A few good women
Tech firms want more female computer whizzes
To combat that perception, IBM has launched annual summer camps for seventh- and eighth-grade girls called EXITE (Exploring Interests in Technology and Engineering). Instead of pounding in tent pegs and building campfires, the girls learn to tear apart a PC and debunk the mysteries of a circuit board at IBM Labs. To date, 1,700 teens have attended the girls-only EXITE camps at sites from Yorktown Heights, N.Y., to Santiago, Chile.
This fall, representatives from a half-dozen U.S. high-tech companies will meet with the National Science Foundation in Washington to plot their contributions to an $8 million "service learning" initiative designed to revolutionize the way college-level engineering and computer science is taught. Instead of being plunged into abstract problem-solving courses, students can gain hands-on experience and credits setting up, say, databases for local social service agencies. Already, pilot programs report a higher retention rate among female students. "It's because they see the relevance of the field early," says HP's Johnson. "The issue isn't whether women can do the work. It's how this material is presented to them."
Still, others regard the industry's gender crisis as the product of a more challenging problem--its image as nerd central. At Intel, where she chairs women's initiatives, Liu finds herself trying to convince visiting teens and Girl Scout troops that's a bad rap. "We're trying to show girls that this is something cool and fun," she says, "and that we look like regular people. We're not weird or geeky." The National Academy of Engineering has also launched a website called "Engineer Girl!" with jazzy graphics and job stories of fun-loving young female engineers trying to make a difference.
How well those initiatives succeed may determine whether the half of the U.S. population that is female ever boasts 50 percent of the nation's computer science degrees, as women do now in professions such as medicine and law. But even if the industry falls short of that goal, some companies now see a compelling business case for boosting the number of women in IT ranks. "If you've got a bunch of nerdy white guys creating the technology, you get stuff that appeals to nerdy white guys," says Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer for Sun Microsystems. "If you want to turn out more usable products, you'd better get more women involved."
In some instances, not having a woman on a design team can prove costly, not only in profits. At one California communications firm, engineers couldn't understand why a hospital emergency-messaging device--triggered by voice recognition--wasn't working. Then somebody noticed that most of the nursing staff was female. The voice-recognition software had been tested mostly on men.
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