For a long time, Leach wouldn’t ask for help when learning something new because of the flak she’d likely receive. In her field — open-source — this can include harsh, spur-of-the-moment, online criticism. She has experienced comments along the lines of ‘just someone’s girlfriend’, and worse, at industry conferences and has battled to be taken seriously when managing male workers.

Leach, who is now 28 and spent the past few years working for Catalyst IT in Wellington, remained undeterred and stuck at it. But she says employers need to counter the negativity, which is “a really big deal” for young women new to the job.

Leach’s experience is not unusual in an industry where women have moved little closer to equal representation despite the best efforts over the past eight years of support group Women in Technology, which champions the female cause.

And the unequal numbers start at high school. Despite publicity about the millions of dollars made by IT entrepreneurs and a global and domestic skills shortage keeping IT workers in hot demand, girls at secondary school have little interest in IT as a career, says Unisys’s Terry Shubkin.

Latest New Zealand reports (2005) show 20,800 students graduated with bachelor or bachelor with honours degrees and, of them, only 8.1% were maths and information sciences graduates. Within this group only 35% were female, despite there being 14 female graduates for every ten male overall. There is a cohort of female ter-tiary IT students who do outnumber males — those aged 25 to 39 and, particularly, those 40-plus. But women on IT courses traditionally have a high attrition rate once working in the industry.

Women make up 42% of the New Zealand IT workforce, notes the Kiwi website of an international Committee on Women in Computing. While on the face of it that sounds pretty high, the figure is skewed by large numbers of women in data entry and desktop publishing. For example, women comprise just 16% of applications engineers and 11% of systems technicians and hold only 2% to 3% of top IT management roles.

Industry concern at the continued low numbers of women in the industry is evidenced by its sponsorship of WIT and other networks, and by some outreach into secondary schools and universities, says Unisys’s Shubkin, who is one of three women on Unisys New Zealand’s senior management team. Through WIT, universities and numerous computing women’s networks, women can make contacts, gain support, attend women-friendly courses and events, and find mentors.

In the latest initiative, Auckland and Wellington branches of the international Geek Girl Dinners network have sprung up to provide informal education. Their events have quickly sold out.

Why the interest? In programming, one reason is the stress of fending off the assumption that girls don’t cut it. But Leach and others also say, despite the pressure, they enjoy being in a challenging industry. Many like the fact they’re paid ahead of their peers in other sectors and also note that male mentors have helped them advance.

As with senior roles in other industries, women must make choices, says IT entrepreneur Melissa Clark--Reynolds: top IT management jobs are generally inflexible for those who want a modicum of family time. In her experience, some senior women have been sidelined in favour of men for little apparent reason, she says. She’s also found men on corporate boards don’t always speak of senior women with the respect they would show their male counterparts.

Says WIT’s Carol Lee Andersen, who now owns IT recruitment and other businesses: “Much depends on present role models inspiring new female entrants into the sector and on companies and other women -supporting them to stay there — eventually banishing women’s minority status and balancing the culture.”

It’s not all doom and gloom as our four case studies on successful women IT entrepreneurs demonstrate.

1. Emily Loughnan
IT entrepreneur Emily Loughnan says she naturally “fell to the front” early in her former life in television production for TVNZ. She ran crews and then studios, and set balls rolling — as she did later at NZ On Air, playing a major role in the advent of Shortland Street.

In one sense, then, it wasn’t a huge leap to found Click Suite, a Wellington interactive media company, with her husband, Rex McIntosh. It now employs 24 staff.

Long accustomed to coping with pressure as she was, Loughnan still found an internet startup difficult territory. “There were only the two of us at the beginning, and we had to grow with cashflow ... There can be a long time between projects and it is unpredictable.

“Although cashflow crises are a long way behind us now, I will never forget them. It was hideous.” It helped that both understood the pit-of-the-stomach worries you take home at night: they learned to vent their business issues then tuck them away in favour of personal time.

Loughnan says shared excitement about interactivity propelled the pair into business in 1994 and ensured they didn’t stop at the first hurdles — such as getting turned down for an overdraft because their concept was too techie.

“Sometimes you will be up against the wall. When you are, I say: ‘Well, that’s the closest I can be to the other side’.”

Click Suite has a well-honed modus operandi focusing first on the client’s ‘story’, and on audience research — the meaning around which to build -graphics and interactive functions. But, notes Loughnan, the company must re-chart its course with each new phase of growth.

She aims to lead her “fantastic team” by rewarding excellence, inviting continuous feedback, and offering work/life balance. “I don’t believe work has to be all long days ... People have families to consider.”

Having taken learned-on-the-job production and management skills into IT (with a top-up from an Excellerated Business School course in Hawaii), Loughnan has no intention of allowing a ‘dark rooms and pizza boxes’ work culture, nor the pigeonholing of women and the hierarchies she once battled at TVNZ.

2. Deborah Crowe
True to the practicality of her Southland farm upbringing, Deborah Crowe moved into IT to follow the money.

An engineering graduate with a low boredom -threshold, Crowe says she’s “not a good employee”. Several years as an engineer with Telecom left her disinclined to consider a long-term career there, and simple arithmetic confirmed her feeling.

