The U.S. is missing the boat by ignoring a large part of its talent pool, says the National Center for Women & Information Technology. NCWIT – a coalition of more than 70 first-tier corporations, academic institutions, government agencies, and non profits - believes the future of US competitiveness and innovation means creating and maintaining a representative, creative, cutting-edge, and technically trained workforce.

As NCWIT and the National Science Foundation kick of this afternoon’s “Innovation Town Hall” meeting at the National Academy of Engineering in downtown Washington, D.C., we bring you the first part of a discussion USBE Online had with NCWIT founder and CEO, Lucinda Sanders, and Jan Cuny, a computer science professor at the University of Oregon and head of the NSF’s Broadening Participation in Computing Initiative.

USBE:  What is “IT Innovation and the Role of Diversity” about?

Lucy Sanders: It’s about the role of diverse thoughts in innovation - what are the real benefits of diverse thinking and of America’s diverse workforce in the area of IT. We've worked to bring together decision makers, policy makers, academics, executives; a whole range of people, to have a thoughtful discussion about how we can leverage diversity to our advantage.

Jan Cuny: That’s a goal the program I run at the National Science Foundation to broaden participation in computing shares.  BPC is a natural partner to Lucy’s efforts.

LS: We’re really excited. And I think it’s one of the first times, if not the first time this conversation has been had at a national level.

USBE: Can you tell us about the work you are doing with historically Black colleges, Hispanic serving institutions and Tribal Colleges?

LS: We have an academic alliance of universities across the U.S. working on institutional reform in terms of attracting more women to IT disciplines, and on faculty advancement. One of the very important things we have started to work on in the last six months is a broader collaboration with Jan’s program - the BPC. There’s a lot of information and a lot of activities.

JC: Part of the role of the BPC program is to fund two kinds of grants. One is our broad initiative to bring together coalitions and institutions and organizations. An example of such an alliance would be NCWIT, although it was actually funded before my program started. But we have similar alliances.

There’s one that serves Hispanic-serving Institutions. We have about 8 HSIs that formed an alliance. We have another that connects HBCUs with our one institution, and another that’s kind of a planning grant which looks at getting more computer and science degrees into tribal colleges. So we have a range of programs in these alliances.

One of the things we can’t afford to do, if we are going to really broaden participation, is everybody working in isolation. What we need is to be developing infrastructure and organizations that cross these groups. So, I think the town hall meeting is a good example of how the infrastructure the NCWIT is building can be used to bring along all these other groups as well. 

USBE: A recent study was done on why women on the technical ladder are opting out of IT. Based on your extensive industry background and with your record (you received a Bell Labs Fellow and hold six patents in the communications technology area) how would you comment?

LS: Based on my experiences as a woman climbing the technical ladder, the corporate ladder, as well as the management ladder, I think in general (and this is true for both men and women) the technical design environment is via a creative environment that’s fast paced and self-challenging.

So, when you’re in those environments, part of what you’re supposed to do is design solutions to problems and critique each other’s work; work together to put out a big system or product. To succeed, you really have to view this creative environment, and one of constructive criticism, as fun. Although it is difficult but it is the kind of environment where confident risk taking, an ability to put ideas out there and to welcome criticism, is really important.

One of the things research has shown is that women tend to be less confident than men. So in these kinds of environments it takes more encouragement of women to get their ideas out there and fully participate in the technical world. And that’s what it takes to climb the ladder whether or not you are a minority woman.

Having said that, I’d say some of our cultures and corporations are out of control. I think they’ve taken what should be a creative, fun, and dynamic design environment and turned it into a hostile culture where some of our best men and women are leaving because the cultures are not conducive to creation.

One of the reasons people jumped off is some of the very real needs to balance work and family. A lot of corporations are starting to deal with that. Ironically, a career in information technology is supposed to be a good one to help you balance work and family, because you can do it from anywhere.

JC: In the academic environment, life-balancing issues are really critical because the way the academic environments work is that in the first seven years you try to get tenure. You have 7 years to get tenure or else you lose your appointment. So, the initial years are incredibly intense and they correspond roughly to the same time most women are getting married and looking to have children.

I think it puts a huge amount of stress on those first 7 years, and they are extremely competitive. I think are lot of graduate students who are faculty are going through and saying they don’t want to do this. I just read a study that says faculty on average work about 50 hours a week. So if you add in the homework women do for their families the average faculty member with young children works 90 hours a week. That’s a pretty impressive number a lot of people are just not willing to sign up for.

