Communications - February 2009

“seek inspiration from mentors—family,
friends, teachers, and/or prominent people—
to create careers combining your education,
talents, interests, and dreams.”

only to do the right thing but also to broaden its customer base. Gerstner created plans to embrace group differences in order to appeal to broader sets both of employees and customers. As a result, the company extended its reach into women-owned businesses, for example, as well as into new market segments.

maXIne D. BRo Wn: assoCIate DIReCtoR, eLeCtRonIC VIsuaLIzatIon LaBoRatoRY, unIVeRsIt Y of ILLInoIs at ChICaGo; Co-authoReD the 1987 nsf RePoRt, VIsuaLIzatIon In sCIentIfIC ComPutInG, WhICh DefIneD the fIeLD of sCIentIfIC VIsuaLIzatIon.

ed as a major step in this direction. ⁸

˲ Join organizations, such as the Anita Borg Institute, the Workforce Alliance of NCWIT, and Catalyst, that are actively working on solutions to problems facing women in the technical work force.

˲ Send the company’s women in computing to some of the field’s conferences so that they can expand their professional network. Company recruiters should attend such conferences as well.

˲Implement “best practices” —those shown to be most successful at increasing women’s representation in the technical work force (see resources provided at www.ncwit.org/ resources.res.practices.php).

˲ Make an active effort to place more women in senior leadership positions. This policy is not only rewarding in its own right but it also increases the company’s ability to recruit and retain other female talent. ¹⁵Provide leadership-development opportunities through programs such as the Anita Borg Institute’s TechLeaders.

˲ Correct the company’s gender-relat-ed wage differential, thereby sending a strong signal to its work force that women are deemed to be critical assets. ³

Consider the exemplary efforts of IBM. Over the past 15 years, the company has effected dramatic and systemic cultural changes, resulting in a 370% increase in its women executives and a 233% increase in ethnic minority executives (as of 2004). ³⁰These changes occurred in four main ways: demonstrating leadership support, engaging employees as partners, integrating diversity goals with management practices, and linking diversity goals to business goals.

When Lou Gerstner assumed control of the company in 1993, he deliberately set out to change IBM’s culture by uncovering, and endeavoring to understand, differences between underrepresented population groups (including women and minorities). The first step was to establish task forces, composed of executives and employees alike, for each group. Once group needs were better understood, management implemented practices to establish and sustain diversity— in creating pools of high-potential candidates for recruitment or of outstanding employees for advancement, women and minorities had to be well represented. These changes, though company-wide, were particularly focused on IBM’s technical workforce, which it considered to be one of its most critical assets.

From the beginning, IBM’s diversity efforts were driven by the desire not

Government has a Role to Play

Improving women’s representation in computing must also entail more enlightened governmental institutions and policies. The following agency practices have been shown to be particularly effective:

˲ Rigorously adhere to evaluating Criterion 2. In 1997, the NSF’s board approved a reformulated merit review policy that included two criteria: ( 1) intellectual merit and quality of research, and ( 2) broader impacts of the proposed activity. Criterion 2 required that proposals address areas of societal concern, including the broadening of underrepresented groups’ participation in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) work force. ²⁴ But although NSF continuously improves enforcement of Criterion 1 under its grants, it has yet to establish a method for ensuring observance of Criterion 2.

˲Hold academic institutions accountable for measuring diversity among their employees through enforcement of Title IX. Four federal science agencies have made efforts

“the theoretical and practical knowledge
embodied in cs is interesting as standalone
study. but the real opportunity lies in
equipping oneself to partner with scientists
or business experts, to learn what they
know and, together, to change how research
or business is conducted.”