Monday, November 01, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Technology's role seen to grow in women's work-family balancing act

Technology will help society, especially working women with families, accomplish more in less time, four female technology executives told an audience of more than 300 businesswomen at the International Women's Forum at the Bellagio last week.

The panelists said one of women's main concerns is managing families and work, but they concurred technology provides the tools to help accomplish more in less time.

Sue Bonstrom, a senior vice president at Cisco Systems, said using technology to optimize time is a necessity for the future of society.

"Right now there are five workers for every retired person. In the near future, with the population bubble, it will be two workers for every retired person," Bonstrom said. "Look to your left and look to your right -- their children will have to be twice as productive as you are."

Katherine Bagin, a vice president at AT&T Corp., said productivity is already increasing at dramatic speeds.

"In the Industrial Revolution, in the late 1800s, productivity was 50 times what it had been in the previous century," Bagin said. "Where we are with microprocessors, we relive the productivity increase of the Industrial Revolution every 2 1/2 years. As women we've always been multitaskers. It's our survival. Women are going to be the benefactors of convergence."

Bagin said that combining different technologies into simplified devices allows people to multitask faster and more effectively.

The panel's moderator, Vladimir Pozner, president of the Russian TV Academy, noted that the panel represented technology companies worth more than $500 billion, more than Brazil's Gross National Product. But the panelists expressed concern about the lack of women in the technological sector.

"Twenty percent of engineer graduates are women and 25 percent of computer science graduates are women," Bonstrom said.

She said she works to encourage schools to push girls into math and science, the building blocks for technology careers.

While all the women stressed the need for improvements to the education system, they also addressed how their companies were working with schools to integrate technology into the classroom.

"We have a program in Singapore, working with seventh-grade girls who use a tablet PC, which acts as a digital textbook," said Linda Zecher, vice president of U.S. public sector for Microsoft Corp.

Bostrom said the most effective teachers are the ones who integrate technology into the classroom.

The women also recognized that entertainment technology shouldn't turn children away from books, it should encourage them to read in a new way.

"People don't read Shakespeare, they go to the movies. When kids think of Shakespeare, they think of the Gwyneth Paltrow film," Zecher said. "We can't go back. But if I can get a child to read Shakespeare on a tablet PC or learn cursive through an interactive software program, then that's great."

The panelists said that the constant need to know and to be in touch is the way kids live. They said that 24-hour news networks created a constant awareness of what was going on all over the world.

"It challenged the way we think," Zecher said. "It changed the baseline of knowledge to a constant `what's going on?' and `what's happening now?' "

Eve Aretakis, president and chief executive officer of Siemens Network Convergence, said the constant need to know is reflected in new technologies.

"We're going to give you technology to say these are the only people I'm always going to be in contact with, like your kids," Aretakis said.

Bagin said that there is nervousness that comes from the "always on" mentality and that it is just as important for technology to allow people to turn off. "With (voice over Internet protocol), for example, you could be located anywhere in the world or you could request to not be found at that moment."

Bagin said children need to be taught about what is appropriate on the Internet.

"We have to use both technology and better judgment," Bagin said. "We need to question and teach our children how to make better choices."