So its been with great interest that I’ve read about how Brooke Partridge and Karen Coppock found inspiration for their achievement in ICT. To complete the triptych of women in ICT that I admire, I’ve interviewed Kristen Peterson, a co-founder of Inveneo and now its CEO.

She’s built the organization from just an idea in 2002 to a leading ICT4D organization I so admire, that I pretty much begged her to hire me (and she’s now my boss). Here, I interview her about how she came to be in the technology industry:

Its interesting that she hit on each of the key points of our debate: the importance of parents & mentors, ICT is more than one industry, and how exposure to ICT can excite girls in any culture, without previously participating in this Educational Technology Debate.

My favorite was her early mentor source: TV. Through this often maligned ICT, Kristin saw powerful women role modes to emulate and give her inspiration. Might we use YouTube – this generations TV – to showcase interviews of women in ICT? Please add interviews that you find powerful in the comments below. YouTube videos are directly supported by the commenting system.

First, Stephen Lockyer let us know about girls in his small scale study which:

indicated that girls contributed up to five times as much in an online discussion compared to an offline discussion. If anything, this would suggest that the perception of boys being dominant in all areas of IT is perhaps outdated or outmoded!

In addition, the ICT is field not male dominated around the world. Ingotian shared this interesting observation:

I was at a government Open Source conference in Malaysia last November. One thing that was striking was that women were in a majority. This seems to indicate that culture makes a significant difference.

Yet there is an observable hurtle to having an equal gender balance in the usage of ICT in education and the resulting make-up of ICT industry populations. As Alexa Joyce pointed out in the study which started this debate, most girls ‘drop out’ of ICT studies once they reach middle or high school. While a distaste for maths or physics can be one issue, there is a large, social influence: role models.

Girls, compared to boys, are more influenced by role models in their environment – whether ‘close’ role models such as parents, teachers and family or ‘distant’ role models such as famous actresses and musicians. It is clear that the lack of ICT-oriented role models is a dissuading factor for girls: their role models don’t see ICT tertiary studies or ICT careers as female-friendly and this attitude impacts negatively on the girls that look up to them.

Both Brooke Partridge and Karen Coppock pointed to strong early role models, both family and professional, as inspiration for achievement in the ICT sector. In particular were female role models, to which they could relate.

Then Ed Gable gave us what I think is the most powerful example of how role moles can be agents for change:

I visited a vocational school on the island of Biak, in Indonesia, recently. That school has a strong ICT program, enrolling about 30% of the school’s total number of students. In its first year, participation by girls was about 20 percent. In the second year, the program’s local consultant selected a woman teacher as the head of the ICT effort. By the third year, about 55% of students enrolled were girls.

In addition to role models, we should also expand our expectations on ICT usage. Women need not be in the ICT field to be leaders in ICT usage. As Clayton R Wright reminded us, ICT is a cross-cutting technology:

I must hasten to add that if women are shown how ICTs can impact their daily lives (by providing health advice, sources of materials that can be used to make goods, the price of goods in local markets, etc.), they are more likely to be interested in using ICTs – particularly simple devices such as mobile phones.

And girls do not need to specialize in ICT itself to become excited about technology or participate in the industry during their careers. Just take Brooke Partridge‘s conclusion as an example:

As hard as I try to link ICT into this posting, I keep getting pulled back into the “softer” issues of professional development as the areas that allowed my growth in a career centered in ICT. The industries of ICT are inherently exciting, fast-growing, and full of opportunity. So, as long as girls and young women get exposure to ICT in their education and daily lives, it will be a natural place for them to land professionally.

Most hopeful, there are multiple programs looking to increase girls’ excitement around using ICT and women’s participation in ICT in all industries. Alexa Joyce detailed how these programs are coaching girls to be the next generation of trend setters. In the mean time, Karen Coppock reminded us that even today, there are women in ICT to look up to:

In the almost two decades since I began my career, more and more women have broken through the technology leadership glass ceiling to even more prominent roles – Carly Fiorina’s leading HP, Margaret Whitman running eBay and Carol Bartz at the helm of Autodesk and now Yahoo. Unfortunately women CEOs of large tech firms are still relatively rare, especially in emerging markets, but they are appearing more and more often.

