Program Targets Girls For Tech Careers

Welcome Guest. | Log In| Register | Membership Benefits

February 08, 2001 (2:41 PM EST)

By Terry Costlow,

When IBM Corp. exec Carol Kovac threw a birthday party for her young daughter a while back, the entertainment wasn't the usual games, clowns, or movies.

Instead, Kovac set out old VCRs, computers, radios, and screwdrivers and set the kids loose.

"I gave them screwdrivers and let them take things apart," said Kovac, who is vice president of IBM Life Sciences, Somers, N.Y. "They were all talking about what was inside. Watching these kids' faces as they worked with these things was very exciting to them, and to me."

Fostering a love of technology, especially in young girls, is one of the passions in Kovac's life. She's putting that into practice now, as one of the leaders in National Engineers Week, which runs this year from Feb. 18-24.

Kovac is working with thousands of women — and their male colleagues — who hope to capture the interest of as many as 1 million girls on Feb. 22, the first of what will be an annual event dubbed "Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day."

Co-sponsored by IBM (stock: IBM) and the National Society of Professional Engineers, the weeklong celebration of the engineering profession turns 50 this year.

And adding the female focus has struck a chord with many women engineers.

"There's considerable interest from my female colleagues, who have responded to the appeal for more women to go out to schools," said Sandra Johnson Baylor, manager of the WebSphere Database Development project at IBM Silicon Valley Laboratory, San Jose, Calif. "Some who never thought of doing a presentation in the past are really excited to go out to a school and present technology to the students."

Baylor, who herself has gone to middle schools during National Engineers Week for the past seven years, said children share that excitement. After the presentations, that is.

"We ask before we start who is interested in engineering, and we only get a few hands," Baylor said. "We usually have the entire class saying they would consider the profession when we finish."

Baylor doesn't lecture. In the spirit of the birthday party for Kovac's daughter, she prefers to let the students become participants. One method is to have them play a game.

"We have students act out the operation of a computer," Baylor said, "picking volunteers to be the bus, processor, and memory. We have them perform a bubble sort. It's really a lot of fun, especially for the bus, because he's moving around a lot."

While these presentations also involve boys, "the fact that I'm a living, breathing female brings home the fact that females can be engineers," said Baylor, who also works with a smaller group of girls, meeting with them monthly in hopes of instilling the engineering bug early.

Education experts believe a girls-only environment can be a more effective way to reach female students than a mixed group, partly because boys tend to ask more questions and dominate the sessions, they said.

That can be especially true in fields like engineering, which are traditionally considered male professions.

Baylor has also participated in IBM summer camps, where small number of girls spend a week learning about technology and professions such as engineering.

Both the participants and top IBM executives have given the program a thumbs-up.

"These week-long camps have been wonderfully received by the girls and their parents," said Nicholas Donofrio, senior vice president of technology and manufacturing at IBM. "From that nucleus came the idea of making National Engineers Week a partner in this. Now we're trying to find ways we can do something every day, not just one week per year."

Once the promoters of National Engineers Week decided to home in on attracting women to engineering, they had to narrow their reach to avoid becoming too fragmented.

It didn't take long for them to eliminate colleges and opt instead to focus on far younger students. A big impetus was research Kovac did a few years ago as one of 30 executives in an IBM task force called the Women in Technology Steering Committee.

"We looked at women coming out of college, and we started looking at attrition," Kovac said. "We found steady attrition going back to 11- to 15-year-olds, in middle school. We started saying you can't just work at the college level."

The key is planting the idea of engineering far earlier.

"There just aren't enough girls who are interested in pursuing technology," she said.

Indeed, though the numbers have climbed a bit in recent years, women are still not rushing into the field. A National Science Foundation study in 1995 estimated that 10 percent of the engineers in the United States were women.

A 1999 study by Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government found that although 56 percent of women used computers at their jobs, less than 30 percent of the people in the professional computer field and information technology were women.

That Harvard study doesn't predict a big change in the future. Only 14 percent of women scored in the top range of SAT math tests in 1994, compared with 24 percent of the men who took the test.

In computer science, a field often cited as having a relatively high percentage of women, the percentage of women receiving bachelor's degrees fell from a high of 37 percent in 1984 to just 28.5 percent in 1995.

While Engineers Week efforts will focus on the lack of technically skilled women in the United States, executives say the problem is worldwide.

"Things are about the same in other countries," Donofrio said. "I was just in Europe, and they lament this there as well. China is probably the only place where they may be going a bit ahead. They seem to be doing a good job getting women into the field."

One big challenge is to alter stereotypes that often play out in ways so subtle that people don't realize they're steering females away from technical fields, many observers say.

"We're not giving young girls role models," Kovac said. "If they know anyone in engineering, 95 percent of the time it's a man."

Donofrio noted that most men in the workplace now accept women as equals. However, there are still holdouts who cling to the idea that engineering is a boys' club, he said.

"I think the way to approach that problem is from a supply-and-demand perspective," said Donofrio. "There's a huge shortage [of technically skilled talent] now, and we've got to build for the future, when more engineers will be needed. Looking at it that way is probably what it will take to wake up these Neanderthals."