LEADERS SAY THEY'VE COME A LONG WAY; GEN X UNSURE.

Byline: Ilana Debare Scripps-McClatchy Western Service

Some are determinedly piercing the glass ceiling and finally entering executive suites.

Others can't even get a word in edgewise during staff meetings.

About 3,000 women gathered recently in the Silicon Valley for the country's second annual conference on Women in Technology. They offered sharply contradictory assessments of their industry.

Some high-tech veterans in their 40s and 50s gave upbeat descriptions of how they had taken advantage of the computer industry's youthfulness, flexibility and constant growth to achieve their personal goals.

``Two times in my career I stopped work for a year or so to raise children, and in each case I then found jobs that were better than the ones I left,'' said Karan Eriksson, partner in a Folsom-based firm called the CP Software Group.

But some women in their 20s gave frustrated accounts of being passed over for male subordinates when it came to promotions or being ignored during meetings.

``When I got my job, people told me the best thing to do if I had an idea was to feed it to one of the guys and have them bring it up for me,'' said a young programmer from Intel Corp.'s New Mexico facility.

``If I go to work in a baseball cap and an oversized T-shirt, I'm not seen as an object,'' said another young woman engineer. ``But if I wear a dress and a little makeup, it's like `Hey, how you do-ing!' They want to see if I'm going to crack, to be the object that they think I am.''

The conference was sponsored by a group called Women in Technology International, a network of female engineers, programmers, marketers, managers and others in the computer field.

It drew twice as many women as the first such conference a year ago.

And it came at a time when technology remains the most dynamic part of America's economy, although women aren't reaping their share of the gains.

Women make up about 35 percent of the high-tech work force, but not one of the 50 biggest computer companies traded on the stock markets has a female chief executive, according to data compiled by The Sacramento Bee.

And only 8.4 percent of the members of the boards of directors of Fortune 500 computer companies are women - compared with 9.5 percent in noncomputer firms.

``The good news is there are now large numbers of women working in science and technology who are capable, much more self-confident, and more savvy about what they need to do to realize their ambitions,'' said Carolyn Leighton, executive director of WITI. ``The bad news is companies still only have one or two board members or senior executives who are women.''

At the conference, high-tech veterans offered their younger counterparts some tips for success:

Build yourself a support network of mentors or ``coaches'' - both inside and outside your company.

If your goal is to become a CEO, seek out diverse work experience in many parts of your business.

Don't let other people's preconceptions box you in or limit you.

Don't be afraid to set some limits on your work life, despite the computer industry's longtime assumption that success requires 16-hour days and seven-day weeks.

``I think that (assumption) is changing,'' said Eriksson.

``When I had my first child, I made up this whole `consulting' thing so I wouldn't have a gap on my resume. With my second child, I left the gaps and just said `maternity leave.' That's really completely acceptable these days. I see it on resumes all the time now.''