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1. Basic ICT literacy among all citizens, so that they can play a full and active role in a knowledge society, and benefit from opportunities offered by e-government, eLearning, etc. and exploit ICT tools in daily life.
2. Advanced ICT skills that can be applied in working contexts, whether in the ICT sector itself or fulfilling an ICT function in any type of organization. In particular, current research indicates a lack of skills in highly specific domains such as security and green IT
3. Particular combinations of appropriate skills (e.g. IT plus sectoral knowledge of a field such as healthcare, or IT plus language skills and business competence).

There is a strong need for governments and the ICT sector to cooperate to address this problem. In Europe this has been recognized through the European Comission’s Communication on ‘e-Skills for the 21st century: fostering competitiveness, growth and jobs‘, which was a call to action for all involved.

A similar problem affects other developed countries, such as the USA and Japan. However, in other parts of the world, such as SE Asia, the problem is different: young people are rather enthusiastic about ICT, and countries like China, India and Vietnam have large pools of talented engineers and programmers. However, these engineers and programmers, although highly skilled technically, often lack the appropriate blend of business, language and management skills.

Numerous actions have been put in place in Europe and the USA, which can act as models for other regions of the world. For instance, in Europe, the e-Skills career portal aims to give information on ICT careers, learning resources and more for young people interested in the field – TechCareer Compass plays a similar role more focused on North America. Both are based on multi-stakeholder approaches involving governments, companies and the education sector. These kinds of portals focus on career profiles, indicating the range of skills required for different technical careers and highlighting the specific competences needed for individual posts.

In addition, industry has launched its own approaches to make ICT more exciting and engaging for older students and to encourage them to take up careers: key examples are the Networking Academy programme from Cisco, Microsoft’s Imagine Cup and Thinkquest, run by the Oracle Foundation.

All of these initiatives are run globally. In all of the programmes, young people are encouraged to develop a wide range of skills (e.g. team leadership, organization, planning across different locations, language) in addition to more classical technical skills such as programming and web development. It is interesting to note that young people in developing countries regularly achieve high places, comparable to their developed country counterparts, in the competitive elements of these programmes.

Of course, the programmes are rolled out in slightly different ways depending on national needs; for instance in the case of Thinkquest, countries that only recently joined the programme are typically supported through the organization of face to face training workshops for students and teachers. Meanwhile, in the case of NetAcad, they offer online support and training bringing together developing countries such as Cambodia with their more developed regional counterparts such as Japan and Singapore. This facilitates transfer of knowledge between students in these different countries.

Also some countries have more sophisticated needs than others: Net Acad for instance targets younger students in Egypt than in other countries. In Egypt, students are highly motivated and skilled in acquiring networking competency (both girls and boys), and thus the curricula are used already at relatively young ages compared to others.

However – despite all these actions, or perhaps because of the wide variety, it can be difficult for a student or teacher to find their way through all the offers and get an overview of the opportunities.

So, in the case of Europe the European Commission has taken the initiative to launch an e-Skills week, to raise awareness of all the actions in the field across Europe. The week will be coordinated by Digital Europe and European Schoolnet and take place in March 2010–although EU-based, we invite stakeholders all over the world to join in this campaign and get more young people enthused about ICT, wherever they are based.

I would frequently take very deep breaths before entering into a meeting as it is very intimidating to walk into a room full of men and confidently carve out a place for yourself. But I did carve out place for myself in the ICT industry – due to the support of my parents, role models and mentors. Technologists and educators can develop this critical support system for women in developing countries, to help encourage them to embrace technology and ICT-oriented careers.

Parents play a critical role

Parents play a key role in the development of their daughters’ personalities and professional aspirations. Technologists and educators can work with parents to encourage them to promote technology usage by their daughters at the earliest ages. This may be a multi-generational endeavor, but the earlier it starts, the earlier it will bear fruit.

