When it comes to the representation of women in the technology industry, the numbers continue to be startlingly bad. The number of females in the science, technology, engineering or math fields has been dropping since the 1980s. In 2016, only about a quarter of the computing workforce were women, and less than 10 percent were women of color. In 2015, women in the U.S. accounted for only 18 percent of computer science degrees, with that number falling for women of color.

Yet, there are also signs of hope. The number of females in computer science programs at schools such as MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Stanford are on the rise. And at Harvey Mudd College in Southern California, more women than men will receive computer science diplomas when they walk commencement this spring.

Sitting on the stage at Harvey Mudd’s graduation will be the college’s president, the only woman to hold the position in the school’s 63-year history. And she has a message for all young men and women who aspire to careers in the technology field.

“Our whole goal is to show it doesn’t matter what race you are, what gender or anything else. If you bring hard work and persistence and curiosity, you can succeed,” said Maria Klawe (pictured), president of Harvey Mudd College. “There are so many opportunities to make a difference in the world and that’s really important.”

Klawe spoke with Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Global Women in Data Science Conference (WiDS) in Stanford, California. They discussed Klawe’s career, corporate efforts to broaden diversity, the importance of non-technical skills in engineering success, and the growing influence of data science. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Maria Klawe in our Women in Tech feature.

From computer novice to professor

The college president’s career trajectory has mirrored her own advice. As a young Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of Toronto 40 years ago, Klawe found herself in the odd position of having never written a single line of code or even used a computer. In less than a year, the school named her a professor.

“You are never too old to learn math and computer science,” Klawe said.

This point has been reinforced quite close to home for Klawe. Her younger sister is working toward a degree in computer science at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology at the age of 63, despite obstacles most students would not normally have to overcome.

“She suffers from fibromyalgia; she walks with a walker; she’s quite disabled, she’s getting A’s and A pluses; it’s so cool!” Klawe said. “For every single person in the world, there’s an opportunity to learn something new.”

Signs of progress in the academic world may help fuel industry initiatives to achieve a more gender-balanced workforce. More than 70 companies have publicly announced gender diversity targets, including Intel Corp., General Electric Co. and Pinterest Inc..

Last year, Accenture PLC announced a goal to achieve 50 percent men and 50 percent women by 2025. Nearly 40 percent of the of the global professional services company’s workforce is female, and Accenture’s chief leadership and human resources officer, Ellyn Shook, sought advice from Klawe on how to get the representation numbers higher.

Harvey Mudd’s president advised Shook to start recruiting at women’s engineering colleges in India, and the effort resulted in an uptick in Accenture’s numbers.

“I told her, ‘You owe me; you’re joining my board,’” Klawe recalled. “And she did.”

Closer look at recruitment process

Perhaps more significantly, Accenture is also making progress in the number of women to achieve prestigious partnership positions in the firm, according to Klawe. The progress is being driven by a renewed focus on the entire recruitment process, from advertising to interviewing and skills evaluation after hire.

“They’ve started really looking at how many women are being promoted to partners, and they’ve moved that number up to 30 percent in the most recent year,” Klawe said. “It’s such a great example of a company that just decided ‘we’re going to think about how we advertise; we’re going to think about how we interview; we’re going to think about how we do promotions; and we’re going to make it equitable.’”

The emphasis on hiring a more diverse workforce is also bringing greater scrutiny to the most important factors for success in the high-powered, fast-moving technology environment. Google has been evaluating key qualities of its top employees, and the findings have yielded an interesting conclusion: STEM expertise ranks dead last.

More likely to contribute to success were non-technical skills, such as coaching and listening. Google’s revelation was that the most successful employees weren’t the smartest technology minds in the room.

“The least important thing was their knowledge of engineering,” Klawe said. “It was empathy, ability to mentor, communications skills, ability to encourage, all of these things that we think about as ‘soft skills,’ but they actually change the world.”

Studies such as Google LLC’s highlight why companies will need to pay special attention to the broader skill set of a more diverse hiring pool, especially when it comes to filling key data science positions. LinkedIn recently compiled a list of the top 10 emerging positions in the U.S. Three of the top five were in data science.

“This is a great time to get into data science; there are so many opportunities,” Klawe said. “That’s why we need women and people of color, people who are not well represented in these fields, because data science is changing everything in the world.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Global Women in Data Science Conference. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Women in Data Science Conference. Neither Stanford University, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE