Here’s a rather troubling statistic: while women make up some 46 percent of the total workforce in the United States, only 22 percent of tech jobs are held by women. Why? The long-held belief by many is that women perceive the tech world as being an industry where it’s harder for a woman to succeed. But is that really true? Not according to some women in the industry. Take Laura Demmons, a tech entrepreneur who founded a startup that engineers water purification appliances. Demmons started out at HP, where she managed a team of software engineers in the 1980s. “I went from not having a technical background to just diving into the deep end in software, working with programmers…and finding out that I probably liked working with scientists and engineers almost more than anything else I had ever done in my life,” she says. While her case might be atypical, it’s proof positive that women can succeed in IT, given the right circumstances. As the article in Red Herring duly notes, step one might be increasing the number of women in graduate programs for technical fields like engineering.

For more on women and technology:
– read the article [1] from Red Herring