My parents were critical in my professional development. They raised me to be very confident in myself and my abilities. My mother continually told me that I could be anything I wanted and encouraged me to think big. When I told her I wanted to be a nurse, she asked, “Why not a doctor?”

She was a very early adopter of computer technology in her word processing/graphics design firm and constantly exposed me to new technologies and opportunities. From my first job at AT&T through my current career as the VP of Consulting for Vital Wave Consulting, my mother has always been my biggest cheerleader and has encouraged me to excel in my ICT career and life.

My mother-in-law, Alice Schmidt, also came from a family that encouraged women in technology-oriented fields. She came from a long line of mathematicians – both male and female. It was always assumed that she would go to college, even though she graduated from high school in the late 1950s.

When she was 16, her Dad sat her down and said that that Michigan State had good applied physics department and Univ. of Michigan had good mathematics department and asked her which would be of most interest to her. This is not a question most teenage girls heard in 1958, especially those from non-wealthy families. Her friends said that the only job they could get was a teacher or a nurse, but Alice’s parents had opened her eyes to a much wider variety of options.

Vital Wave Consulting has found that several developing-country schools – especially primary schools – are providing orientation sessions to parents before introducing computers into the classroom. This is an excellent opportunity to begin to socialize the importance of ICT training for all students – female as well as male – and to encourage parents to encourage their girls to experiment with and embrace technology.

One approach would be to have female leaders of these sessions – or to have promising female technologists share their success stories in these sessions – to further establish in parents’ minds that females are viable players in this field.

Importance of Role Models and Mentors

Role models and mentors are another valuable support system for female technologists and members of the ICT ecosystem. Schools, businesses and communities can more formally institutionalize mentorship programs and mechanisms to expose girls to female role models to help them break through into the ICT field.

In the absence of role models, it is very difficult to break into a new field, but it can and has been done. For example, my mother-in-law, Alice’s first job in the early 1960s was at IBM. She worked as a computer programmer on a NASA contract for the Mercury and Gemini space missions. It was a very male-oriented environment and she had no real role models to look up to. She carved out a role for herself and subsequently helped pave the way for other women to enter the field after her.

In the two and a half decades between her entry into to the technology field and mine, several women had begun to break through the glass ceiling at technology firms. These women became my role models. In the almost two decades since I began my career, more and more women have broken through the technology leadership glass ceiling to even more prominent roles – Carly Fiorina’s leading HP, Margaret Whitman running eBay and Carol Bartz at the helm of Autodesk and now Yahoo. Unfortunately women CEOs of large tech firms are still relatively rare, especially in emerging markets, but they are appearing more and more often.

Mentors are also a very valuable resource. Over the past two decades, I have had the opportunity to work with – and be mentored by – some incredible women in the tech field. They took the time to provide me with important tips on how to succeed and thrive in a still male-oriented technology world.

Some of these relationships were informal, but others were structured through corporate mentoring programs. Programs of this nature were rare in Latin American telecom firms during my time there, but could be a very valuable mechanism to institute to begin to cultivate young women technologists in developing countries.

Lastly, schools – from primary through university – can nurture mentoring opportunities. I have visited my alma mater institutions several times to discuss my career path and encourage other young women (and men) to pursue a career in the international technology field. Events of this nature open students’ eyes to the diversity and breadth of career options and show that women – as well as men – can succeed in the technology field.

Technologists and educators can work with parents, highlight role models and cultivate mentors to help encourage women – as well as men – to embrace technology and technology-oriented fields.

What do girls do with ICT, and is there any difference compared to boys?

In countries where internet access is common, young people in general are heavy users of ICT tools, particularly in leisure time. Girls are particularly fond of social networking tools, blogs and other tools that enable communication with peers. Increasingly, they are playing games on handhelds or consoles, but also online. This compares to boys, who tend to focus more on games (online or handheld/consoles). Girls are also more keen on creative technologies for artistic expression compared to their male counterparts.

How do girls and boys differ in educational achievement in ICT?

