On Monday, Women In Technology honored five women who’ve made strides in scientific or technical fields, including Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, who co-discovered HIV. Also inducted into their “Hall of Fame” were Maria Azua, a vice president at IBM who holds 27 patents and has another 59 pending, and Been-Jon Woo, an engineer at Intel who holds 13 patents.
Another honoree has helped HP realize that helping women engineers return to work after they give birth isn’t rocket science, according to the inspiring lede in the Mercury News story:
The pattern was depressing. For years, Nor Rae Spohn watched as women engineers at Hewlett-Packard would take time off work to have children and then disappear. “The technology moved quickly, and you couldn’t entice them to come back,” she said.
But Spohn, vice president of business imaging and printing at HP in Boise, and her management team worked to get women engineers to come back to work part time — anywhere from two to four days a week. The result: Her organization is 22 percent women in a male-dominated industry. “As their kids get older, they gladly come back to the workplace and we haven’t lost them,” she said.
The fifth honoree, Kim Jones from Sun Microsystems, was quoted as saying: “I want to pass on the message that diversity is critical in all decisions a business makes.”