Women should be considered the leading solution to growing concerns about a skills shortage in the technology industry in the Republic and elsewhere, according to Mr Nicholas Donofrio, senior vice-president of technology and manufacturing for IBM.
Mr Donofrio, who also chairs IBM's corporate technology council, said women still made up only 15 per cent of engineers and programmers in the industry. During a visit to Dublin this week - his second in three years - he said the Republic seemed to have done a better job than the United States in encouraging women to pursue maths and sciences careers, judging by the number he had seen working at IBM here. He cited Puerto Rico as an example of a country that had successfully targeted women in the sciences. They now make up about half of university engineering courses.
He also believes technology companies should find ways of drawing upon "other untapped pools" of potential employees in other countries. IBM operates research laboratories in Europe, the US and Asia because "we want to harness the diversity of thinking where it is", Mr Donofrio said.
That diversity currently includes research into such cutting edge technologies as nanotechnology - creating molecular and atomic-level computing devices - and quantum computing. Some 20 per cent of IBM's research and development goes into such pure maths and sciences applications, with no expectation of any immediate practical use, he said. But the bulk of spending "gets out the door", he said, turning into new products and services.
Mr Donofrio, a 33-year veteran of IBM, stopped off in Dublin on his way to London, where today he presents the third annual Turing Lecture.
Sponsored by the Institution of Electrical Engineers and the British Computer Society, the lecture is named in honour of British mathematics and cryptography pioneer Mr Alan Turing, who cracked the German's top secret Enigma coded messaging system during the second World War.