According to our research in the White Paper on “Women and ICT: Why are girls still not attracted to ICT studies and careers?” at secondary school level, there is very little difference between boys and girls in terms of achievement in ICT studies – although their self-perception is different. Girls tend to understate their skills whereas boys usually overestimate their competence.

Girls often report that they enjoy studying ICT. In countries where this is not the case, it is typically due to an over-emphasis on pure programming skills in the curriculum – which is typically less attractive to girls compared to e.g. multimedia skills.

However there is a major issue in transition to tertiary level – most girls ‘drop out’ of ICT studies in favour of other subject areas such as foreign languages. This is in part explained by the fact that girls often study fewer related technical subjects (e.g. maths, physics) than their male counterparts (despite having comparable levels of achievement) and these subjects are pre-requisites for higher education in ICT. They also believe that ICT studies will not give them sufficient opportunities for creativity and team working compared to other fields.

So what’s causing the problem?

Girls, compared to boys, are more influenced by role models in their environment – whether ‘close’ role models such as parents, teachers and family or ‘distant’ role models such as famous actresses and musicians. It is clear that the lack of ICT-oriented role models is a dissuading factor for girls: their role models don’t see ICT tertiary studies or ICT careers as female-friendly and this attitude impacts negatively on the girls that look up to them.

Similarly, their choice of more technical subjects such as maths and physics at upper secondary and tertiary level is influenced by role models’ perception of gender dominance.

Another key issue is that parents, school guidance counselors and teachers lack knowledge of ICT studies and careers: they thus do not encourage students who express interest in such areas, as they perceive ICT as a field where there are good career opportunities for girls.

Finally, girls often express a need to ‘help the world’ with their future careers: ICT is not a field in which they feel they can do this.

How can we address these issues through the education system?

There are numerous areas where improvements could be made in education to encourage girls to participate more actively in ICT, for instance:

• Integrate ICT better into a variety of subjects, so that ICT skills are acquired in a range of contexts (e.g. using ICT tools as part of language lessons).
• For countries where girls dislike ICT curricula, revise curricula to encourage acquisition of broader IT skills to include creative technologies (e.g. graphic design, video editing) as well as programming.
• To encourage further female uptake of ICT at tertiary level, involve more female IT professionals and female IT students in careers activities in schools (e.g. through inviting guest speakers in schools, or visiting local IT company facilities/university departments), ideally involving parents in the process and demonstrating how ICT contributes to solving societies challenges (e.g. environment, healthcare).
• Organisation of informal ICT activities, such as computer clubs, alongside the school curriculum that give young people the space to ‘play’ with ICT which is not feasible within the usually packed daily schedule.

Early Exposure to ICT and Business

I grew up in Silicon Valley… while Silicon Valley was growing up, too. HP’s Cupertino site was a few miles away, as was Apple. I have a family full of electrical engineers. So, even though I took a non-technical route in my education, working in the technology arena came naturally. I was comfortable with technology and saw it as an exciting set of evolving products and services. Proximity to ICT and ICT business played a huge role in my career choices.

The second important aspect of my career development relates more to function. In my early career, I did very well in some jobs, and not so well in others. This had little to do with the industry focus of my work or my skills. It had everything to do with what function I was playing in my job. I simply enjoyed some work activities much more than others. And my career really took off when I identified the types of roles that actually give me energy rather than sucking it out of me.

There is a great work style assessment tool that I use with all my employees called 5 Dynamics. It helps people understand the type of work (functions) they love and what type of work leaves them feeling depleted. And it provides strategies for dealing with the inevitable aspects of any job that we don’t like so much. It’s as great for kids and young adults as it is for professionals.

Holistic Education and the Power of Networking

But, two aspects of my career development have contributed most to my professional advancement in the ICT arena. And both were non-technical in nature. The first has to do with the interdisciplinary approach to my education. International relations, economics, international management are all code for degrees that examine policy, economy and business jointly.

In today’s increasingly global markets, ICT business management requires an understanding of all these areas. (Technical background would have helped a lot, too!) My pluralist approach to education didn’t play a big role initially, but once I got to a management level, I saw it accelerate my professional opportunities.

