, agrees. "The industry has finally wised up. A lot of companies are saying, 'Let's work on this together. Let's get them in the pipeline now and fight over [hiring] them later.'"
Pep talk. In February, Sterling and Jan Cuny, vice chair of the Computing Research Association in Washington, D.C., persuaded Microsoft to fund a CRA-sponsored workshop for female computer science and engineering graduate students to help counter both their alienation and escalating dropout rates. Held at a Seattle hotel, it introduced 102 women in first-year postgraduate programs to stars of the profession who could serve as role models at a time when fewer than 10 percent of their full professors are female. "Students need to see people who've achieved successes," says Cuny, "and find out these are real women with real lives and problems."
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