Anita Borg sums up her goals in a simple, yet powerful statement: 50-50 by 2020. That is, by 2020, she wants to see women around the globe occupy half of the world's computer and technology positions, be they academic or corporate.
And reaching this mark is not about pushing men aside to make a place for women, either. "It's about expanding the pool of possibilities for everyone to include women and women's ideas," said Borg, an engineer for Digital and the founder of several organizations dedicated to increasing the ranks of women in the fields of computing and technology.
Those ideas are on the discussion table this weekend in San Jose, California, at a different type of technology confab, one named for the inventor of the compiler, the late US Admiral Grace Hopper, whose illustrious life holds much inspiration for the women who come to this conference. Raised in an era in which women were prohibited from taking mathematics beyond what would give them the basic bookkeeping skills to manage a family's finances, Hopper - who recently had a high-tech Navy vessel named after her - decided to follow her heart and pushed to become a mathematician.
Teaching stints at universities such as her alma mater, Vassar College, were augmented by Hopper's second ambition � joining the Navy. She spent her life working multiple jobs simultaneously, serving her country, working for companies such the Eckert-Macuchly Corporation � founded by the makers of the ENIAC and precursor to the UNIVAC � and conducting research and teaching at universities such as Harvard.
While the world of computing in general owes Hopper a debt of gratitude for the compiler, women in technological fields draw inspiration from all her accomplishments, as well as celebrate her at this annual event which is as interdisciplinary as its namesake.
Sessions at The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing delve into social issues such as career-building, balancing work and family, and efforts to recruit girls and women into studying computer science run along side technical presentations on topics such as Java, robotics and visualization, genetic computation, and high-performance computing.
A major focus of this diverse conference is on increasing the ranks of women in computer science. Without a high visibility of women in faculty positions or in high rankings of research organizations and corporations, it is hard for younger women to see the field as a possibility for them, a sentiment echoed by a number of the conference attendees.
According to numbers presented in a 1996 Computer Research Association survey, only 16 percent of the bachelor's degrees awarded in computer science went to women. Meanwhile, only 20 percent of the master's degrees went to women in 1996 while 12 percent of the PhDs in computer science and computer engineering were awarded to women.
"You really need a degree in computer science � a second bachelor's or master's to get into computing [at corporations] now," explained Kathryn Woods, senior scientific programmer for Genentech, who came into computing from her field of biology by way of a NASA Ames Research Center program 15 years ago that helped women from other scientific disciplines get computer training. "When I started in my group, there were four or five of us; I was the only woman. Now, with 14 of us, there are two women."
Part of the solution is figuring out what might attract women into the field of computer science. At least that's what Jane Margolis hopes to discover over the next four years. The visiting research scientist is working on a collaborative project between the women's studies and computer science departments at Carnegie Mellon University. The study will follow male and female freshmen computer science students over the next four years to see how many stay with the program and what keeps them in it.
But others at the conference may already know part of the answer, and that's the beauty of the Hopper celebration. "Young women don�t see the societal benefit of computer science," said Sheila Humphreys, academic coordinator for the department of electrical engineering at UC Berkeley.
But there is plenty, and Humphreys points to projects on visualization that bring about less-invasive surgery techniques as well as those to make highways safer. "There are as many options for helping society in computer science and engineering as there are in medicine," she said.
Borg concurs, noting that a growing volume of viewpoints, especially those of women, will make societal connections clearer.
"If we really want to deal with the hard problems, we'll work on the problems that affect real people," she said, challenging the conference to not only focus on their narrow areas of research, but also to look at the global affect of their work.
