Women of color are making significant individual career inroads into the field of computer software engineering, and possibilities for success are plentiful, but experts say their overall numbers are still low in light of the opportunities.
Traditionally a field dominated by males, data show the picture for women remains mostly the same as 20 years ago.
“Their numbers are still small in terms of the total,” said Sylvia Wilson Thomas, chairperson of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Workforce Committee. The number of women engineers in general has risen in the last 20 years–from about 4 percent to about 8 percent of the total–but there is room for improvement.
For software engineering in particular, Deborah Clingingsmith, an executive at Hewlett Packard, said the number of both women and minority women in the field has dropped in recent years. She is director of the Society of Women Engineers’ Golden West region, which includes Silicon Valley.
Clingingsmith, a software engineer and an Asian-American, has been at Hewlett Packard for more than 20 years. She now trains engineers and does development work. For most of her career, she said, she has been the only woman on a design team and certainly the only minority woman.
National Science Foundation data released last year confirmed this overall trend. While higher percentages of female scientists and engineers were computer, biological or social scientists in 1997 than an earlier survey in 1993, smaller percentages were engineers.
Women in general constituted about a quarter of the total science and engineering labor workforce. Of those women, about 20 percent were minorities:1 percent were African-American women, 1 percent Hispanic women, 2 percent Asian women and 0.1 percent American Indian women.
The report, the 10th in a series on the status of women and minorities in science and engineering found that full-time first-year undergraduate enrollment in engineering among minorities dropped 5 percent from 1992 to 1996.
Experts attributed this phenomenon to several factors. For the last four or five years, with the stock market and economy booming, the payoff for engineers who stuck to the technical aspect of the field was less attractive than, for example, for e-business, said Wilson Thomas, who works at Lucent Technologies.
While engineering graduate salaries were quite good at $40,000 to $60,000 annually, positions for engineers who went into information technology and e-business were ranging from $75,000 to $100,000.
Graduates with a degree in computer science or software engineering or another engineering degree eschew the field and instead opt to head on to medical school, law school or get a master’s in business administration.
“You get students who don’t want to stick to a technical track,” Wilson-Thomas said said.
Gloria Montano, senior program manager at Compaq Computer Corp., added that unlike law or medicine, “People don’t see value in [technology careers]. In science and technology, it’s less apparent. When technology’s done well, you don’t know it’s there.”
She said access issues also apply. Can minority women afford the degrees they need to have and are they even aware of where to get them? Often they can’t, she said. If they do make it into a degree program, they have to survive competitive and rigorous academic environments.
In cases where English might be a second language, “it’s a triple whammy,” said Montano, whose parents are from the Philippines.
At her company, Montano said there are a “fair number” of women of color. Many are from India with the Asian cultures also represented.
Conversely, there are women entering the field who did not major in software engineering and yet have become very successful through atypical routes.
Viola Maxwell-Thompson, a vice president at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, an information technology consulting services provider, graduated from Lake Forest College with a double major in psychology and education. She became a supervisor of teller operations at a big bank and was exposed to more and more technology as a result.
She found she was fascinated by it and was chosen for an in-house training program, learning various software languages like Assembler and COBOL. After a series of promotions and a lot of hard work and self-study, eventually she was hired away by what was then called Arthur Young, where she again quickly rose through the ranks. Maxwell-Thompson is now a business-to-business marketplace advisor at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, which was launched last year.
She said the numbers of women in software engineering are not encouraging at this point. “Let’s put it this way, there’s definitely the room to improve it.”
Why does she think the numbers are low, especially in the executive ranks?
“I think it’s a combination of things,” she said. “I think it’s the exposure. I think it’s a challenge having the right mentors and I think just in general, there’s a challenge of women being positioned at executive-level positions. It’s improved, definitely, over the years, but the pattern of improvement for people of color who are women is a little bit slower.”
Maxwell-Thompson said she was fortunate enough to have very strong mentors within the firm who ensured she was given the right exposure. “I was working on the `right’ projects that were large, revenue-generating projects for the firm,” she said. “In Chicago, I was the first African-American female partner,”
Maxwell-Thompson now serves as a mentor herself. She sponsors what is called an affinity group for African-Americans at her firm. “We’re focusing on retention, we’re focusing on recruitment, we’re focusing on career development,” she said.
Maxwell-Thompson does have advice for women of color interested in the field.
“I would say, try to see if you get involved in some of the professional organizations,” she said. ” t’s a perfect forum for meeting other people within the profession. It’s also an opportunity for you to meet corporations who are hiring.”Maxwell-Thompson said there are several Asian women at her firm also leading large accounts. While language barriers are not a problem in the field, she said cultural differences can be, particularly if they were raised in another country. “But it’s not something that can’t be dealt with,” she said.
Clingingsmith added that girls must be geared toward math and science instruction from an early age and stick with it. She said data show girls get “turned off” by math at around 6th grade, an age at which overall self-esteem drops as well.
The very fact that there are fewer women and minority women engineers also makes it tough for girls to choose this route. Just as there are no television shows that focus on the profession like ER or Ally McBeal do for medicine and law, “You don’t have `Barbie Engineer,'” Clingingsmith said.
To combat this lack of exposure, the Society of Women Engineers hosts Engineering Awareness Programs at junior high and high schools throughout the country that have been very successful at attracting and retaining girls into the profession, she said.
WHERE TO TURN
The Gates Millennium Scholars Program: It is geared toward those intending to study math, science, education or library science. www.gmsp.org.
The Society of Women Engineers: Its mission is to stimulate women to achieve full potential in careers as engineers and leaders. www.swe.org.
MentorNet: The National Electronic Industrial Mentoring Network for Women in Engineering and Science. www.mentornet.net.
Institute for Women and Technology: An organization created to increase the impact of women on all aspects of technology. www.iwt.org.
— Kathy Fieweger
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