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."
For Ishwinder Kaur, one of only four women in a 50-member Ph.D. program at the University of Oregon, the workshop also served up reassurance that other female grad students share her private fears. "I found out that if women don't do well in a course, they think, 'I'm not good enough,'" Kaur says. "If men don't do well, they say, 'Oh well, that test was crap.' They never feel it's their fault."
That attitudinal chasm is familiar territory to Carol Muller, a former associate dean of engineering at Dartmouth College, who discovered that female dropouts often had higher grade-point averages than their male counterparts. "It's not that women are flunking out," Muller says. "They have less confidence."
In 1997, with backing from Intel and AT&T, Muller started MentorNet, which links female students to online mentors in the industry. Based at San Jose State University in California, the nonprofit network has matched more than 11,000 science and engineering students with mentors from over 950 companies--35 percent of them male. "There are way too few women in these fields to do all the mentoring," Muller says. "But it also helps the men in the workforce get an idea of what's happening to young women today."
Among those whom MentorNet helped stick with their studies was Brenda Liu. At Berkeley, Liu had never had a female professor and couldn't confide her fears of failure to her Taiwan-born parents, who would have been devastated had she quit. Now she credits her E-mail mentors with cheerleading her through bouts of burnout and nudging her on to graduate school. "It gave me more confidence to talk to somebody who was out there working in the real world," she says. "I thought, 'OK, maybe I can do it too.'"
Then just as Liu wrapped up her master's degree at Carnegie Mellon University, her job search collided with the 2001 dot-com crash. But a MentorNet volunteer from IBM helped her craft a resume and coached her on what to say in interviews. That counsel helped land her a coveted slot at Intel, where she volunteers as an online mentor herself.
Part of the industry's challenge in recruiting these days is countering the post-dot-com perception--fanned by the current controversy over outsourcing--that the U.S. high-tech industry no longer has its help-wanted sign out. "The truth is, we have thousands of job openings here we can't fill," says Kevin Schofield, general manager of Microsoft's strategy and communications. "We're starved for good people."
In recent years, universities have tried an assortment of strategies to make sure more of those good people are women. Some, like Rutgers University, have grouped computer science and engineering students in common residences to act as support groups. Brown University established chain mentoring, where students bolster those in the year behind. And, with nearly $300,000 in cash and laboratory equipment from HP, Massachusetts's Smith College launched the first all-female engineering program, which graduated its inaugural class this spring. But the female presence in computer science hasn't inched upward.
High ideals. Now many in the industry are focusing on an earlier generation in grade school, where career dreams, and misperceptions, are spawned. According to the book Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher, girls--unlike boys--want jobs they believe can make a difference in society. But they don't view high tech as a key to that idealistic path. "They think it's what you do if you want to develop games or become a hacker," says Sterling. "They just don't feel it's relevant to helping solve the problems of the world."
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.
This story appears in the August 16, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.