By Eve Tahmincioglu
It took a century for IBM, the male-dominated computer giant known for its blue-suited culture, to appoint a CEO who often wears a dress.
Last week's appointment of Virginia Rometty?is both symbolic and potentially game-changing for the computer company and for an industry?long plagued by a?lack of women in both the?rank and file and?leadership.
?I think it?s great news and part of a long steady road to Damascus as far as women leading technology firms,? said Nancy Koehn, a historian at Harvard Business School who recently wrote about IBM's?centennial for the Harvard Business Review.
While Hewlett-Packard recently appointed its second female chief executive in Meg Whitman, the appointment at?IBM?is ?even a bigger deal," Koehn said.
?This is a big, important public bet the company?s making,? she said, ?and it won?t go unnoticed.?
Jon Iwara / AFP - Getty Images
Virginia Rometty will take over as chief executive of IBM Jan. 1, 2012.
Koehn and others are hoping that others in the industry sit up and take notice fo the latest breakthrough in what is still very much a good old boys? network.
?The cool thing about this particular appointment is that it?s very visible,? said Todd Thomas, associate professor of leadership at the?DeVos Graduate School of Management at Northwood University in Midland, Mich., who writes a blog on?leadership?"I think it shows there might be some activity going on in large companies about identifying female talent in the leadership pool, and also a willingness to adapt to different leadership styles.?
Despite the?appointment of Rometty, and others including Whitman and Xerox's Ursula Burn, women are still a tiny minority in technoogy leadership positions. Among Fortune 500 technology firms, only 11 percent of executives are women, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology.
The lackluster figures reflect a shortage of women in lower-level tech jobs.?Women hold 56 percent of all professional jobs in the US, but only 25 percent of IT jobs, the center reported. Women accounted for only?18 percent of undergraduate computing and information sciences degrees?in 2009, down from 37 percent in 1985.
?While some of the stats for women going into the profession aren't great, the key is being able to highlight appointments like Rometty's for our younger generations, and leveraging them into learning experiences and opportunities for inspiration,? said Kate Brodock, executive director of digital and social media at Syracuse University.
Clarke Murphy, global leader of the CEO and board services practice for executive search firm Russell Reynolds Associates, said he?s seeing a growing number of?women as finalists for key executive positions at technology companies. ?It?s an expectation today because there are so many great women executives in the ranks today."
So will Rometty?s ascension to IBM?s helm open the?floodgates to?more?women in tech?
?It would be nice to think that having two or three women leading the big tech companies could be a tipping point,? said Paula King, dean of the School of Business and Leadership at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minn. ?But I don?t think so.?
?The pipeline needs to be full of women in engineering and women not dropping out of tech and physics in grammar school," she said.?If that happens, she added, ?there may be a tipping point.?
Paul Carroll, author of ?Big Blue: The Unmaking of IBM? and partner at management consulting firm The Devil?s Advocate Group, doesn?t think Rometty?s appointment will lead to overnight change for the world of technology or IBM, but he does see it as an ?unusual? move that will shake things up.
?In the late '80s and early' 90s, there was only one women who held a position of any real consequence at IBM,? he said. And even today, he pointed out, the executive team at IBM has only two women among a dozen members.
A Rometty tenure, he said, ?is going to open up lots of opportunities for women at IBM.?
?IBM, like other companies, have this network where you hitch your wagon to a rising star and get pulled along with that person,? he explained. ?It?s been tough for women because so many rising stars were men, but I have to believe she?s going to pull some people along and change the mind-set.?
Some believe all the tech-women-CEO fanfare will die down and leave women back where they were.
?Every so often it seems that there could be a breakthrough in the hiring tendencies, but, then, everything settles back to business as usual, particularly when the woman has a bad go of it at the helm, as with Yahoo and HP,? said Billie Blair, organizational psychologist and president/CEO of management consulting firm, Change Strategists Inc.
(Yahoo recently fired CEO Carol Bartz and HP?s Carly Firorina also was let go.)
But Carroll said one difference now is that?two women -- Whitman and Rometty -- are now running two of the largest computer companies in the world.
?As the father of two daughters, I?m hoping we get to the point where this is no longer remarkable,? he added.
Related:
IBM names first female CEO
HP makes it official, appoints Meg Whitman
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Source: http://bottomline.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/10/28/8526890-a-victory-for-nerds-who-wear-skirts
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