A grand challenge: inspiring women to embrace IT careers.

The TV broadcasts of the Apollo missions in the '60s inspired millions to look toward the stars. But some were more curious about the technology used to get there.

The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) launched an interview series in June featuring heroes of IT entrepreneurship (www.ncwit.org/hcrocs). Among the women nominated was Donna Auguste.

Donna was a senior director at US West Advanced Technologies, worked in artificial intelligence at IntelliCorp, and earned four patents for her work on the Apple Newton personal digital assistant before founding Boulder-based Freshwater Software, which was acquired for $147 million by Mercury Interactive in 2002.

In her interview, Donna reveals something about herself that seems oddly unique today: inspiration for a career in computing. Donna watched the Apollo Program missions on TV as a little girl and said it was seeing live images of mission control that inspired her to want to work with computers.

At the time of the Apollo Program, the U.S. had embraced space exploration as a grand challenge and invested billions of dollars in education, research and innovation in scientific and technological fields. IT research and investment in its development has since created more than a dozen billion-dollar industries in the United States--using technologies such as the Internet, bar codes, speech recognition and fiber optics--many of which we depend upon today.

IT has become the backbone for how we work, communicate and entertain ourselves, not to mention the critical role it plays in driving our economic development. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that IT jobs are growing at twice the rate of all jobs overall and that they will be among the fastest-growing job sectors in the coming decade.

Yet inspiration for computer science and IT is flagging. A study by the Higher Education Research Institute indicates that interest in computer science among incoming college freshmen has plummeted nearly 70 percent since 2000. The U.S. has long held a comfortable lead when it comes to technology innovation, but by any barometer this lead is threatened.

In 2003, only three American companies ranked among the top 10 U.S. patent recipients, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Today, Asian countries represent not just a growing proportion of the technology manufacturing sector but a growing proportion of technology's creators.

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As the global marketplace for innovation "flattens" and other countries produce the educated, skilled labor force necessary to compete in this marketplace, our ability to compete is not something we can take for granted.

Women comprise more than half the ranks of all undergraduate students on American college campuses today, and they occupy more than half of all professional positions in the U.S. workforce. Yet women earn less than a quarter of all bachelor's degrees in computer science, fill less than 27 percent of professional computing-related jobs, and hold only 13 percent of corporate officer positions at the Fortune 500 tech companies.

Inspiring more women to choose computing careers will result in a growing pool of skilled technical workers to fill the 1 million-plus IT jobs that analysts predict will be added to our workforce by 2014.

Women-led companies are growing at twice the rate of those led by men, according to the Center for Women's Business Research. The fact that these companies are not, for the most part, IT companies, is a shame: NCWIT recently completed a comprehensive research study of gender and patenting in the U.S. that found mixed-gender teams produced the most frequently cited patents--with citation rates that were 26 percent to 42 percent higher than the norm.

As technology becomes exponentially more pervasive in our lives, we need to ensure that it is created by as broad and diverse a population as the one it serves. As with the advent of space exploration, the next century of technological innovation represents a grand challenge for our best and brightest minds, and we need to call them--all of them--to action.

Lucy Sanders is CEO and co-founder of the National Center for Women & Information Technology (ncwit.org), housed in the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is a Bell Labs Fellow and a former vice president at Avaya Labs. She holds six patents. She can be reached at [phone] or [e-mail].