Sidebar: Reaching Out to Women And Minorities

Computerworld - Despite recent gains, women and minorities are still underrepresented in the executive suite and the IT ranks, industry leaders and diversity advocates say. CIOs need to recognize the issue to ensure that women and minorities are encouraged to rise to upper-management positions, they suggest.
"The first step to any change is a conscious acknowledgement that there is a problem and something has to be done," says Carolyn Leighton, chairwoman and founder of Women in Technology International (WITI) in Sherman Oaks, Calif.
She and other advocates say executives need to consciously look for female and minority candidates, and to do so successfully, they have to change the way they recruit candidates and groom future leaders.
Kay J. Palmer, CIO and executive vice president at J.B. Hunt Transport Services, notes, "One of the underlying goals of [our] mentoring program is to give all high-potential employees the opportunity to work with executive mentors across the company." If a program doesn't exist to facilitate these relationships based on ability, she says, such relationships often instead develop based on shared personal interests, which sometimes excludes females or minorities.
Other leaders say CIOs need to do more to cultivate relationships with women and minorities and the organizations that represent them, such as WITI, to get a better handle on attracting them to certain jobs or companies.
"You have to be intentional about it," says Bill Regehr, senior vice president of IT and CIO at Boys & Girls Clubs of America. "I've challenged our HR people to go out and find me high-quality minorities and women to come into our technology slots."
Regehr and others say the intent isn't to fill quotas or lower the bar just to increase diversity. Rather, they say, it's about reaching out to groups that might be shut out by traditional mentoring relationships.
However, some CIOs say a well-crafted work environment that values all individuals can be successful in promoting talented workers, regardless of gender or minority status.
"I think overall you want to assess the potential of all the people in your organization," says Charles Hunsinger, vice president of software engineering at Corporate Express. "I don't think you want to pick and choose who wants to succeed. You want to try to mentor everybody."

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