Technical women face a frustrating dichotomy: We want our status and position in the computing field recognized, but we don't want to give it any undue attention.
That puts us in a quandary as irritating as the conundrum of trying to appear pretty without letting appearance get in the way of professionalism. Women notice other technical women, and—if my experiences are representative—we have a tropism toward one another at conferences. We want to acknowledge the issues we share, tacitly or directly, which guys (even the sensitive ones) sometimes don't understand. Our concerns might be worrying what to do about a customer's apparent sexist attitude, or trying to resolve our social "feminine" training that fits uneasily in an industry as male-dominated as computing. Organizations such as Systers can help.
However, at the same time, many technical women don't want to make a point of their gender. Successful women often believe that our professional accomplishments are the result of our personal strengths. If the point of feminism was to make our physical plumbing irrelevant, I don't want to invalidate that goal by making too big of a deal about the subject. It feels too much like pulling up the turnips to see how they're growing. I wasn't willing to lose a business opportunity because some twit thought that girls don't understand technology. I'm just as unwilling to give credit for my successes to my "feminine intuition."
However, recent statistics are making me reconsider that attitude. Fewer women are entering computer science (CS) curriculums, at every stage of the educational pipeline—from grade school to graduate school. Approximately 16.7 percent of all CS bachelor's degrees were awarded to women in 1998-1999—that's down from 18 percent in 1994-1995. As a result, the computing industry, which constantly claims labor shortages, is losing access to a large pool of workers—who just happen to be female.
The ACM's Committee on Women in Computing currently is researching graduation and undergraduate enrollment statistics to assess the situation and predict trends. Preliminary results, reports Tracy Camp at the Colorado School of Mines, suggest a drastic decline of women graduated with CS degrees between 2001 and 2002. For more details, visit www.mines.edu/fs_home/tcamp/cacm/paper.html.
As resellers, it might seem that there's not much you can do, other than encourage your daughters to pursue careers in computer science. However, you can help in smaller, more immediate ways. One of those is to participate in MentorNet, which pairs university women who are studying engineering or science with professional scientists and engineers working in industry, and helps them form e-mail-based mentoring relationships. In the long run, it's to your advantage as well as theirs. Why not take part?
