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The Other Digital Divide
What kind of role is women playing in technology these days?
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Business New Haven
4/2/2001
By: BNH
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Many female entrepreneurs have embraced e-commerce. Even Connecticut's media and merchandising mogul, Martha Stewart, uses MarthaStewart.com to play an integral role in her empire, better known as Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSLO).
True, Stewart and Sharon Patrick, her president and COO, did not engineer the site in a technical sense. From a business standpoint, however, they did design it to provide promotion, lead-generation, customer service and a direct sales channel for MSLO's far-flung ventures.
On a smaller scale, there's WebInFlight.com, whose television program, Best of the Web, reaches a captive audience of millions each month tin-flight broadcasts on United Airlines and US Airways.
This Old Saybrook dot-com also has a female CEO, Karen Streck. Yet Streck's master's degree is in human behavior and business administration. It's her co-founder and president, Jim McQuire, who has the master's in computer science.
That situation women in top management, men providing the technical muscle is all too typical. At EduHound.com, another local Web-oriented company, the Webmaster and Web graphic designer are both female, as are the president and vice president. But the company's chief technologist is a man.
Women Missing from Top Tech Fields
Linda Bruner, while generally upbeat about women in technology, finds this pattern troubling. A principal in Bruner Consulting Associates, a $5 million information technology (IT) services firm based in Bridgeport, Bruner says women have been entering the world of Web site creation almost exclusively as designers, rather than as developers, database administrators or heavy-duty programmers.
Nonetheless, she says, women are increasingly filling critical roles in technology companies. In particular, she says, There seems to be more acceptance of women in the e-commerce field and they've been performing extremely well.
A look at the membership roster of Connecticut's Association of Computer Support Specialists (www.acss.org), sorted by specialty, bears out Bruner's observations.
The Ms. designation appears in profusion. But while a few women have found their way into such technical specialties as Microsoft Exchange Server or Windows NT, most are concentrated in end-user applications, graphic design, recruiting and training.
Men dominate or reign supreme in the more lucrative categories, including text-based operating systems (e.g., LINUX, UNIX), database tools for large business computers (DB2, SQL) and complex programming and scripting languages used to build dynamic Web sites or to connect the sites with internal corporate systems (Java, Visual Basic).
These hot topics are no secret. The Gartner Group, for example, predicts that Java will figure in 75 percent of all new e-business application development projects by 2003.
The tendency for women to cluster at the lower end of the techonomic scale is clearly visible in a report on the IT industry. Commissioned by Catalyst, a research and advisory non-profit, and sponsored by Tampax and Proctor & Gamble, the study found that women are most underrepresented in the highest-paying occupations.
For example, women accounted for 57 percent of computer operators, the lowest-paid occupation surveyed , but only ten percent of electrical engineers. Furthermore, only eight percent of women employed in IT earned $70,000 or more per year, a range into which 18% of men fell.
Still, Stephanie Philips voices qualified optimism. Philips owns SoftLink Resources, a Stratford firm dedicated to meeting the computer and networking needs of small businesses. She sees more women taking on technical responsibilities. Two of her clients even have women in senior IT positions.
But she, too, expresses disappointment that the IT landscape looks substantially the same, gender-wise, as it did five years ago.
Helen Charov echoes her sentiment. A 20-year veteran of the industry, Charov is managing director of eBizCT, the software industry cluster of the Connecticut Technology Council (CTC). I've always held up the software and computer industry as a great place for women to move up, Charov says. Unfortunately, I don't see that playing out.
She still believes it's a great arena for women to advance on their merits, and she's met a lot of exceptionally talented women on the lower rungs of the IT ladder. When it comes to CEOs, however, she says, I'm hard put to count more than the fingers of my hands.
Linda Phillips (no relation to Stephanie Philips) was similarly dismayed to realize that she couldn't come up with any women principals of e-com type companies off the top of her head. Her company, SOS Technology Group, provides information and knowledge management systems to clients such as the U.S. Navy.
Women Lack Tech Clout
The truth is that women are substantially under-represented both in the highest ranks of IT workers and in the upper management and governance of technology-related companies.
In mid-March, the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania released the results of a study investigating the representation of women in top positions in the nation's media, telecommunications and e-companies.
The study examined only 18 e-companies, culled from a Fortune list that included Amazon.com, Yahoo! and AmeriTrade. Within this admittedly small sample, researchers found wide variance in the percentages of women at the top.
For example, women accounted for 43 of the 272 executives at these e-companies. That 16-percent ratio doesn't seem so bad until you look at the supporting tables.
