Newsmaker: From math teacher to Turing winner

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Now, the "ouch" moment. Well, here's one that I haven't told any other reporter. I was working on a software program, on a very large machine which was being built in a huge warehouse on an IBM site. It was a mammoth machine! The first time I went to go and run my program on the machine that was being built, I went with a group of the guys, and as we walked into the building we were suddenly stopped. And they said, "Whoops, we don't know how to get to the machine without going through the men's room." The floor where the computer was had been built so that this kind of huge men's room was down the middle, because there were so many people involved with putting these things together.

Were you the only woman in that group?
Allen: No, at that time I was a manager. There was a group of four peer managers and three of us were women. So there were women getting in lots of roles at that time and getting promoted, and it was great. That wasn't true a few years later.

In the late '60s, I remember walking into an auditorium which had many managers in it at IBM and I counted four women among well over 100 people in the room.

So when did you start to see it swing back, or have you seen it swing back?
Allen: I see it swinging back now, but not everywhere.

I still, every time I walk into a room or the cafeteria or some other space in the workplace, look at the ratio. And I think most women do that. At the beginning, I wasn't sensitive to it whatsoever, but I am now. I have become more and more, so over the years as I realize that there aren't that many women around. I think the field is not doing well. And I know the field is not doing well in terms of the number of women.

I think the field is not doing well. And I know the field is not doing well in terms of the number of women.

Some critics and studies have said that women are not attracted to the sciences because of the hours required. What do you think of that claim?
Allen: I think, first of all, the idea that women aren't attracted to science is not true.

They are being attracted to medicine and the biological sciences. Even the gap, the percentage of many women in physics and chemistry and mathematics is closing. And in some of these other fields they're actually going to pass. You know, they say the number of women may pass the number of men at the undergraduate level.

I think there is also the question of work-life balance. I think that's more about the culture of the workplace than it is about the way people work.

Can you explain to me what you mean by that?
Allen: Well, many people at IBM don't have an office and they work from home. The technology enables that and, in fact, it's very effective. But the culture in the workplace sometimes goes counter to that, and the expectation is that you're going to be physically in the office and that you'll be there long hours.

I should say, I'm at the IBM Research Laboratory and that's not our culture here. But we do need to come in, and it's because of the intellectual stimulation that one has and the ability to work with other peers on interesting problems.

Many people in your industry complain that the U.S. is suffering from a lack of qualified skilled workers. Some say it's a lack of incentives on the part of companies, others say it's a faulty U.S. education system. What's your take on that issue?
Allen: Well, I was involved with ACM's Job Migration Task Force and it wasn't clear that any of those was quite the right answer. But one of the things that is obvious is that so many of the women are not part of the IT workforce. If we're ignoring 50 percent of the potential workforce, then we have a problem in the IT workforce.

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