Newly released data shows that women-founded startups raised just 1% of investment in Central and Eastern Europe. 5% went to mixed-gender founding teams, while all-men teams raised 94%. Commissioned by European Women in VC, Experior VC, and Unconventional VC, Funding in the CEE region – through the lens of gender diversity and impact highlights venture capital allocations and leadership, as well as performance of women-led startups in CEE. “As a young and dynamic ecosystem, CEE has the opportunity to learn from the successes and slip ups of established hubs, and leverage the untapped potential and returns of building diverse and inclusive founder communities. There’s a very long way to go, but we hope that with transparency, open conversation and radical action, we can reach it together. These findings give us the starting point, and the first step on the journey,” says Thea Messel and Nora Bavey, General Partners at Unconventional Ventures. The report brings a fresh perspective on the venture capital market in the CEE region, with a gender lens. While female founders are still a minority, and they get just a fraction of the capital men get, women founders perform much better when looking at the revenue to funding ratio. In capital productivity, women outperform men by as much as 96%.

Higher education pipeline suggests long path ahead for increasing diversity, especially in fields like computing and engineering. Black and Hispanic workers remain underrepresented in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) workforce compared with their share of all workers, including in computing jobs, which have seen considerable growth in recent years. The representation of women varies widely across STEM occupations. Women make up a large majority of all workers in health-related jobs, but remain underrepresented in other job clusters, such as the physical sciences, computing and engineering. Current trends in STEM degree attainment appear unlikely to substantially narrow these gaps, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of federal employment and education data. Black and Hispanic adults are less likely to earn degrees in STEM than other degree fields, and they continue to make up a lower share of STEM graduates relative to their share of the adult population. And while women now earn a majority of all undergraduate and advanced degrees, they remain a small share of degree earners in fields like engineering and computer science – areas where they are significantly underrepresented in the work force.

This March, as many women across the country still grapple with the impact COVID-19 has had upon the workforce within the past year, a new study revealed the devastating effects the pandemic has had on women in the tech workforce. It comes as no surprise that women in male-dominated careers are already at a stark disadvantage when it comes to securing equal pay and opportunities as their male counterparts. In fact, as we observed Equal Pay Day this month, a day that symbolizes how far into the year women must work in order to earn as much as their male colleagues did the year before, it is as blatantly evident that we are far from making the progress needed to close the gap. In an effort to shed light on gender disparities that are rampant within the workforce, Girls in Tech, a global nonprofit that works towards erasing the gender gap in tech, conducted a survey among their members nationwide on how they have been coping during the pandemic. The organization released their findings in their 2021 study, “The Tech Workplace for Women in the Pandemic” which unearthed an alarmingly high rate of burnout among working women with male bosses.

The 2021 vNCWIT Summit is free and open to the public. Get ready for conversations, Q&As, on-demand videos, and more! Connect with educators, entrepreneurs, corporate executives, and social scientists from across industries and disciplines. Fully immerse yourself in research-based recommendations and peer-to-peer discussions to further your efforts in creating inclusive cultures.

Over a third (38%) of women working in the IT and tech industry claim that a lack of females in the sector made them wary of entering the profession, according to Kaspersky’s latest Women in Tech report, Where are we now? Understanding the evolution of women in technology. Highlighting the importance of role models in the quest for gender diversity in the technology industry, the research also found that only 19% of women currently working in the sector were encouraged to take up a role in IT or technology by a female role model. The research, involving 13,000 men and women working in IT, found that almost half of women (43%) had to find their role through their own research. A further third (33%) were encouraged into tech during their education thanks to their school, college or university. These results show early signs of change at the grassroots stage, but that a current lack of female representation is still a key barrier to achieving a diverse workforce.

Dr. Barbara Ryder, J. Byron Maupin Professor Emerita of Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, has been named the recipient of the 2021 Harrold and Notkin Research and Graduate Mentoring Award. The award, sponsored by the NCWIT Board of Directors, recognizes faculty members from non-profit institutions who distinguish themselves with outstanding research and excellent graduate mentoring, as well as those who recruit, encourage, and promote women and minorities in computing fields. It is bestowed in memory of Mary Jean Harrold and David Notkin, in honor of their outstanding research, graduate mentoring, and diversity contributions.

Considering the crucial role Katherine Johnson played in helping humankind reach space, it’s only fitting that a space craft would finally be named after her. Northrop Grumman has announced that it will name its new NG-15 Cygnus spacecraft after the legendary NASA mathematician. The ship, which will bear the name the SS Katherine Johnson, will be used for an upcoming cargo delivery mission to the International Space Station. Johnson, who passed away last February at the age of 101, spent 33 years working at NASA as a mathematician. During her time at the space agency, her calculations of orbital mechanics - including trajectories, launch windows, and emergency return and rendezvous paths - were vital to the success of the first crewed space flights. Her work was so trusted that astronaut John Glenn requested that she double check the computer’s calculations by hand before he became the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962. Johnson’s story - along with those of Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughn, two other female African-American mathematicians working at NASA at the same time - was the basis for 2016 film Hidden Figures, in which she was portrayed by Taraji P. Henson. In 2015, Johnson was awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.

AnitaB.org, The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), and the STARS Computing Corps (STARS) are conducting a survey to understand the impact of the global pandemic on the conditions of work and educational environments related to computing and technical degree programs and professions. Through the Investigating Compounding Impacts of Racism & COVID-19 on Learning & Employment in Computing & Technology (CIRCLE-CT) Study, we are gathering responses from individuals across the computing and technical ecosystem including K-12 teachers; post-secondary program leaders, educators and students; and individuals in the computing and technical workforce and tech startup communities. Individuals who are at least 18 years old are eligible to participate.

SWE Scholarships support those who identify as a female/woman and are pursuing an ABET-accredited bachelor or graduate student program in preparation for careers in engineering, engineering technology and computer science globally. In 2020, SWE disbursed nearly 260 new and renewed scholarships valued at more than $1,000,000! Applicants complete one application and are considered for all scholarships for which they are eligible.

In the early days of the pandemic, while patients in nursing homes were dying at an alarming rate, geriatric nurse practitioner Ashley Ritter was plagued by the same uncertainty around Covid-19 as the rest of us. Her patients at NewCourtland Services in Germantown had questions about this terrifying new illness; her colleagues at Penn had questions; her family and friends wanted answers. But mostly, she found what the rest of us did: Bits and pieces of science, mixed in with a lot of theory, panic and unproven advice. One source Ritter kept coming back to, though, was the Twitter feed of a colleague at the University of Pennsylvania, Alison Buttenheim, a behavioral scientist who specializes in infectious disease prevention and whose tweets shared the best science-backed information out there at the time. So Ritter, Buttenheim and Malia Jones, an epidemiologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, started a Facebook page called Dear Pandemic, a source for easy-to-understand, science-backed Covid information written by a volunteer team of 12 women scientists from around the country and England, including five in Philly. The scientists call themselves “Those Nerdy Girls” and hail from a variety of research fields - epidemiology, immunology, mental health, demography, population science, behavioral science. Like Ritter, 11 of the 12 women have PhDs; three are also nurse practitioners; one is a medical doctor. Many were recruited by Ritter in the early days, as the initial group tried to find experts to answer particular questions and to keep up with the frenetic pace of information needing to be shared.