Brain Trust

Cover Story

by Charles Molineaux

March 25, 2008

A growing corps of women information technology professionals and chief information officers is conspiring to blow open a well-kept secret of the U.S. business world:  There are a lot of great job opportunities in technology.

     Yes, really.

     The National Science Foundation estimates America will need 1.25 million more science and engineering employees between now and 2012, a 26 percent increase. Unfortunately, students and job seekers, especially women, are turning away from the field in droves.

     "We're just headed for a perfect storm in IT," warns Rebecca Blalock, CIO of Southern Co.  "We're reaching a point in time where the fastest growing jobs are going to be in the IT field, and the people aren't going to be there to do those jobs."

       Just when they might be expected to relax and celebrate their hard-won successes at bursting glass ceilings for themselves as well as for generations to come, successful women in the IT field find their role disturbingly changed from vanguard to rearguard, fighting to reverse a stubborn trend away from women's participation in the corporate world of technology.  And this struggle is critical not just for the women and girls of the future, but for an overall U.S. business world threatened by a crippling long-term tech talent shortage.
     The 21st century is certainly off to a less than auspicious start for women in technology.  According to the National Bureau of Labor Statistics, the percentage of women in "computer and mathematical occupations" declined by almost 14 percent between 2000 and 2007, and their total number in the field slipped by 10 percent. While the bureau's statistics for female representation among "computer and information systems managers" dipped only slightly during the period, from 28 percent to 27.8 percent, that figure is hardly progress.  Furthermore, with fewer women getting into the field, where will the women technology leaders of the future come from?

      The brain drain sapping the next generation of IT professionals, especially female ones, is starting in the earliest stages of career decision-making.  Between 2000 and 2004, the percentage of college freshmen listing computer science as their probable major fell a stupefying 70 percent.  Even at the K-12 level, the College Board reports that although girls have such a strong presence in Advanced Placement classes that they outnumber boys, girls are still only 15 percent of those taking tests in AP computer science.
     "It is definitely trending the wrong way," observes Deborah Dean, CIO of Matria Healthcare of Marietta.  "A lot of times when I'm in meetings, it's majority men, not women."

Who wants to be a CIO?
     The confounding trend is developing even as IT, and women IT leaders, achieve growing levels of respect and acceptance in their organizations, finally escaping from back offices, utility closets and basements everywhere.

       Delores Barton is not merely Spelman College's first woman technology boss.  As vice president and CIO of the school's media and information technology division, she's the first officially named chief information officer that Spelman has ever had and the first to report directly to the president instead of the school's chief financial officer.  After 31 years at IBM and a background solidly rooted in tech and math, she took the job five years ago and has gratefully watched the institution's growing appreciation for technology's role.  "More and more people have come to recognize IT as critical to their success," she asserts.  "At budget time, no one says "Oh, they're getting too much.'  People say, ‘We need to invest in technology because we need it to do our jobs.'  It's a given."

    "It used to be like, ‘Ooh, I don't understand it. I know I need it, but keep it back in the corner,'" recalls Helen Berg, CIO of Merge Healthcare.  "Now, since the popularity of the Internet, it's not just about what's going on in the computer room and running the networks.  It also is, ‘How do I use this to change my business or run my business to achieve a competitive advantage?'"
     Barbara Kunkel, CIO for the Troutman Sanders law firm, says even the slow-to-change legal field has seen dramatic evolution in the past decade, pointing to the 1990s when her firm took the then-unusual step of registering its domain name.  "This is an electronic world.  It's understood now that if you're going to hire a law firm, you'd better make sure they're efficient. Corporations have been spending millions on legal resources, and they need to have their law firms become more versed."

     And while technology's ability to reduce a firm's billable hours may seem a mixed blessing, Kunkel says legal-technical phenomena such as e-discovery have been revolutionary.  "In the electronic world, that's the smoking gun in the legal industry as it was in the Microsoft antitrust case, discovering those memos.  I have to find those smoking guns."
     At the same time, having the right CIO directing tech initiatives can make all the difference, too.  IT can be a huge area of spending for a company, even as technical initiatives are often launched to streamline and reduce expenses.

