Women, minorities could fill more high-tech jobs

By SHARON GAUDIN
Network World, 07/17/00

WASHINGTON, D.C. - A Congressional Commission presented the House Committee on Science last week with a roadmap of recommendations they say will solve the country's critical shortage of high-tech workers.

The way to solve the problem, according to the commission, is to draw more women, minorities and people with disabilities into the high-tech workforce. The group added that if IT attracted the same number of women as men, there would be no shortage of skilled high-tech workers.

And yet today that shortage is costing Silicon Valley companies $3 billion to $4 billion per year in lost production and has the potential of staggering the nation's economy and its position as a global technology leader.

"I see this as the greatest challenge we have as a nation,'' says Neal Lane, former director of the National Science Foundation and the current president of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. "We've seen this problem coming for years. We need to do something about it now. If the current trend persists, we, as a country, will fall short.''

Congressional representatives, scientists and high-tech employers all testified that increasing the number and diversity of Americans joining the high-tech labor force is critical to continuing the boom in the industry, which is largely credited as the lifeblood of the U.S. economy.

The problem, many industry observers say, is that women - who comprise half the population - only fill a fraction of IT jobs (see graphic, page 16). And it's even worse for minorities. The Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering and Technology Development reports that today only 7% of science, engineering and technology jobs are filled by minorities.

Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, said last week that the U.S. needs to better prepare its workers for jobs in the high-tech industry.

"Every citizen must count for opportunities and must be counted for our nation's well- being,'' Greenspan said, speaking to a gathering of U.S. governors. "How well we prepare our resources in this area will show in how well-prepared we are as a country.''

And according to a range of numbers, the American workforce is not being well prepared for high-tech jobs.

Approximately 550,000 IT jobs are vacant in the U.S. this year, and that number is expected to balloon to 800,000 by 2002 and one million by 2003, says Meta Group, a consultancy in Westport, Conn. Also, the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the technology field will create more than five million new jobs between now and 2008. Plus, American universities and colleges, with a reported 45,000 computer science graduates per year, are not feeding enough new workers into the field.

Even Microsoft has difficulty finding enough IT workers; 10% to 15% of positions are vacant, with IT jobs being the hardest to fill, a company spokesman says.

Turning the tide

That's the problem the commission tackled while it traveled the country for a year, holding meetings with educators, engineers, hiring professionals and industry leaders.

The recommendations they came up with are multifold. They range from holding companies accountable for the percentage and pay scale of their female, minority and persons with disability employees to making sure the nation's teachers and classrooms are properly prepared to educate children in math and sciences.

"These are good recommendations,'' says Catherine Didion, executive director for the Association for Women in Science in Washington, D.C. "We need to have some accountability in terms of putting these recommendations into action. It's really important that the people who follow up on this be leaders in the industry, government and academia.''

Having spearheaded the creation of the commission, Congresswoman Constance Morella (R-Md.) already is working to put together a group with the responsibility of driving these recommendations forward. She said she wants the group, which would greatly be involved in lobbying and education, to be comprised of leaders from industry, government and academia. While she said she's not sure how long it will take to pull the group together, she is focusing on its creation.

Morella says she is calling in executives from the major industry players, trying to set up a meeting for this summer. She wants them to sit down and discuss what they can do and, more importantly, what they will do to integrate more women, minorities and people with disabilities into their workforces.

Morella also has called on the companies, including Microsoft, IBM, Intel and AT&T, which pledged a few months ago at a White House meeting to donate $1 million per year for 10 years to creating diversity in employment. She said she is asking them to give a segment of that annual donation for three years to fund the commission's recommendations.

Members of the National Science Foundation are reportedly reworking their scholarship funding, as well as ways to better connect community colleges with four-year institutions.

Sonya Allen, director of global work environment and diversity at Xerox, says the company sees the need for change and is ready to move forward supporting the recommendations.

"This is very critical. It's something we should have moved forward on a few years ago,'' says Allen, who attended the Congressional hearing in support of the commission.

Allen also supports the commission's recommendation that companies report the percentage of and the pay parity of their female and minority workers. "It could be embarrassing, but it could be effective,'' she says.

Gail Naughton, president and chief operating officer of Advanced Tissue Sciences in La Jolla, Calif., says an annual corporate report could be beneficial and as easily done as making it part of public companies' yearly 10K filing.

"I'm sure there will be resistance,'' says Naughton, who was the first woman ever named Inventor of the Year by the Intellectual Property Owners. "Many of the larger institutions that haven't been trying to be more diverse will have to play tremendous catch-up. On paper, they will not look good.''

Naughton and others say the worker shortage will only worsen if it's not addressed immediately.

"If we don't do something now, there's going to be some big problems not far down the road," Didion says.

Fixing an embedded problem

To pick up some of that workforce slack, corporations have turned to the government, pleading for increases in the number of H1-B visas, which allow businesses to hire and import foreign workers for a limited amount of time. Congress raised the ceiling from 65,000 to 115,000 in 1999, and the cap was maxed out halfway through the year.

And the problem with H1-B visas, some say, is that the workers brought in and trained soon will have to return to work in their own countries. That means U.S. companies using them will continually be training and losing workers.

And what is causing this shortage of workers? It's a question that members of the commission studied before they even looked at ways to tackle it. Among the many problems they found were:

Women working in IT earn a fraction of their male counterparts, averaging 72 cents on the dollar for female network professionals, according to the 1999 Network World Salary Survey.

Some teachers, guidance counselors and parents are still guiding girls away from science and math classes.

Most science teachers - and hence role models - are men. For example, at the university level in the U.S., 94% of the engineering faculty is male.

The long hours often expected in the high-tech industry are difficult to balance with family responsibilities.

There has been a disconnect between community colleges, which educate a large number of women and minorities, and four-year colleges.

The stereotype of the geeky IT worker with the pocket protector, high-water pants and taped-up glasses is a tough one to swallow for teenage girls, especially those who may be wrestling with a general drop in self-esteem that tends to occur at that age.

The male-dominated industry can be a lonely and tough old-boys club to break into.