SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA CAREERS / THE PATCHWORK...

To hear Anita Borg tell it, an idea that changed her life began in a women’s restroom.

That was where Borg began a conversation with another woman at a 1987 computing conference attended by 400 people in Austin, Tex. As they bemoaned the paucity of women at the conference, more women joined their conversation, and soon the lounge group had grown to 10. They decided to continue talking at dinner with the other 20 women at the conference.

That nucleus evolved into an electronic network of 1,850 scientists, scholars and students in more than 20 countries. Dubbing themselves the “Systers,” the on-line women’s group focuses largely on mentoring, offering advice and encouragement on topics ranging from what to know before the first job interview to whether it’s better to have children before or after graduate school.

Systers also provides what management experts define as a key element for helping workers succeed in the corporate world: role models. By sharing their work experiences, members expose each other to new options and allow the younger members to learn from women who have advanced in their careers.

“One of the most wonderful roles mentoring can play is to broaden our choices,” Borg said. “It’s (creating) understanding that there is breadth and there are different things to choose.”

The Systers share a common passion for the potential of computer science, as well as the isolation that can accompany being an underrepresented minority in a specific field. In 1992, for example, a National Science Foundation survey found that women were awarded only 13.8% of the doctorates in computer science.

In 25 years in the field, Borg, a consultant engineer at Digital Equipment Corp.’s Network Systems Laboratory in Palo Alto, says she has yet to work on any project with a female colleague at the same level as herself. “There are just so few,” she said. “That’s why Systers is so important to so many women.”

“I don’t believe that anybody manages to really just fulfill themselves independently,” she added. “In a fairly sexist culture, it is harder for women to get the kinds of information they need in order to thrive, and the information they need is altogether different than that which they get from men.”

So when Ellen Walker of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., wanted advice on the best way to handle students who called her “Mrs.” and her male colleagues “Dr.” or “Professor,” she asked the Systers what they would do. (Response: Correct immediately. Say “I prefer Dr. Walker, please.”)

When Laura Downey, a computer scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology outside Washington, wanted advice on universities friendly to women seeking master’s degrees in computer science, the Systers were glad to fire back advice. (She picked Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.)

Focusing exclusively on gender when selecting mentors is discouraged by some management experts, who caution corporate climbers to seek a variety of perspectives and approaches to problem solving. That’s because men and women don’t share the same approach to handling some workplace situations.

Karen Stephenson, a professor of human resources at the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, suggests that men, for example, wield power differently than women and “it’s good to get both sides of it.”

“Mentoring generally is a good idea regardless of gender,” Stephenson said. “There’s a kind of knowledge that people have that they don’t write down. The only way that you can extract that knowledge is to work with that person and emulate it.”

Watching mentors in action shows discrepancies in what they advise and how they actually function, Stephenson says. That’s a drawback for electronic mentoring because it eliminates the all-important personal touch.

For Systers, though, with the potential female mentor pool scattered across the globe, mentoring via e-mail has proven the next best thing.

Limited to female computer professionals and students, the group zealously guards its mailing list and its privacy. When a trade publication wrote about the group in 1990 and Systers began expanding, men complained it was unfair to be excluded.

But the Systers steadfastly held that they needed a place to describe their own concerns, a place where dealing with the issues took precedence over deciding what the issues were. Women like Rensselaer’s Walker applaud the opportunity to have a supportive place to describe loaded subjects like sexual harassment or pay inequity.

“I feel like . . . it’s OK to ask stupid questions,” she said. “(The workplace) is not a gender-free environment. It’s nice to be able to yell out to a bunch of women . . . ‘Is it me or what?’ ”

The success of Systers has spawned spinoffs in other areas. Walker began a group modeled after Systers for high school and college students in Upstate New York, and a network for women of color in the computing field has been formed. Also, Downey has received 130 requests from other computer aficionados for the list she compiled in her graduate school search.

The ripple effect has also influenced Borg, who changed her research direction after working on Systers. The fast growth of Systers and the potentially overwhelming amount of information being processed in the group led her to design Mecca, a system to make e-mail more manageable within big groups.

For Borg, the rewards of her organizational odyssey were summed up simply as she recalled a student who approached her during a conference a few years after Systers was launched.

“She burst into tears . . . (and said), ‘I didn’t know there were other people out there like me.’ ”