     "You've got make sure you're matching what you're spending with the company's objectives," Berg warns.  "If you have a mismatch there, it can be very draining on the bottom line.  So you want to align your IT spending with what your company objectives are.   In that regard, I think the CIO plays a huge part in getting that alignment in place."
     David Leighton, president of the Women in Technology International advocacy group, sees the job evolving from one that revolved around fear and security concerns to a major asset woven into every aspect of a business.  "The CIO position," he observes, "was built as this vertical role with walls around it.  As we've turned the corner and technology has become more mainstream and the Internet is more widely accepted as the new business platform, we've seen a shift in the IT role to a horizontal one integrated through companies."

     That evolution, and the liberation of IT from a hard-core hardware pursuit typically locked in the cellar, has also broadened the field's appeal to women and the applicability of managerial strengths typically associated with women. 

       "Because of the shift, we've seen a number of women excel," Leighton says.  "They bring certain skill sets to the table, and we see this as you look at the whole 360-degree leadership style, consensus building, managing across corporations.  A lot of that talks to the feminine side of leadership."

A manly job
     Not that the much-lamented male domination of IT has evaporated, nor have some persistent turnoffs for women trying to achieve in the field.  Long hours and an unforgiving schedule, for example. 
     "In 1992 I was working on the F-22 fighter program for Lockheed Martin," recalls Berg, who was raising three children at the time.  "The days were long and I definitely felt a lot of stress about having to say, ‘I can't come in at 7 in the morning because I can't drop the children off until 7:30.'  You don't want to be seen as someone who right at a critical moment has to be the one who gets up from the table and has to leave."
     "That balance is very hard," Dean grants.  "Especially if you're the primary caregiver, it's always a challenge for women.  You have these huge, colossal projects, and especially from a technology perspective.  It's not something where you can say, ‘Oh, I'll do that three weeks from now.'"

     Berg says it sometimes is too much.  "Some of my friends have said, when they've left their jobs, ‘I'll take any job, just as long as it's not in IT.'"  But the technology world is also seeing some progress made possible by ... technology.  Telecommuting is still in its infancy but being embraced by growing numbers of CIOs.  "More and more database and development jobs do have maybe a work-from-home day," Dean observes.  "We offer it one day a week for those jobs.  That's not available for the network engineering stuff, because you have to be here to work on the item."

     At the same time, the broadening of the roles for IT have also widened the ladder leading to the CIO slot, so expertise in the softer side of computing can become a ticket up.  "Women have the creativity, the analytical skills that make good software and database developers," says Dean, whose degree is in health care administration, not computers.  "It looks like women are not attracted to the hardware-physical wiring-device aspect of the business.  If you look at the IT operations function, the network engineers, data operations people, they're almost all men, and the people that are promoted throughout are primarily men.  But then if you look at my software development side and the knowledge management and data warehousing side, they have a better distribution with more women in it.  My two lead data architects are both females, so I think there are more women to progress up through the ranks in those types of categories."

United in crisis
     Male and female alike, however, forward-looking CIOs are lining up to face the market's growing shortage of qualified personnel, especially women. "The fight for talent is getting ready to start," warns Blalock, who says the issue is often discussed in metro Atlanta's unusually close knit CIO community.  Her Southern Co. has been forced into the forefront on the issue by its own aging work force and a looming exodus of skilled workers.  "At the point in time when a lot of these folks are getting ready to retire, we've got this dearth of talent in the marketplace."

     Microsoft Corp. warns of the looming tech talent crunch in a stark assessment by the company's computer science research organization, Microsoft Research.  Its 2006 white paper, The Future of Information Technology:  Growing the Talent Critical for Innovation, specifically identifies as a problem the failure of the computer science field to adequately attract women.  From 1985 to 2003, among women taking the SAT, the percentage intending to take computer science shrank to just 16 percent from 37 percent.

