Microsoft gathering seeks ways to get kids thinking IT

Women have long been underrepresented in the information-technology industry, but their reasons for leaving the field could be leading indicators of why fewer students are pursuing careers in the field.

That's the theory of one Microsoft Research manager, and it helps point the way toward possible repairs to a talent pipeline that's leaving the IT industry scrambling for workers.

Women leaving university computer-science programs after one or two years have told researchers they didn't see the larger relevance and impact of their work, said Kevin Schofield, general manager of strategy and communications at Microsoft Research.

"It just felt like they were getting lost in this sort of endlessly geeky field that was all about taking the box apart and understanding how it worked," he said. "Now we're seeing that notion across a larger set of people."

Microsoft hosted about 350 academic leaders in computer science at its Redmond campus Monday to discuss this issue and a raft of challenges facing the industry and American competitiveness in a tech-based global economy. The discussion opened the company's seventh annual Faculty Summit, a two-day conference covering everything from the big picture to specific technological issues involving user interfaces and mobile computing.

Enrollment in computer-science programs nationally is down 60 percent over the past four years, said Lucy Sanders, CEO and co-founder of the National Center for Women and Information Technology. It's an issue of quality as well as quantity, she added.

"We're not seeing the best and the brightest ... and we're certainly not seeing women and minorities," she said.

(Microsoft wanted 25 percent of Faculty Summit attendees to be women, roughly matching the IT work-force proportion, but attracted only 23 percent.)

Several panelists and faculty suggested computer science could become more relevant to all students if it were put into practical context, especially in introductory classes. Instead of teaching just abstract programming languages, courses should tie computing to interesting and relevant applications such as robotics or difficult problems in health care.

Such relevant applications abound. And an integral part of anything that's "cool" — energy, nanotechnology, biotechnology — is computing, said Craig Mundie, Microsoft's new chief research and strategy officer.

The dot-com crash and headline-grabbing news about IT offshoring have helped create a perception of paltry career prospects. In fact, the U.S. economy is expected to add 1.5 million IT jobs by 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. And universities are producing only half of that need, Sanders said.

American mass-media culture also has devalued careers in mathematics, computer science and engineering, Mundie said. Kids say they want to be Britney Spears or Tiger Woods, while in China and India the most prestigious courses of study are in the hard sciences, he said.

"In the United States, we just don't celebrate engineers," Mundie said.

One way to address that issue is to point out the likelihood of failure in the more glamorous pursuits.

"Kids have genetically a better chance of growing up and being Bill Gates than growing up and being Tiger Woods," Mundie said. "... We should probably publish these statistics."

Benjamin J. Romano: 206-464-2149 or bromano@seattletimes.com