Crusader In A Little Black Dress -- CEO Katrina Garnett Wants To Draw More Women Into High Tech

In a striking ad that recently graced the pages of Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and Fortune, the glamorous female chief executive of a Silicon Valley software company, CrossWorlds, gazes out with a look many interpret as seductive and few would immediately associate with computer programs.

The ad is calculated to have an impact without having to explain the arcane and unsexy details of what CrossWorlds software does.

In the photo by Richard Avedon, 36-year-old Katrina Garnett, mother of two, wears the kind of low-cut black dress that makes a woman very popular at a party. The text, however, places her between two titans of the computer world: "Younger than Bill Gates, older than Michael Dell." Her company is much smaller, but Garnett is one of the few women who have reached a peak in the industry.

Before any description of her company's product, the ad mentions Garnett's favorite charity: "Started the Garnett Foundation to encourage girls to pursue technical careers." The message? She's a person with principles, an executive who's going to spend some money doing good in the world.

This is not a story about the slinky dress or CrossWorlds. It's about a woman making a small but focused effort to draw other women into a field where there is lots of money to make and interesting work to do.

CrossWorlds' niche is to provide software that links the disparate back-office systems a corporation might pick up as it acquires, say, one company in Indonesia, another in Holland.

The foundation, launched 16 months ago with $500,000 of Garnett's own money and a staff of three, has begun to fulfill its narrowly focused goal: to encourage young women in high school who are good at math to consider careers in computer science.

Back when Garnett was a vice president at Oracle, the $25 billion database giant, she regularly went to interview and hire college seniors at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She remembers being offended when one of the male interviewers on the Oracle team referred with a chuckle to a young woman at the top of the class as just - "a babe who can code."

In the early days, people imagined that the high-tech world might be a wide-open field in which none of the old prejudices would apply but, Garnett says, it became a male-dominated culture. In the mid-'80s, about 30 percent of the bachelor's degrees in computer science went to women; now the share is down to 16 percent.

Not only has that percentage shrunk, but women leave computer-science jobs at twice the rate men do.

By introducing high-school girls to women who've stuck with it and excelled in the field, Garnett hopes to get across the idea that the work is collaborative and creative, not solo and nerdy.

In her years at Oracle and another big software company, Sybase, Garnett says she was the only female vice president on the engineering side and felt like an outsider. She wants CrossWorlds to be more welcoming to women. There is a problem, however - there aren't many women with technical skills in the pipeline.

The Garnett Foundation started by looking at the high-school level, with a survey of college-bound students in three booming high-tech locales: Silicon Valley, Boston and Austin, Texas. Of the female students surveyed in what Garnett sees as the back yards of the computer business where interest and familiarity ought to be high, only 3 percent said they were interested in majoring in computer science. Four times as many boys indicated an interest.

High-school girls have already participated in the Web site (named for the foundation's initial survey: http://www.backyard.org) where they can interview prominent computer scientists.

You can click for short biographies of women who've made a mark through computer science. There's Anita Borg, pictured in a plane after her first successful solo flight.

Borg, a scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and president of the Institute for Women and Technology believes the hacker myth turned off a lot of young women.

In addition, Borg said, "We have not yet gotten across to girls that if they want to do socially good stuff, one of the best things they can study is not sociology and education, it's computer science. That's where the impact is going to come."

This month Garnett will run a computer camp (with overnights) on the Stanford University campus introducing 24 public and private high-school girls to women like Borg.

One 16-year-old who'll be at the camp, Christina Biagini-Kirk, vice-president of the tech club at Presentation High School in San Jose, shares a passion for problem-solving. The fun part for her about computers is when "you think you know something and then you find an easier way to do it.

Borg said she was "outraged" at the negative reaction to the CrossWorlds ad from male Silicon Valley CEOs. "Women tiptoe down this narrow path of acceptable behavior. If (Oracle CEO) Larry Ellison can get out there in an Armani suit, displaying power and virility, why can't Katrina push in the same direction - mixing power and femininity?"

Garnett loves the fact that some other high-school students (all girls, as far as she knows) have used the ad as a poster.

"So many women say to me, `I'm really good looking, and so my boss thinks I'm an idiot.' So they dress down, in nerd clothes. I don't have to do that. I work for myself."