Microsoft DigiGirlz Summer Camp Is Serious Fun for High-Tech Teens

Microsoft broadens the scope of its high-tech camp for young women, offering hands-on experience in the technology world.

Visit a state-of-the-art playtest lab on Microsoft’s main campus, and you might expect to find product testers hard at work, putting a not-yet-released game for Xbox 360 through its paces. But would you expect the testers to be young women? Probably not, given the widening gender gap in the technology industry. According to a recent Computing Research Association (CRA) Taulbee Survey, women currently represent fewer than 20 percent of computing science and computer engineering graduates from U.S. colleges.

But today through Aug. 11, young women will be in plentiful supply — in the playtest lab and elsewhere — as Microsoft opens its campus to 80 high-school girls for the fifth annual DigiGirlz High Tech Camp. The camp gives girls in grades 9-12 the opportunity to participate in hands-on computing activities, as well as hear from working women who have broken the mold and achieved successful careers in the technology industry.

One of those women is Debra Chrapaty, a Microsoft corporate vice president who will relate her personal experience of overcoming career obstacles in a keynote speech Wednesday. The youngest of four children growing up in Philadelphia, Chrapaty says her father believed girls shouldn’t go to college or have careers. Instead, he expected her to get married, have kids and bus tables in the family’s diner. But in eighth grade, she turned the tables on him, asking for a subscription to The Wall Street Journal for her birthday.

Chrapaty worked her way through college and went on to earn degrees in economics and computer science. She launched a career that’s included the Federal Reserve Bank, Capitol Records and the National Basketball Association. She has been featured in CIO magazine and has had her picture on the cover of InformationWeek as CIO of the year. Today, she is corporate vice president of MSN Operations, a job she calls “the icing on the cake of my career.” Chrapaty can’t say exactly when she crossed the chasm to the technology field, but she’s positive she wasn’t actively exposed to it.

“I think I was using databases early in my career to do economic forecasting, and I simply fell in love with the technology,” she says. “But we don’t want to leave that kind of inspiration to chance. We want to have role models, and mentors and hands-on experiences for young girls so they can develop a vision of what a career in technology would be like. If they can see their future, they can realize their future.”

As part of her talk at the DigiGirlz camp this week, Chrapaty hopes to inspire girls with her first-person account of a woman who wasn’t deterred by roadblocks in her career.

“There will always be people who tell you that you can’t do something or can’t be something,” she says. “It’s important to listen to your inner compass, and to know in your heart that you’re limitless in what you’re capable of achieving.”