When Janel Barfield goes to sleep these nights, visions of Java and C++ programming languages dance in her head. “I’ve started thinking in these languages,” she said. “I dream in them too.”
Barfield, a 26-year-old sophomore at Texas’ Sam Houston State University, has joined an exclusive club.
She’s one of two Sam Houston State women who made the finals in an international collegiate programming competition to be held next month in the Netherlands. She and team member Samira Noman are among only eight women of 186 contenders and among three women from the United States.
Even so, it’s a record high for female participation in the event, according to Tracy Liebman, a spokeswoman for IBM, which sponsors the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) competition.
Despite some change, women remain consistently underrepresented in computer science and engineering. The trend is more surprising because women have entered fields like business, accounting, medicine and law in large numbers over the past two decades. Women earned 56 percent of bachelor’s degrees in accounting during the 1995-96 academic year, for example, up from 29 percent in 1978. In computer science, though, the percentage was 28 percent — higher than 20 percent in 1976, but well under female representation in other fields.
With the information technology industry facing an acute shortage of trained personnel, the gender gap is causing concern.
“As you know, there’s a shortage of qualified information technology professionals. If you exclude half the population, you are shooting yourself in the foot,” said Gabby Silberman, project director for IBM’s Centre for Advanced Studies in Toronto.
That concern was on the agenda for 1,000 or so women who gathered recently in Dallas for the regional meeting of Women in Technology International. The 10-year-old organization was founded with the aim of fostering women’s careers in high-tech.
Worries about the relative lack of women programmers, engineers and analysts aren’t new. A widely publicized 1992 study by Wellesley College, commissioned by the American Association of University Women, pinpointed a likely cause. Girls lose interest in science and math during the crucial middle-school years, the study found. The lack of interest seems to be prompted by low self-esteem, cultural norms that say science and math aren’t for girls, and educators who may unconsciously reinforce those norms.
Ability isn’t the issue, said Mahera Philobos, a civil engineering professor at Georgia Tech University who oversees a mentoring program that pairs first-year students with juniors. Georgia Tech’s female students pull higher grades on average than their male counterparts, she said.
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Yet, she said, “I’ve talked with female students who were really terrified about coming here, convinced they would fail.”
Confidence is one barrier. Peer pressure is another, said Shauna Sowell, vice president and manager of worldwide facilities for Dallas-based Texas Instruments and a mechanical engineer.
“Math and science careers, unlike medicine or law, are still considered the purview of the nerds,” said Sowell. “Although it’s acceptable for a boy, there’s tremendous peer pressure on girls not to be nerdy.”
During frequent appearances at high-school or middle-school career days, Sowell always asks students to guess what she does for a living.
“Never, ever has someone guessed engineer,” she said. It’s especially important for women to consider technology careers because they’re growing and they pay well, Sowell tells students.
The chance to make money doing something she enjoys attracted Angelia Reedus to an electrical engineering degree. Reedus, who graduated from Prairie View A&M University two years ago, had early encouragement.
“My high school physics teacher was female. My biology teacher was female. They made me feel I could do anything I wanted.”
Reedus considered following them into teaching, but she decided a business career would give her the income she wanted while still being “fun.” She’s currently with TI in Houston, where she’s helping to launch a mentoring program for high-schoolers in her spare time.
There need to be more efforts like hers and Sowell’s, say both women and men in technology. Carolyn Leighton, the founder of Women in Technology, said the women’s group is also “very interested” in promoting the development of computer and video games that appeal to young girls — alternatives to violent media games aimed primarily at boys.