Minority Women To Address Gender Divide.

Some of the nation’s most powerful business and technology leaders will meet in Atlanta this October to address the gender and ethnicity gap that limits women and minorities to only 7 percent of the nation’s most senior executives.

The nation’s only multicultural technology awards conference, the Women of Color Technology Awards Conference, will kick off its sixth year on October 11, 2001, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, in downtown Atlanta, Ga. Tyrone D. Taborn, CEO and chairman of Career Communications Group, producer of the three-day event, says, “The goal of the conference is to reiterate the recommendations of countless studies that call for broader efforts to place more women and minorities in senior-level positions within the public and private sectors. Women make up more than 51 percent of the U.S. population; it makes no sense that they are less than 10 percent of corporate directors.

“Regarding pay, women and minorities continue to face great economic inequalities in the work force,” Taborn adds. He cites figures from the U.S. Department of Commerce that the average women earns 76 cents for every dollar an average man earns. Looking exclusively at the earnings of people of color, Black women earn 65 cents on every dollar earned by White men; Hispanic women earn 52 cents on the dollar.

Researchers have found that most of the wage gap between women and men is attributable to differences in the jobs they hold and the fact that the work force still is highly segregated by gender. Although women have made great progress in the job market over the past 20 years — primarily in professional occupations — 73 percent of women in the work force are in nonprofessional occupations.

Regardless of these challenges and pitfalls, women attending the Women of Color Technology Awards Conference have distinguished themselves in career fields that were closed to them only a few short decades ago. One impressive example is this year’s Technologist of the Year, Sherita T. Ceasar, vice president of Subscriber Services for Scientific-Atlanta, Inc., in Atlanta, Ga.

As a young person pursuing a math and science career, Sherita Ceasar had to beat the odds. Ceasar, who is African American, grew up in Chicago during the 1970s, in housing projects where drugs, fights, gunshots, and gangs were commonplace. But the people of Ceasar’s community knew that she was smart and supported her resolve to make it out of the neighborhood.

“Even the winos in my community encouraged me,” says Ceasar. “They knew I was going to college and wanted me to study.”

Today, Ceasar’s sharp intellect, sheer determination, and hard work have propelled her to great heights in industry, among peers who mostly are male. And she is channeling her energies and experiences into developing the next generation of female engineers, in hopes of changing the face of 21st-century technology.

By recognizing the achievements of role models such as Sherita Ceasar, the Women of Color Technology Awards Conference will provide inspiration to females, particularly young girls, many of whom shy away from careers in technology and science, believing that opportunities for success are only for boys.

“As we tell the success stories of Ms. Ceasar and our other award winners, we hope to create a ripple that becomes the unstoppable wave that eliminates all barriers to achievement for all women,” Taborn says.

For more information at http://www.digitalwork.com .