First, perhaps predictably, 35 percent of these female executives worked in such traditionally female-friendly enclaves as marketing and human resources. In addition, while females comprised 30 percent of the executives at Charles Schwab, 29 percent at E*Trade, 27 percent at Ebay and a whopping 44 percent at Yahoo, they were completely absent from the upper ranks of Amazon.com, AOL/Time Warner, Knight Trading Group and Openwave (phone.com).
More troubling is that only 11 held what Catalyst calls clout titles. That means women occupied only four percent of such positions as chairman, chief executive officer, vice chairman, president, chief operating officer, senior executive vice president and executive vice president in the e-companies investigated.
Most revealing of all, only four percent of board members at these companies were women and 12 of the e-companies analyzed had no female directors at all. In contrast, the 17 telecom companies included in the Fortune 1000 had a total of 214 board members, of which 23 more than ten percent were women. SBC Communications, the parent company of SNET and Cingular, had six female directors of 21 (nearly 29 percent) and six women out of 19 top executives (nearly 32 percent).
Don't blame the study's small sample for these figures. A survey of 101 public new-economy companies found that females comprised only three percent of directors, compared to 11 percent among the Fortune 1000 as a whole.
Re-Engineering the (School) Systems
Before women can attain top ranks in e-business, or in technology in general, higher numbers of them must enter the workforce with appropriate training. Unfortunately, statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor show the percentage of computer science degrees awarded to women declining from 37 percent in the mid-1980s to 28 percent in the mid-1990s.
Women's disproportionately low representation in technology careers reflects a similar pattern in science and engineering. In 1999, 30 leading female industrial scientists participated in a Catalyst study. Over half reported having received little or no information about the corporate job market for industrial science careers. Nearly a third chose the business sector not because they were recruited into it, but because they did not feel welcomed into academia.
Many people believe the cure must start in the schools and universities. Here in Connecticut, for example, a distinguished private high school will offer a Summer Challenge to junior high school girls from all over the world. During July, Miss Porter's School in Farmington will open its scienceand computer labs to help the girls learn about practical applications of math, science and technology to real-life problems. Until young women have more female role models, however, they are unlikely to respond in numbers to this or similar attempts to coax them into science and technology.
The Committee on Women in Science and Engineering is a standing committee of the National Research Council. If the information on its Web site is up to date, the female engineering faculty of Connecticut's colleges and universities totals only 21. Worse yet, it's divided among only five schools: two at UConn, three at Naugatuck Valley Community Technical College, four at Yale, five at the University of New Haven and seven at the University of Hartford.
The issue of equitable treatment of women faculty in science and engineering emerged as a priority in January, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology held an all-day dialogue involving the presidents, chancellors, provosts and 25 women professors of nine top research universities.
Yale's contingent at the Cambridge meeting included president Richard C. Levin; Susan Hockfield, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science; Alanna Schepartz, Milton Harris ‚29 Ph.D. Professor of Chemistry; and Joan A. Steitz, Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry.
The participants agreed on several ongoing action items, including analyzing the salaries and the proportion of other university resources provided to women faculty and working toward a faculty that reflects the diversity of the student body.
Helping Women Navigate the Obstacle Course
Let's return to the women who do opt to work in IT or technology-related companies.
Many of the barriers that hinder their careers probably resemble those that confronted the scientists in the 1999 Catalyst study cited above: an absence of mentors and female role models; lack of line experience; isolation and exclusion from informal networks; stereotypes and preconceptions; style differences; and risk-averse supervisors.
To help redress gender imbalance in the upper ranks, the Annenberg Center recommends that companies and trade associations:
- Conduct internal audits to determine whether they encourage or discourage women's advancement and retention;
- Create mentoring opportunities;
- Encourage executive recruiters to identify qualified women for senior and top level jobs;
- Identify and develop programs, both within and outside the industry, to train more women for top-level positions;
- Ensure that executive women are featured at conventions and conferences as both keynoters and panelists;
- bullet\Work with executive recruiters with a demonstrated record of success in identifying qualified women for board positions.
In the end, women in technology will probably receive the most encouragement and support from other women already in the field.
Throughout Linda Phillips‚ 20-plus years in technology, she's gained the most career information and guidance through specialized women's associations. I was originally involved with Women in Technology (WIT), she says, a local organization in Washington, DC. It was founded by women who were in management positions and a few people in tech, marketing or PR, but all involved in the technology industry.
More recently, Phillips has enjoyed her national membership in Women in Technology International (WITI), a separate organization with local chapters in many areas.
[WITI's] San Jose conference last year was really an eye-opener as far as the numbers of early-20s women looking to get into the field, recalls Phillips. It was amazing and it was thrilling.
Phillips and two other Connecticut women, including the author of this article, have applied to form a Southern New England chapter of WITI. For more information, call Phillips at 860-683-2620.
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