High Tech May Follow New Paths as Women Make Inroads

The status of women in high tech has never been higher by many key measures. Yet most technical jobs, such as programming and hardware design, remain overwhelmingly a man’s world. So on balance, is high-tech’s gender gap becoming a thing of the past?

First a look at the gains: Women are beginning to make their mark on the new economy, given the rise of female executives at technology giants from Hewlett-Packard to Cisco Systems to EBay. Fortune magazine’s 1999 list of America’s 50 most powerful businesswomen is more techie than ever--rising from eight in 1998 (only one in the top 10) to 12 this year (with slots one, three, five and 10 all occupied by leaders of the new economy).

As technology’s women leaders eclipse women in other industries in power and influence, they are the first to proclaim the irrelevance of gender in high-tech.

And could there ever be a better time for women to crack a traditionally male field? With the new economy racing, great tech jobs are going begging. Meanwhile, widely proliferating conferences and support organizations help women figure out how to fill those jobs or build their own companies. Other groups mentor girls in math and science, priming the pump for future leaders.

Against this backdrop, the trade publication Infoworld (whose readership is 92% male and whose chief editor, Sandy Reed, is a woman) and Women in Technology International, a foundation dedicated to empowering women through technology, polled about 500 women in high-tech fields, asking them to rank 19 factors they look for in an employer.

Things such as adequate compensation, opportunities for advancement and the employer’s growth potential rose to the top. That can’t be too surprising to anyone who works for a living.

What did surprise me--and the survey’s authors--was that traditional woman-friendly factors landed near the bottom of the list: family benefits (such as on-site child care or paid leave for elder care) and work force diversity were important to only a tiny fraction of the sample. Even flexible work schedules--often prized by parents raising young children--were a minor concern for most respondents.

As one might expect from a relatively youthful, largely professional sample, only 28% of those polled had children under 18 in their households, compared with 40% in the general population, which must have played a part in their responses.

But generally the women responded in much the same way one might expect from another large demographic category not included in this survey: men.

The survey results may say more about the cultural conditions in high-tech companies than about the respondents’ preferences per se, according to Reed. Many of those companies long ago institutionalized flex time, telecommuting and generous benefits to retain sought-after employees; women in such companies consider such conditions standard.

Conditions for women in high tech are better than in many other fields, in part due to the innovative cultures of tech companies.

So if the gender gap really has closed, why do women continue to avoid hard-core technical careers like the plague?

In 1998, only 15.7% of bachelor’s degrees in computer science were awarded to women, compared with 18% in 1995. A recent study by the University of British Columbia confirmed long-standing trends showing high school girls to be dramatically less interested than boys in careers in engineering and computers.

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Karan Eriksson, WITI’s chief executive, points out that while engineering and computer science remain male bastions, women are making huge inroads into other high-tech careers.

In business and information-sciences schools, which offer “secondary” high-tech degrees--in marketing, business development, product management and the like--the ratio of women to men is approaching parity, she points out.

As a result, about 29% of the overall high-tech work force are women, according to WITI.

But the vast majority of the most influential roles for shaping new technologies still are held by men.

Anita Borg, director of the Institute for Women and Technology, a nonprofit sponsored by Xerox Corp., says high tech’s “philosophy of gender neutrality” drives many women away from engineering and computer sciences careers. That philosophy flows from scientific origins, she said.

With supposed gender neutrality, she argues, comes “an incredible reluctance to talk about the possibility that women might do things differently.” Women risk their careers by being genuinely unconventional, Borg thinks.

The implication is success by assimilation--being subsumed into the male creative vortex and the myopia that’s led to a vicious cycle of marginally useful, rapidly obsolescent gadgets, a speed-up of everyday life and a culture of endless churn.

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What might women change about this approach?

“One area that comes up over and over is a less individualist perspective on how technology is used,” Borg said--in other words, instead of creating an endless stream of new devices for each person, finding new ways for people in the industry to work together.

It’s no accident that women have designed a wide range of software products that support many users working together on a single project, she said. Meeting software allows simultaneous communication and editing of documents by people in different locations, for example.

Eriksson says that if half of all computer scientists were women, products would become increasingly focused on group projects and collaboration and on ways to provide better service to customers rather than merely delivering elaborate and technically sophisticated new features. Even today, with women in high tech concentrated in marketing, communications and management, they are beginning to have this kind of effect.

But Eriksson predicts that women ultimately will infiltrate the hard-core tech positions on their own terms. She cited the recent establishment of the first engineering school at a women’s college, Smith College in Northampton, Mass., which was designed to produce “thinking, broad-scoped engineers” out of generalists, rather than from single-minded, math-science specialists who ace their SATs.

Meanwhile, in theory the industry responds to what the market wants. If so, it ultimately will have to depend on women to decide what to sell; after all, Eriksson points out, women do most of the buying in our culture.

“We’re not feminists. We’re consumers and businesspeople,” she said. Hardly a radical notion--but maybe a powerful one.

Times staff writer Charles Piller can be reached at charles.piller@latimes.com.