A grand challenge: inspiring women to embrace IT careers.

• Author: Sanders, Lucy
• Position: National Center for Women & Information Technology - Column

The TV broadcasts of the Apollo missions in the '60s inspired millions to look toward the stars. But some were more curious about the technology used to get there.

The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) launched an interview series in June featuring heroes of IT entrepreneurship (www.ncwit.org/hcrocs). Among the women nominated was Donna Auguste.

Donna was a senior director at US West Advanced Technologies, worked in artificial intelligence at IntelliCorp, and earned four patents for her work on the Apple Newton personal digital assistant before founding Boulder-based Freshwater Software, which was acquired for $147 million by Mercury Interactive in 2002.

In her interview, Donna reveals something about herself that seems oddly unique today: inspiration for a career in computing. Donna watched the Apollo Program missions on TV as a little girl and said it was seeing live images of mission control that inspired her to want to work with computers.

At the time of the Apollo Program, the U.S. had embraced space exploration as a grand challenge and invested billions of dollars in education, research and innovation in scientific and technological fields. IT research and investment in its development has since created more than a dozen billion-dollar industries in the United States--using technologies such as the Internet, bar codes, speech recognition and fiber optics--many of which we depend upon today.

IT has become the backbone for how we work, communicate and entertain ourselves, not to mention the critical role it plays in driving our economic development. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that IT jobs are growing at twice the rate of all jobs overall and that they will be among the fastest-growing job sectors in the coming decade.

Yet inspiration for computer science and IT is flagging. A study by the Higher Education Research Institute indicates that interest in computer science among incoming college freshmen has plummeted nearly 70 percent since 2000. The U.S. has long held a comfortable lead when it comes to technology innovation, but by any barometer this lead is threatened.

In 2003, only three American companies ranked among the top 10 U.S. patent recipients, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Today, Asian countries represent not just a growing proportion of the technology manufacturing sector but a growing proportion of technology's creators.

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