“Fifteen years ago I realised as an engineer my salary would top out at $80,000, whereas I knew there were cowboys in IT earning three times that.

“I thought, ‘I need a rebranding exercise’. It was as calculated as that.”

Crowe jumped into project management in a web development company, then formed an IT consultancy with an acquaintance and continued her web-strategies learning curve.

In 1999, Wellingtonian Crowe met a couple of guys nurturing their version of the little-known idea of mobile marketing. “Within two weeks we built a WAP gig guide to appear on mobile and internet.”

The guys were Ben Northrop and Justin Boersma and the trio soon registered the company Run the Red but kept their other businesses going for a while for income. Text messaging and advertising content via cellphone were barely established so potential Run the Red clients needed educating.

A text-based promotion for Telecom for the duration of the 2001 America’s Cup was an early success and, in late 2003 with a text-banking project for PSIS, Crowe got on board as general and operations manager.

Since then turnover has grown from under $500,000 to around $7 million and, with 12 staff and offshore expansion, Crowe focuses more on strategic direction and management. She is promoting a young woman to lead the operational side. Crowe says: “I remember being given breaks in my late 20s.”

She also recalls refusing to start at the bottom when considering a move into sales within Telecom; her mana-ger, however, wanted to do things by the book.

By contrast as an IT entrepreneur, it’s a matter of “-riding a new bow wave every few years … defining the rules as you go along”.

“There’s huge opportunity in technology, and it’s what you make of it.”

3. Melissa Clark-Reynolds
Heard the one about women and men using exactly the same scripted approach to negotiate a pay rise? Bosses considered the female unpleasantly aggressive and the male perfectly acceptable.

Anecdotes like these come as no surprise to serial entre-preneur Melissa Clark-Reynolds. But dealing with sexist comments from time to time has detracted little from the “huge fun” she has had in IT company leadership. Nor has it scratched her record of business success, which includes being turnaround CEO of PayGlobal.

A qualified epidemiologist who has mastered SAS but otherwise avoids code, Clark-Reynolds joined moribund PayGlobal in 2006 at the instigation of investor No 8 Ventures. In a short time she made thorough reforms in all areas: HR, accounting, production, customer service, operations and strategy.

This is a woman who likes responsibility. Six years after its 1992 inception, her insurance firm Fusion — by then under a 50:50 joint ownership arrangement with a corporate and with Clark-Reynolds as head of sales, marketing and operations — had 38% of its market.

There followed a sell-up, providing money to invest in a health consultancy in Vietnam and (“with mixed success”) in companies she selected in an ‘angel’ capacity. She then helmed and turned around loss-making IT company Intaz, ahead of the PayGlobal assignment.

Sought after as an industry mentor and teacher, Christchurch-based Clark-Reynolds is back in startup mode, with a values-oriented children’s website, called Monkeyfun, to be marketed to greenie, tech-savvy Californian parents — en route to hoped-for world domination. It has taken her a year to plan how the concept will go from zero to junior Facebook-style hero. Her research extended to sales of entertainment-interactivity companies internationally, so she understood her product’s long-term value and ideal acquirer.

While she enjoys working with men, Clark-Reynolds wants to see more women in IT, for their own opportunities, and to ensure products meet women’s needs. “It is important in a business that you represent your customer base in your team,” she says.

Clark-Reynolds considers skills shortages add to the need for more women recruits, while equal representation and leadership should also create work environments where no one has to deal with “sexist bullshit”.

4. Katherine Corich
Katherine Corich has never seen a glass ceiling and, if she did, she would ditch the perception and keep her focus on the task at hand — likely, these days, to be growing her contacts in Kazakhstan.

Sysdoc Group is a process, knowledge and change manage-ment consultancy born 22 years ago out of Corich’s desire to marshal her considerable expertise into learning curves for organisations. Having moved with her family to England, she’s driving the company’s global growth from its London office. You might think the British old boys’ network is all but impenetrable but, for Corich, decoding the culture was just another venture outside her comfort zone — where she says women must tread if they want business success.

Sysdoc is now a $24 million turnover company with offices in Wellington, Auckland, Sydney, London and California. As Corich explains it, each new territory has been targeted after “really understanding the market”, each growth phase has proceeded from a solid client base, and each new customer is serviced with a commitment to help it become “a thought leader in its space”.

A linguistics graduate and commercial pilot, Corich was an information architect for a British stock exchange and a technical college instructor in France, but had earlier been introduced to documentation/IT in roles with IBM. Focused on achieving her best, she barely noticed any male/female numbers imbalance.

With Sysdoc, she has recruited for diversity. Accommodating a variety of flexi-time arrangements, the company attracts “highly skilled professional women wanting a home life balanced with a challenging career”.

Corich has four children; her husband, co-owner in the company, became the home-based parent when they realised two non-stop careers would not work. Their lifestyle has inspired many, she says. “When employment models allow for shared child-care responsibilities, everyone wins: society, family units, children, businesses and the economy.”

Corich says if she has a management style, it is “that I passionately believe what we do increases [clients’] safety, security, business performance and productivity”.

“I so believe in that, and share it — that people with the same work ethic want to do the same.”