     "Alarmingly," the analysis concludes, "the proportion of women who considered majoring in computer science has fallen to levels unseen since the early 1970s ... and is now 70 percent lower than its peak in the early 1980s."  The analysts caution that a worsening shortage of employees trained in computer sciences threatens American competitiveness and innovation on the world stage.
     The stakes are chillingly spelled out in a simple but powerful video Shift Happens, which last year turned into an Internet sensation.  Blalock enthusiastically disseminates links to the presentation calling it "scary."  Created by a Denver area high school administrator, the brief PowerPoint creation is much simpler than Microsoft's white paper but delivers an in-your-face wake-up call about the importance of staying current in a world of technology and international affairs now changing at blinding speed. 

     Ephraim McLean, chairman of Computer Information Systems at the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University, sees widespread slippage.  "I've talked everywhere," he says.  "From Cornell, to Stanford, to MIT to Georgia Tech, to Georgia State, to Minnesota to Texas and universally in all aspects of computer science to information systems, they're down dramatically, anywhere from 20 to 60 percent drops in applications and enrollment.  

"Something's wrong generally, because I talk to employers they say, ‘My God, we need people!'"

Why ask why
     "We've really gone through a cycle," Dean theorizes.  "In the '60s a lot of moms stayed home.  In the '70s and '80s women were going into the work force.  In the '90s and 2000s, they're staying at home with children.  It's cycled back and forth."

     While the worrisome numbers are widely recognized in the IT world, attempts to trace the roots of the problem and understand it continue.  Hypotheses abound.

     With only 17 percent female CIOs worldwide, common theories emphasize the field's male dominance and a lack of role models for women, although neither of these is new. And even though the number of women tech leaders has dipped recently, their number remains dramatically higher than two decades ago when, nonetheless, proportionally far more women were launching careers in IT.

     Long hours and the challenges of maintaining work-life balance are also often cited. But such concerns in the business world predate the very existence of IT, and many employers are aggressively trying to address them with telecommuting and flex-time initiatives, a situation that is a far cry from the early 1980s when, again, the field was seeing an influx of women.

     Berg points out that, even as IT employers compete with each other for talent, they face growing competition from outside the field as women choose other technical and scientific careers. "Even when women are picking sciences, you see a lot more people going into life sciences, into biology, biotechnology.  There are a lot of new exciting things going on.  So that could be one reason we're seeing less involvement in IT.  It may not be quite as revered of a profession as other ones."

     The field's degree of hostility or hospitality to its distaff side gets a fresh airing in a study that appears in the February edition of the Communications of the ACM.
     The analysis offers the results of a survey of the perceptions and priorities of men and women currently working in IT.  Men expressed higher levels of enthusiasm for the technology itself; women placed a higher premium on the IT field's job security, ease of entry and flexible working hours.

Otherwise, the study found there was no difference between the male respondents and the female ones in the degrees of importance or satisfaction they cited on questions about their chances for advancement, prestige, income opportunities, and the chance to do gratifying work.

The survey offers a potentially telling insight in that it reflects the observations of women already in IT careers at a time when those outside are choosing to stay out.  Is there a potential disconnect between the realities of the field and how the public perceives it?

What we have here is a failure to communicate
     Concerns about a widespread misperception come up repeatedly as technology professionals wrestle with their human energy crisis.  As Blalock says, "It doesn't make sense that more people aren't going into this field, except that it has a poor image."

     It is an image that has indeed taken a crippling series of hits in recent years.  At GSU, McLean sees in the industry's history a pattern of feast and famine that can frighten observers.  "Men and women were both entering the field in the ‘go-go' 1980s," he recalls, "the Silicon Valley days.  It grew up through '82, '83, '84 and peaked around 1989.  Then it fell off.  Then it started to grow back in the 1990s into the ‘dot bomb' disaster.  As it built back up, there was almost the same number of people going into computing studies, but the number of women fell off.  There was this great divergence."
     Microsoft's Future of Information Technology points to what it calls "The Story of Vanishing Opportunities," the operative word being "story."
"The bursting of the ‘dotcom bubble,'" the paper says, "led to distrust ... even strong technology companies have been grouped together in the minds of many with the numerous, highly speculative businesses that were focused on Internet commerce get-rich-quick schemes."

     Then comes the chilling chapter reflected in headlines: outsourcing.

