http://www.wired.com/news/women/0,1540,,00.html

Women Without Businessmen
By Kendra Mayfield

WIRED NEWS

2:00 a.m. June 21, 2001 PDT

SANTA CLARA, California -- Karenann Terrell has been in the auto industry
for more than 20 years, and has
some advice for women working in male-dominated fields.

"Publicly our face needs to be unity," said Terrell, who joined
DaimlerChrysler after a 20-year career at GM.
"There are enough barriers as women in technology to tear us down."

This year's Women in Technology International Professional Women's Summit in
Santa Clara drew a crowd of
mostly women attendees from both the new and old economy who came for one
reason: to meet other
women in technology.

See also:
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The Push to Push Women Higher
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Move on up with Women in Tech

Forums like WITI's Silicon Valley summit allow women to access other
high-level executives they might not
otherwise get a chance to meet.

"I would not miss coming here because of the opportunity to meet other women
and hear their strategies,"
said Terrell, who is director of e-connect for DaimlerChrysler. "Not on
dealing with men, that's not what this
place is about -- in dealing with business, success and professional and
personal development areas."

Women have innate qualities such as collaborating, juggling tasks,
prioritizing and empathy that make them
natural leaders, said Radha Basu, CEO of Support.com in a keynote address.

"It's not the time to be wallflowers and wimps, it's time to step up, to be
calculated about what risks you're
going to take," Basu urged the crowd.

"Women who think outside the box do have a lot of opportunities," Terrell
said.

But some wonder whether the number of women in technology will decline with
the current economic
downturn in the industry.

"Women have the right skills, and yet right now is the time that the
pipeline might suffer," Terrell said. "But
the pipeline is primed with women -- entry, middle and now moving to
executive levels. It's hard not to be
impressed with the number of women in senior leadership roles in the tech
fields."

Attendees say there's still a need for women-only events like WITI's
conference to drive more women to the
industry.

"The need for people in the industry has accelerated at an unparalleled
rate," Terrell said. "And the only place
to go to move from a mechanical to an electrical into a software world is
into untapped populations of
people. The penetration of women into those fields right now is way indexed
low."

That's why companies like WITI and DaimlerChrysler focus on bringing women
in at the entry level and
mentoring them in middle school for science and math, she said.

"Focusing on young people and young women as an untapped market is what we
are all looking for. It's the
talent pool," Terrell said.

While women are generally more comfortable in fields like computer science
and biology, the numbers are still
relatively low in the physical sciences, said Darlene Solomon, director of
Agilent's Life Science Technologies
Lab.

"The numbers are certainly better in some fields. In biology and chemistry
we see a much greater percentage
of women going into graduate school," Solomon said. "But I still get the
sense that at elementary schools and
middle schools, there's a lot of women choosing not to go into math and
science."

"There's still a sense that there's a need that exists (for conferences like
WITI's) that hasn't gone away,"
Solomon said. "I think that there are needs in terms of having women being
centered on what they want to
do and what they can do that a conference like this is a shot in the arm."

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