June, 2005 CCS News: LBNL Women Participate in HPC Focus Group

June, 2005

LBNL Women Participate in HPC Focus Group

In an effort to increase the number of women in the field of information technology and high performance computing (HPC), Contra Costa College (CCC) hosted a women-only focus group earlier this month as part of its HPC program. Berkeley Lab is one of the program’s advisers, and is assisting in the development of the internship program.

A number of LBNL women spoke at the event and shared the distinct paths they took to arrive at their careers today.

“Working in high performance computing is a lot of work,” said Jackie Scoggins, who works with the Scientific Cluster Support (SCS) program and is part of the UNIX group. “But it’s also fun—there’s always something new to learn.”

Susan James, who is also a member of the SCS program and UNIX group, agreed that IT is a challenging and demanding field. But she believes the stereotype that women cannot do IT is changing. “Women are as capable as men,” she said to encourage women attendees considering a tech career. “There is no limit to what women can do—sometimes they can even do it better.”

Tammy Campbell, who works in the Mac/PC support group and is also an advocate for education, suggested that more effort must be made to make girls interested in computing technology at an earlier age—starting in elementary and middle school, not high school. “Girls need positive female role models who are doing IT to come into the schools and talk to them,” she said.

Deb Agarwal, Department Head of the Distributed Systems Department, also attended the event.

The working group’s goal was to better understand why few women enroll in CCC’s HPC program, and how to increase the recruitment of women. CCC took a survey of 10 of the 15 women participants about their views of careers in computing technology. Participants felt that:

technology is still a good career (quality of jobs and salary).
the reason the computing field is not as attractive to women is because the majority of industry workers are men, and they are perceived as having no other interests but computers.
the main obstacle for women from pursuing HPC degree is the lack of confidence to succeed in this field.
more female mentoring, role models, social activities, industry visits and workshops are needed to help overcome these obstacles.

For full survey results, go here.

“Clearly, there is a need for more local gatherings of this sort to help more women who want to pursue careers in computing technology,” said Farah Pranawahadi, the HPC program coordinator for CCC. “Everyone engaged in the discussion was very supportive of one another and helpful in providing ideas to shape our program.”

CCC is the first community college in California to offer an Associate of Science degree in high performance computer technology. The two-year high performance computing program began last fall, and requires students to do an internship. No prerequisites are required, although a passion for math and computer hardware and software is strongly recommended. The program trains students in system and network administration, security and parallel programming.