     "Is it because Lou Dobbs say all our jobs are going to India?" asks an exasperated McLean, pointing a finger at the parade of news reports of technology employment "going overseas"
     From The Future of Information Technology:  "This has led to the prevailing conventional wisdom that there is no longer a viable career path available domestically in the computing professions. Ironically, although strong evidence of increasing demand now contradicts these commonly held perceptions, the data has not yet been widely publicized."

     And that evidence is indeed strong.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics says five of the top 10 fastest-growing jobs between 2004 and 2014 will be in IT.  It projects a 54 percent increase in demand for network systems and data communications analysts, a 38 percent increase for computer applications software engineers, 43 percent for computer systems software engineers, 38 percent for network and computer systems administrators and 38 percent for database administrators.

     As for those biology and biotechnology jobs mentioned earlier, the BLS expects growth there, too, but nothing remotely on the scale of the growth forecast in IT.   Even with the widely accepted projection of a 2 percent to 3 percent annual job loss to outsourcing in the next decade, the growth in new tech jobs is expected to vastly outnumber those job opportunities being sent to New Delhi. And Blalock says for all the coding work that will be going to the other side of the world, there is a growing amount of crucial, proprietary work that businesses won't let out of their sight, and that means opportunity right at home.

      "We've got to start getting the word out about this," Blalock says. "But we've done such a terrible job, scaring these kids.  Their parents are telling them, ‘I'm not going to pay for you to major in computer science.  Those jobs are going to China and India.'  But somebody has stay here and manage that stuff.  And they're high-paying jobs!"

Outreach
     "You have to go back to the schools," Berg says.  "You have to go back to where some of these seeds are set."  She points to a series of initiatives aimed at capturing the imaginations of girls and young women.  Techbridge, a high school after-school and summer program originally funded by the National Science Foundation, seeks to encourage girls in science and technology fields.  The program has formally set her up as a mentor for a young woman.

IBM offers a weeklong program in math and science through its EXITE camp, an option that since 1999 has brought metro Atlanta middle school girls through workshops and field trips.
     At Matria Healthcare, Dean says her mere presence has changed the perception of opportunity for women, citing numerous cases in which young co-workers have approached her for career advice.  "They really think there's now a possibility that they progress more now.  There was a male in the role before, and I've really seen some of those individuals blossom, and that's been very rewarding.  For those of us who've gotten to the CIO level, helping these women is a ‘must' that we have to do." 

Yikes!  Geeks!
     Tech professionals and observers look to one more challenge, the cultural one.  Lighthearted "geek chic" may bring distressed computer users flocking to the pocket-protector panache of such tech service companies as the Geek Squad, but the less-than-suave conduct commonly associated with the technology field in contemporary culture is repeatedly cited as a drawback for students, and for young women in particular, considering IT as a career. 

     "There's a stigma I think," Berg observes. "The typical people in school who are involved in computers, they're called ‘nerds,' and sometimes the girls think that the boys are turned off by that."
     "I think IT has a terrible image," Blalock agrees.  "It's just not portrayed as being very sexy.  You know, these skinny guys with glasses.  When you're in college and you think about, ‘Gosh, I don't want to get out of college and go sit in a room with a bunch of geeky people.'"

      Microsoft's analysts concur in The Future of Information Technology, fretting that "computer scientists are admired for their intellectual and technical skills, but also routinely associated with the stereotype of predominantly male, immature, badly groomed, socially dysfunctional misfits."

     Ouch.

     Berg laughs every time she uses the word "nerd," but she sees a serious downside, and a stereotype that's getting worse, not better.  "When I was coming up," she recalls, "computers were still a bit of an unknown.  You could be viewed as very smart, or math- oriented, versus today when you can be viewed as a nerd.  I think that the perception has picked up."
     Blalock laments that "we have not made it appear that it's a very attractive and exciting field, which it really is.  IT is all about the future, you know, looking at what's coming in the way of technology and applying it to the way we do business and live our lives.  What could be more exciting than that?

"When I was growing up," she recalls, "the television show Mary Tyler Moore was about the only corporate woman I ever saw.  Maybe we need a television show about a woman who's a ‘super geek' out there, and a geek that's not a skinny guy with glasses but a really hot with-it chick."