SAN FRANCISCO — From the age of 10, Ronnie Falcao envisioned a future in computing. Following in the footsteps of her sister, Falcao studied computer science at Stanford, then began a successful career as a software designer in Silicon Valley. She loved the work.
Still, after a decade she walked away.
Today she is a midwife in Mountain View, Calif., birthing babies rather than code. High-tech jobs go begging for veteran engineers such as Falcao, 41, but like many women in the field, she became fed up.
"I got tired of working with men who appeared incapable of looking me in the eye when they spoke to me, who asked questions of male colleagues even though they knew I was most qualified to answer, or who seemed to resent the fact that I might be capable of coming up with better technical solutions on occasion," she said.
Women are leaving or avoiding computer careers in droves, citing discrimination by male co-workers, few role models, family-unfriendly work environments and a general sense that the field is irrelevant to their interests.
Some implications of the gender gap are subtle, as in the lack of computer products designed with women in mind. The most immediate effect is to worsen the nation's shortage of high-tech workers.
The shortage is so severe that congressional leaders have agreed to increase the number of foreigners who can obtain visas to work in the U.S. high-tech industry--from 65,000 last year to 95,000 this year, increasing to 115,000 in 2001 and 2002. President Clinton has threatened to veto the bill unless there are more protections for U.S. workers.
"I have companies all the time telling me that they are turning down business because they can't find enough workers," said Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Assn. of America, a trade group that estimates a shortfall of about 346,000 computer professionals this year.
Women should be drawn to such a favorable job market, yet the proportion of women among U.S. computer professionals has fallen in the 1990s--from 35.4% to 29.1% of that work force--according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the share of women in the academic pipeline has shrunk at nearly the same rate, government and academic agencies report.
The underrepresentation of women is particularly pronounced at the top-tier computer schools, such as UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon, that feed the elite industry jobs.