USBE: Many studies and reports have shown how under represented women and minorities are in science and technical fields, and yet a recent survey of S&T industry leaders shows rising anxiety over the increasing global competition the U.S. is facing for S&T talent which drives innovation.

LS: It's stunning how under represented they are. 

JC: In terms of PhDs awarded last year only 14 per cent of them went to women, and only 3.4 per cent went to under represented minorities – Black, Hispanic, Native American, in the computer sciences. That’s really low.

And in terms of losing talent to international competition the projection is those jobs will increase by more than twice the rate the total of new jobs between now and 2014. And at the same time, while these IT jobs are increasing, the number of students interested in IT is plummeting. The number of students who show up at college and say they want to major in computing has gone down 62 per cent in the last 5 years.

LS: In fact the number of degrees expected to be produced is only half that of the job growth.

JC: So there is kind of a myth out there that there are no jobs in computer science, but that’s not true at all.

LS: An Association of Computing Machinery study recently released on off shoring says there are more IT jobs now than there were at any time during the IT boom.

USBE: McKinsey & Co. said recently there are 33 million young professionals with university degrees and work experience living in 28 low-wage countries, compared with 15 million in high-wage nations, which includes 7 million in the US. Could people possibly be thinking all the jobs are going offshore?

JC: A number of the corporations that are working with us really hope to tap into the pool of under represented women and minorities to help fill those jobs. Not just for the numbers of jobs that are opening, but also because of the quality of technology that is presented when minorities are at the table.

LS: It’s also the case a huge number of the students that we are giving advanced degrees to - those getting PhDs, more than half were non resident. They were foreigners and will return home. So we are producing relatively few US students in computing.

USBE: Why is there disconnect? Is it that you can’t find women and minorities, or for some reason they remain invisible?

JC: I think we lose a lot of minorities and women very early. There are a lot of capable minorities who don’t have a quality science high school education, and that leaves them uninterested in science when they get to college.

LS: Again the confidence issue is a big deal. If they don’t really land in an environment where there is encouragement, it’s very hard for them.

JC: There’s also a lot of social pressure that results from the image people have of scientists. The image is horrible. There was a U.S. Dept. of Commerce study that found only 2 percent of the characters in prime time T.V. were scientists, and they were older, stranger, and less sociable than other people. And of all the occupations depicted they were the most likely to be killed doing their job.

LS: That's not good.

JC: They did a survey of 1,500 viewers and found the more television you watch the less likely you are to think well of scientists. So, I think we have an image problem in high school that affects women, and I'm sure under represented minorities as well, who don’t necessarily have the role models. If you get a horrible impression from television, but you know engineers and scientists who look just like you, then you can ignore that image. But if you don't know any scientist who looks like you, and you don't see any on T.V., then I think that image stinks.

USBE: With those challenges, how will NCWIT go about changing that image and broadening IT's appeal?

LS: We are just getting started on image and I can't pretend we have all the answers yet. But one of the things we started last summer was a pilot with CISCO on an awareness campaign. So one thing we have learned so far is teaming with high-tech corporations is a good thing in an awareness of image campaign.

We did press releases, sent letters out to CISCO's educational network and put resources on our web site. We generally tried to call attention to the issue, including some of the issues we have talked about: off shoring, image, jobs, the whole thing.  We intend to do a similar thing with more corporations as we move forward.

The other thing we are going to do is talk to the entertainment industry. I've done a few trips. One [of them] was to Hollywood to talk to talent agencies... about the image of IT. It will take some time but I think it's doable.

The last thing we are going to work on is our K-12 alliance.  We are going to target the National Educational Computing Conference. More than 15,000 computer science educators come every year. We are also going to do some significant outreach among girls' groups.

JC: And there are a number of efforts going on at the college level to increase confidence... These are ways for other students to see other students being successful and to see other projects that students have been involved in. I think the whole idea of involving students’ increases their confidence. There are a lot of service-learning projects going on through out the community.

LS: A lot of work on mentoring practices.

JC: As a faculty member, say you give for example a question that's too hard. The women come in and say 'Oh, I can't take this! I have to drop this course'. The men come in and say "What a stupid question! What did you ask that for?' The confidence level is really a marked difference.