More of the country's women are working in computer science. Ellen Chen reports.

When Candice Teoh took computer science at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia, nearly 20 years ago, she was one of three female students in her class. Most other women, the 43-year-old recalls, preferred business computing.

Today, Teoh is seeing an increasing number of women working alongside her as software engineers at Epicor Software Malaysia.

Systemically designing and writing code is a tedious and mundane job - one she adores.

"It's challenging when converting logic into code, as it demands optimization and accuracy to work out the levels of complications, but I love the job," she says.

"The work requires intensive focus, and I understand that it may not be suitable for many people - particularly men. Many of my peers think there isn't much future for software engineers, so they move on to consulting work. But I like working through one problem after the next."

More Malaysian women are taking bigger roles in previously male-dominated industries. British recruitment specialists Hays reports that from July 2011 to June 2012, 50 percent of the software developers they hired were women. The figure is the same for 2012 to 2013.

This doesn't surprise Woon Tai Hai, chairman of the National Information and Communications Technology Association of Malaysia (PIKOM), which represents 1,400 companies.

"We can see this trend growing, as over 65 percent of students enrolled in tertiary education today are women," he says. "The definition of technology has evolved and has become more encompassing."

Woon says ICT careers are not solely about programming but also entail system support, application design and development, network, database and testing.

Much of the work can be done from home.

"The advent of technology today also allows women to work from anywhere, and they would know how to fully utilize the benefits of technology," Woon says.

Women who left careers to raise families are especially attracted to the opportunities to work from home.

The practice is more common among multinationals than local, and small and medium-sized, enterprises. Eight of 21 companies at Kuala Lumpur's recent flexFair job fair are from the ICT sector.

Jobstreet Malaysia's country manager Chook Yuh Yng expects more women to enter the sector since they account for more than half of graduates.

"Nowadays, employers are less discriminative and more progressive," she says. "They hire any gender as long as they're qualified, skilled and can get the job done."

CEO of The Media Shoppe, one of Malaysia's leading Internet companies, Christopher Chan says the country faces a shortage of skilled developers.

"About 30 percent of our workforce for TMS Software are technical staff, and involve coding in some form. However, we don't seem to have many programmers who are women. I guess it's because sometimes the job requires us to travel," he says.

"We do have a few women developers in very key positions. But recently we seem to be hiring more men, as there are frequent needs to travel."

Chan says his wife graduated with a bachelor's degree in computer engineering and a master's in industrial engineering and was the company's CTO. She later took a lesser role so she could focus on the family.

"Students today are more interested in the social sciences rather than computer engineering," Chan says. "Most companies, when they get an opportunity to interview a good programmer, will hire regardless of gender. I find women developers to be more patient and steadier, whereas men tend to get bored easily."

Woon from PIKOM says: "A key trend in tech development is big data analytics, which are deployed by various industries to better serve customers by culling out insights and predictions that the data can generate. The characteristics of being detailed and sensible in women would help in filling the consumers' wants and needs for usability, convenience, productivity and social connectivity."

ICT growth produces opportunity, he says.

"Our ICT Job Market Outlook 2013 (report's) research shows the industry is expected to grow at 10 percent for 2013 a consistent growth (rate) over the past five years," Woon says.

"The average monthly salary for ICT professionals across the board is increasing every year as tabulated in the report. The average monthly (pay) for an ICT professional in 2012 was MYR 6,784 ($2,055), representing an increase of 8.7 percent from MYR 6,240 in 2011. This increase was well above the average inflation rate of 3.2 percent in 2011 and 1.6 percent in 2012."

PIKOM's latest report confirms ICT ranks among the five highest paying industries in the past half-decade and salaries have increased about 8 percent annually.

"Technology will continue evolving, bringing an abundance of opportunities for ICT professionals," Woon says.

"Households are fast embracing digital lifestyles. The women being the homemakers will be an important bridge toward such adoptions."

Taylor's University School of Computing dean Banumathy Devi says: "Males still dominate most high-value and income jobs in the sector."

This is something she believes should change.

"Research conducted for a study in both developed and developing countries found classic cases of vertical gender segregation, with women more strongly represented in lower-level computer science occupations than in higher-status and higher-paid arenas," she says.

"There is definitely a shortage of women pursuing careers in computer science. This is an issue we have tracked within the university for several years."

Only 15 percent of her school's computer science majors are women, but that's an increase from previous years.

"A substantial part of (Taylor's) teaching faculty is women, including the dean," she says.

Much effort has been made to eliminate the "geek" image and to "de-masculinize" the field, Banumathy says.

"Whenever female students generally think of computer scientists, they think of geeks - pocket protectors, isolated cubicles and a lifetime of staring into a screen writing computer code. The geek mythology persists among the younger generation - that to be successful you must eat-sleep-breathe code and nothing else.

"We have organized campaigns for high school students to see programming for what it truly is - a social endeavor that is part programming but also a group collaborative effort to design something amazing."

Computer science has intellectual depth and connections to other disciplines, she says.

"We need more efforts to make the computing field appear more gender neutral and attractive, from introducing role models to showcasing successful women in computer science."

Contact the writer at sundayed@chinadaily.com.cn.

(China Daily 09/01/2013 page3)