Posted on: Sunday, April 20, 2003
Women still struggle to make it to the top in Silicon Valley
By Michelle Guido
Knight Ridder News Service
The boom years of the high-tech industry were good ones for women.
The 10 biggest tech companies based in Silicon Valley added nearly 20,000 women to their work forces. The number of female managers and technical workers grew by nearly 4,000.
And it wasn't just the luck of the times. Many of these companies were trying to attract women by doing things to help them balance work and family. One result: Five of the 10 earned places on Working Mother magazine's list of best companies for women to work.
But an analysis of federal employment data shows that despite these gains, women fell behind. After five years of stupendous growth in the valley's 10 highest-grossing tech companies — firms that last year sold a combined $150 billion worth of products and services — women made up only 32 percent of their work forces in 2000, down from 35 percent in 1996.
And the largest proportion of female workers were not managers or engineers, but what they have traditionally been: office workers.
Industry experts point to a number of factors to help explain why the representation of women suffered at the top tech giants based in Silicon Valley, while men, particularly those of Asian descent, increased their share:
• Women left large corporations for start-ups or to launch their own businesses, where they could more quickly rise to the top and work under more flexible schedules.
• The kinds of technical jobs that grew most in the late 1990s were ones for which women had not been groomed in large numbers. Although they earned 56 percent of all bachelor's degrees in 1998, women accounted for 27 percent of those degrees in computer and information sciences, according to the U.S. Department of Education. That has fallen from its peak in 1985, when women were awarded 37 percent of those degrees.
• Women have few role models within the top ranks of large tech corporations. Even at Palo Alto, Calif.-based Hewlett-Packard — a company recently named one of the Top 10 companies for women by the National Association for Female Executives — men made up nearly 70 percent of its officials and managers in 2000.
"You're looking at an industry that is very particular to men," said Sarah Sherwood, president of Silicon Valley Women in Business, the local chapter of the National Association for Female Executives. "Women are leaving the industry because if you don't have power in an organization, and you don't have a structure that's understanding of women's issues, you run into trouble."
The reason women choose to join some high-tech firms over others may lie in what programs and perks those companies provide to foster the work-life balance that is important to so many working women.
At Cisco Systems, Chief Executive Officer John Chambers heeded employees' pleas for convenient child care and built a 65,000-square-foot day care center.
Sun Microsystems offers adoption assistance for families, subsidized day care and a lactation program designed to help balance the nurturing of a new baby with work.
Hewlett-Packard pioneered job sharing more than a decade ago, a program that, while not exclusive to women, enables many of them to share a full-time job with a colleague.
Radha Basu, of Saratoga, Calif., is an example of how women have used the business acumen they glean at the valley's largest companies as a springboard for their own ventures.
Basu never thought she would leave HP, where she had worked for 20 years and risen through the ranks to become general manager of the company's international software division. But in mid-1999, Basu heard about the opportunity to become a CEO at a fledgling company that is now SupportSoft, makers of support automation software.
She was excited about leading a company. After taking the job, she joined a women's CEO group, where female business leaders share ideas and frustrations.
"We have a lot of the same concerns," Basu said. "But you've got to be a successful CEO first and lead your company before you're a successful woman CEO."
Fellow business leader Anu Shukla, who sold a start-up software company for $360 million in 2000, says she felt typecast at large tech companies.
"When you get to the really, really top jobs, they're all based on networks and those networks are pretty much still all men," said Shukla, who is now CEO of RubiconSoft, a San Mateo, Calif., software start-up.
Women like Shukla often take time to develop entrepreneurial dreams. Eventually, pay inequities, lack of upward mobility and inflexible work schedules lead many to jump ship. During the tech boom, many joined start-ups.
"The Internet boom lowered the barriers to entry for women because the tech requirements were not as hardware-driven as they were in the old days," said Denise Brosseau, a founder of the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs, a Silicon Valley nonprofit organization.
Between the mid-1990s and 2002, women at the nation's Fortune 500 companies made small but steady gains in corporate leadership, according to Catalyst, a nonprofit organization that tracks the progress of female executives. That's less true among the top high-tech companies, where women made up 11.1 percent of corporate officers, compared with 15.7 percent at all Fortune 500 firms, according to the group.
"Silicon Valley is supposed to be the ultimate progressive meritocracy," said Kara Helander, Catalyst's western region vice president in San Jose, Calif. "So these numbers call into question how well these companies are making use of the extraordinary talent they have with women in-house."
At Cisco, the percentage of women dropped from 27 percent to a quarter of its entire work force, despite the company more than tripling its number of employees between 1996 and 2000.
Kate DCamp, Cisco's senior vice president of human resources, said attracting women who are interested in technical careers is a struggle. The 19-year-old company is not yet able to "grow" its own talent, she said. That leaves recruiters to hire people who are already qualified to fill technical jobs — and those are still overwhelmingly men.
DCamp said Cisco will soon begin a program aimed at getting more eighth-grade girls interested in science and math. "I do not believe that the lack of women has to do with capability by any measure."
