Why There Are So Few Women in Tech

[Commentary] Women with engineering or computer science degrees often disappear just as they are within grasp of reaching career peaks. Of the top 100 tech companies in 2008, women accounted for a mere 6 percent of chief executives, according to the National Center for Women and Information Technology.

Of companies that raised venture capital in 2006, not even 7 percent were founded by women. Meanwhile the number of startups led by female chief executives that attracted funding last year was just 4.3 percent, according to VentureOne, a venture-investment tracker. As distressing as such facts are for the U.S. technology field, there is another, far-more-alarming number: Only 18 percent of college graduates with computer science degrees in 2008 were women—down from 37 percent in 1985, according to NCWIT. Why such a deficiency? Several explanations are typically proffered, many of them simplistic. A dearth of role models for women in engineering and science is one. Another is the meager encouragement that parents and teachers offer grade-school-aged girls to pursue math and science. A third is often the matter of women's decisions to have children at the prime of their careers, which makes them less desirable to tech companies filling demanding roles.

These explanations are all true -- and insufficient.

[Gupta serves on the boards of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, the Cancer Prevention Institute of California and Maitri, a Silicon Valley organization that helps women facing domestic violence.]