SILICON CEILING.

• Author: Zuckerman, Laurie
• Position: Women in the high tech industry - Statistical Data Included - Brief Article

Female tech execs face the barriers all businesswomen must confront -- and then some -- to reach the top.

When Robbie Hardy runs a meeting, she bans business talk during bathroom breaks. The founder and chair of The Atlantis Group LLC, a Research Triangle Park angel-investment firm, doesn't want to miss anything while she's alone in the women's restroom. Hardy, 53, laughs as she explains, but the reality is no joke. She is usually the only woman in meetings -- even at her own company. Atlantis investors were recruited from 20- and 30-somethings who have scored major successes with start-ups, many in the high-tech industry. Only two women are on the 19-member executive committee, and nearly all the CEOs seeking investments are men.

Does this mean there's a silicon ceiling holding down women in high-tech? It wasn't supposed to be like this. Remember the promise of the Internet as a meritocracy, where neither gender nor race nor age nor geekiness would pose a barrier to success?

Look at the statistics. Only one in five information-technology professionals are women, according to the Washington, D.C.-based American Association of University Women. The same study concludes that the proportion of computer-science bachelor's degree recipients who are women is declining -- from a high of 37% in 1984 to around 28% in 2000, the only field in which the percentage of women decreased during that time. Despite high-profile exceptions such as Carly Fiorina, CEO of Palo Alto-based Hewlett-Packard Co., women at the top in high-tech are still what they are in most major businesses -- a virtual unreality.

It's getting worse. The White House Council of Economic Advisers reported in May 2000 that women are leaving IT jobs at twice the rate of men. The female share of the IT work force has fallen from 40% in 1986 to 29%. Still, many of North Carolina's female high-tech successes are reluctant to recognize barriers, even though they admit to having faced gender bias along the way.

Adrienne Lumpkin, 43, reached the top in 1993, after 12 years with two tech giants. She did it by joining forces with her husband, Kelly, to start Raleigh-based Alternate Access Inc., a provider of software-based telephone systems. She's the president, in charge of marketing, human resources and strategic resources, and owns 51% of the company. He's the CEO, running sales and the technical side. She won't be specific, but the 10-employee company had revenues in the $1 million to $5 million range.

Lumpkin began her career in 1979, fresh out of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., with a bachelor's in psychology, as a systems engineer at an IBM office in Springfield, N.J. She needed two years of business experience before she could start Harvard's MBA program. After she received her degree in 1982, Hewlett-Packard recruited her. During a decade in Cupertino, Calif., she held midlevel manager positions in product development, marketing and sales-force training and worked in hardware and software development. She says she generally found that those who could produce moved up, though there was competition between and among men and women.

Even so, she experienced problems. Early in her career, she says, a supervisor berated her because she rejected a meeting-time shift requested by a male colleague. Lumpkin, who had to leave at 5 p.m. to pick up her stepdaughter, says she will never forget how angry she felt. She decided to report the incident to personnel the next day. But when she got to work, a male peer had reported it to her supervisor's boss -- a woman. The results? A reprimand for the supervisor and an apology for Lumpkin. She soon took what she calls a lateral transfer to get away from the supervisor, though she continued to work at HP until 1992, when she accompanied her husband, who worked for IBM, to Raleigh.

Most times, the slights are far subtler, the women say. It's the everyday things -- not being invited to a sporting event, feeling excluded from a discussion or noticing that people listen more intently when their male counterparts talk tech -- that take their toll. Hardy says she learned an important lesson from...