Every chance she gets, Alice White goes into her daughter's schools to spread the word: Science is fun. Now seven and five, her girls are very curious and love experimenting. But the physicist and director of integrated photonics research at Lucent's Bell Labs worries that children are not encouraged to think about science as a career. She knows that many girls will not. This is already true in the computer sciences, where jobs go begging but fewer woman are pursuing the education needed to fill them.

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The media images of the Silicon Valley nerdy male surrounded by cartons of junk food and having no social graces do not help, says Serap Savari, a technical staff member at Lucent. "There are no TV shows about exciting computer scientists." With dire warnings that U.S. leadership in IT will be threatened if we can't attract qualified workers to stem the labor shortage, the National Science Foundation announced support last spring of research to find out why women and minorities are underrepresented in the IT work force. "The concern for Lucent and other companies is we don't want to wait three years while the scientists figure out why this is happening," says Magaret Wright, Lucent's director of scientific computing research. Lucent offers internship and scholarship programs to encourage undergraduates to continue onto graduate school. Recently, the company awarded a grant to the Computer Research Association (www.cra.org) to fund a university lecture series featuring women computer scientists. ...