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October 12, 2004
Young women connect with technology
Dominique Ramirez
Mesa Legend
On Sept. 24, women corporate executives from various areas of the Information Technology fields convened at MCC’s downtown Business and Industry Institute, to give young women in Phoenix and surrounding areas a look at future opportunities in the IT field.
Cisco Operating Systems, Boeing, and Honeywell, along with the cities of Mesa and Phoenix, were among the many companies presenting to seventh-, eighth- and ninth-grade girls. These girls were targeted as the main focus group in hopes of being led into the IT job market.
The girls were led at a vigorous pace through lecture and demonstration rooms to get a hands-on experience with tech information, secrets, internet danger, real world solutions and more. The objective was to give these girls a mental picture of the field and to assuage any apprehension that they might have to engineering and information systems. It was highlighted in the lectures over and over how statistically there are more men in IT and how women can also have a bright future in computers. During “Engineer Your Career”, speaker Tanya Gulchak said, “a starting salary for a four-year engineering degree in IT is between $45,000 and $49,000 a year.”
Gulchak is the project engineer for Honeywell Automation and Control Solutions in the western half of the United States. Presenting along with Gulchak was Stacy Leedom from Phoenix’s Cable One Communications. Leedom relayed her ABC’s of IT which were, “Ambition, Basics in education and Challenge yourself.”
Other presentations included the demonstration of the “Smart House.” This technology will allow people to turn on and off anything electrical in the house from any computer terminal. Examples of lighting, security cameras, wall outlets and even the locks on the doors, if programmed, was said by Bethann Partin, “to be able to let the Fed Ex man in with a parcel and to lock him out after delivering the package from a remote computer.”
Special Agent Tom Lifton from the FBI, was also there to present security dangers of the Internet. He gave tips on how to protect one self from identity theft and online chat-room predators .
“IT In The City” was a discussion panel on how women can contribute to the global village. Mark Anderson, faculty from BII said, “Women are usually getting jobs to try to better humanity, trying to save the world, and IT can incorporate that skill into engineering.”
Also, Nobuko Franklin, IT Services Leader for the city of Mesa, said “The chief information officer for Mesa, the company I work for, is a woman as well, and a new study of Fortune 500 companies revealed that companies with the highest representation of CEO women had a 35 percent higher return on equity and a 34 percent higher return to shareholders. ”
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