come girls into the STEM fields – which include science, technology, engineering and mathematics – as early as possible.
“By the time the companies get involved, it’s already too late,” said Linda A. Volonino, a professor of information systems at Canisius College.
Quaranto, for one, still remembers the answer she received as an eighth-grader in Erie, Pa., when she told her female math teacher that she wanted to take advanced math classes in high school.
“She, to my face, said, ‘Why would you ever want to do that?’” recalled Quaranto, 26. “And I did it anyway. To succeed in this field, you have to be tenacious. I fought back.”
Margaret Smith, 32, an engineer for Synacor, went to an all-girls high school where computers weren’t emphasized in the curriculum. (“PowerPoint was as advanced as we got,” she said with a laugh.)
But her father was a software engineer, and a trip to his office on Take Your Daughter to Work Day as an 18-year-old helped hook her on computers. Today, she is mentoring a female summer intern as part of the Synacor Buddy program.
“I’m someone she can talk to for anything she needs,” said Smith, who writes code for the Internet start pages that Synacor designs for its customers.
At the college level, Folks said she’s interested in retaining those students who declare engineering and computer science as a major, and she said programs such as maternity leave for Ph.D. students can help ensure young women have a chance to succeed.
Folks noted that the gender gap in medicine today has largely been closed at the nation’s medical schools, even though medicine has a notoriously demanding and un-family-friendly schedule, and she said she hopes the same progress can be made in computer science.
“We do an appalling job of getting the message out there that this is a wonderful job for women,” said Folks, an Australian native and physicist by training.
Women use mobile technology, such as text messaging, at high rates, and sites such as Pinterest and Etsy have a strong female presence. The goal now is to get more women interested in the back-end work that produces those applications, and to emphasize that software and technology development is rewarding and engaging.
“There’s a beauty in all the logic behind computers,” said Moiseeva. “What most attracts me about the technology field is it’s always evolving.”
A different perspective
Moiseeva said women bring a different perspective to product design, and this should be welcomed. She noted, for example, that men not surprisingly designed cars that were hard to drive while wearing high shoes.
This spring, Moiseeva started the Buffalo chapter of Girl Develop It, a New York City-based program founded in 2010 that offers code-writing classes and monthly gatherings to women who want to gain proficiency in software and app development.
Christa Penner took the class on HTML and CSS, which are used to build websites, after largely teaching herself how to use the HTML programming language.
“I just wanted a better understanding of it,” said Penner, 30, who operates C Designs and Illustrations from her West Seneca home, offering graphic and web design services to her clients. “I was getting so much busier that I didn’t have time to figure everything out from scratch.”
About 10 women were enrolled in the four-week class. “It was very affordable, and it was not intimidating at all because other people were in the same boat as you,” Penner said.