What can you and I do?
Insist on materials which expose girls to non-traditional activities and careers. Even if your curriculum is stuck in a time-warp, you can encourage girls to enjoy technology. Be proactive as you work examples and suggestions into your lessons. You can make girls realize that technology connects with their lives and is not just something geeky boys do.
Administrators
If you are an administrator, empower your faculty to be forces for change by addressing gender equity needs in our primary and secondary schools. You see the big picture. You know how to make things happen. Encourage your faculty to be imaginative and creative in their teaching of technology. Demand inclusive approaches. Heighten awareness.
Parents
If you are a parent, encourage your daughter to explore career options outside the box. Medicine, accounting and law are great professions in and of themselves. Yet technology has transformed these professions in ways unimaginable even a decade ago. Encourage your daughters to understand the possibilities for technology as a career emphasis in all they do and consider.
Resources
Where it Stands
"Women have made a mark in the field, but there's more to do" is the headline of Patricia Brown's article in InformationWeek. Just how much more is revealed in her lead paragraph:
"It turns out that technology has offered a relatively nurturing environment for upwardly mobile female executives. While only eight women head up companies listed in the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index, three of them are CEOs of high-tech companies: Carly Fiorina of Hewlett-Packard, Anne Mulcahy of Xerox, and Patricia Russo of Lucent Technologies. And the CIO many regard as one of the most powerful figures in the industry also is a woman: Linda Dillman of Wal-Mart Stores."
Change has begun. Progress is being made. I will not rest until I can read Patricia Brown's article a few years from now which informs us that one hundred women head up the top 500 companies and of those seventy-five head up high tech companies. I know that it will happen.
Once young women realize that technology is not the exclusive domain of a bunch of propeller heads with plastic pocket protectors, they will begin to explore the possibilities in whatever arena interests them. Only you and I can make that happen.