Finally, and most importantly, it’s about one’s network. It’s the network that helps every good professional find jobs, secure jobs, stay in-the-know, and rebound from professional misfortune. In good times and in bad (and the bad happens to EVERYONE), the support of colleagues and mentors will make all the difference in the world.

And, it’s not just one network… it’s many: college friends, the women one works with (ALL women, from the assistants to the CXOs), those who share passion for certain roles in the workplace. The time one spends staying in touch and helping others in the network will come back in spades when it’s needed most. Men have known this for a long time. Ironically, while women tend to be the more community focused of the two genders, it has taken them a long time to learn that networking goes a lot farther than competing or clawing one’s way up the latter alone.

Its About People, not Products

So, really, having a career in ICT started from a comfort level with the products, through exposure. But, my real success came about when I was able to apply my non-technical assets. And inherently, those assets stem from the areas of study and functional roles that I simply love doing most.

I flailed around a while until I found way to apply them professionally, but once I did everything fell into place. I think one of the most valuable gifts we can give young women today is the opportunity to identify those assets as soon as possible, and help them think as broadly as possible about what roles they enjoy playing.

As hard as I try to link ICT into this posting, I keep getting pulled back into the “softer” issues of professional development as the areas that allowed my growth in a career centered in ICT. The industries of ICT are inherently exciting, fast-growing, and full of opportunity. So, as long as girls and young women get exposure to ICT in their education and daily lives, it will be a natural place for them to land professionally.

But, the age-old issues of women’s advancement in the workplace (in ICT business or not) remain centered on their ability to know themselves in their professional capacity and gain the opportunity to pursue what they enjoy doing most.

From this conclusion came the following question for developing world educators:

How Can ICT in Education Excite Girls and Boys?

Look at any ICT-enabled school classroom, and there is often a greater excitement for the technology with boys than girls, which by middle or secondary school, can translate into ICT tools being an exclusive domain of boys, excluding half the learning population from their benefit. How can technologists and educators design more gender neutral, or pro-female ICT-enabled learning experiences?

And from these experiences, can we hope to also change the gender balance in the ICT industry? Or will ICT, as an industry, always be mainly male”?

For September, the Educational Technology Debate we’ll have three discussants to give us both the formal research recommendations and informal, personal experiences from which educators can develop ways to motivate all students to enjoy ICT equally:

• Alexa Joyce
  Alexa Joyce is a specialist in education technology with European Schoolnet. She has consulted for UNESCO Bangkok Asia-Pacific Bureau for Education, UNESCO International Institute of Educational Planning and for the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. She has a Masters in Biological Sciences from the University of Oxford and an MBA from Solvay Business School, Brussels.
• Brooke Partridge
  Brook Partridge is CEO and founder of Vital Wave Consulting, which she created to further emerging markets as a new discipline in business management. Previously, she was the Business Director of the Emerging Market Solutions Organization at HP where she lead HP’s first technology solutions for developing economies. She lectured in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University and holds a Master’s of Pacific International Affairs from UC San Diego.
• Karen Coppock
  Karen Coppock, PhD is Vice President of Vital Wave Consulting with over a decade of experience in strategic business planning for emerging markets. Previously, Dr. Coppock served as the Director of Industry Collaboration for the Reuters Digital Vision Program at Stanford University, and also held positions with Telcordia Technologies, Williams Communications, INTELSAT, Pacific Bell, AT&T and Harvard’s Center for International Development (Information Technology Group), Santa Clara University’s Global Social Benefit Incubator and the US Peace Corps. She received her Doctoral and Master’s degrees in international business from the Fletcher School, Tufts University.

Please join us for what we all expect to be a lively and informative conversation exploring how ICT in education efforts may be influenced by gender, and how we can reverse the perception that anything ICT-related is the domain of boys, to the exclusion of girls. Your input can start right now in the comments below, and Alexa and Brooke will post their opening remarks beginning Monday, September 7th.