The evidence is clear: A more diverse workforce leads to higher revenues and more creative teams. But despite funnelling millions of dollars into well-intentioned diversity initiatives, white men remain overrepresented in the industry compared to the private sector as a whole. The issue is difficult to address for a variety of reasons, including the fact that ''the diversity problems of each race are different,'' Buck Gee, an executive advisor at the nonprofit Ascend, told TechRepublic. "In Silicon Valley for blacks and Hispanics, the basic problem is getting in the door. The problem with Asian Americans in Silicon Valley is upper mobility to management. You need different strategies for each race, and you can't just throw it in as a diversity program, because not all diversity programs are apt for all the races or genders.''

In 2016, Slack made headlines when their CEO, Stewart Butterfield, sent four black female engineers to accept TechCrunch's award for fastest-rising startup. Foregoing the stage himself, Butterfield was lauded for celebrating diversity in tech. What few people heard, however, is that Butterfield hadn't asked those women to accept the award - that was orchestrated by Erica Joy Baker, then a senior engineer at Slack, and one of the women on stage that night. This is just one of the highly successful efforts Baker has made to promote women and people of color in tech. As one of the few black female leaders in her industry - she's now the senior engineering manager at crowdfunding platform Patreon - she is unafraid to attack the status quo.

UCLA duo aims to make the next generation of programmers and coders more diverse. Jane Margolis, senior researcher at UCLA's Center X, brings her firsthand experience of inequities in a technical field to her work on bringing computer science education to all students. Margolis emphasizes that her work around computer science has always been about inequality and how fields become segregated. As a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in the mid-1990s, she was asked to conduct a research study on the lack of female students in what was one of the top computer science departments in the nation. Her findings resulted in her first book, ''Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing,'' which she co-wrote with Allan Fisher. Margolis' work led to more research funded by the National Science Foundation, on why so few African-Americans, Latinos and females were learning computer science in Los Angeles public high schools. The findings revealed the disparities in learning opportunities that fell along race and socio-economic lines, resulting in her second book, ''Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing,'' with she authored along with Rachel Estrella, Joanna Goode, Jennifer Jellison Holme and Kim Nao. In response to the findings, Margolis and colleagues founded the Exploring Computer Science curriculum and teacher professional development program, which is housed within UCLA Center X's Computer Science Project.

Businesses need to go beyond paying lip service to gender equality if we are to make meaningful change. The current 'MeToo' moment is a rare inflection point for women in society, as we find ourselves in a broad and potentially game-changing conversation about how women are faring in the workplace and beyond. Everyone - from investors, board members, business leaders and employees to customers and suppliers of businesses large and small - is aligned on the issue that the pace of change and the results are simply not acceptable. Despite the headlines and the hashtags, leaders and organizations are asking themselves the tough questions: ''Are we making progress or creating an echo chamber?'' When it comes to gender equality, the data remains stark, according to the World Economic Forum's 2017 Gender Gap Report, which captures the the magnitude of gender-based disparities across economies, education, health and political engagements.

Code.org has partnered with Alaska Airlines to offer free educational videos on how computers and the Internet work, Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi wrote in a blog post.. The video series, which stars Microsoft founder Bill Gates and other industry leaders, will be available beginning in April on Alaska Airlines flights. The series entails short lessons on binary and data, circuits and logic, CPU, memory, input and output, and hardware and software. The series is designed to be easy for everyone to understand, Partovi wrote. In addition to making them available on airlines, Code.org will integrate the videos into its middle and high school curriculum. They will also be available on Khan Academy, a startup that offers computer science education, and tools for parents and teachers.

The Student of Vision Abie Award honors young women dedicated to creating a future where the people who imagine and build technology mirror the people and societies for which they build. Undergraduate or graduate students may self-nominate for the Student of Vision Abie Award. All submitting participants must be 18 years or older on September 26, 2018. Recipients are honored by the technical women's community at the Grace Hopper Celebration. The award includes a prize of $7,000.

Last year's Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) was a huge success! 18,000 people from 81 different countries joined us in Orlando, Florida for three days of learning and networking, making this the biggest GHC yet. They also had over 800 speakers, all of whom are dedicated to shattering perceptions and supporting women in tech. And don't forget the hundreds of organizations that participated in our Career Fair and Expo. With so many great opportunities available, it's no wonder GHC earned a 95% approval rating from attendees.

The WiDS Datathon is a new feature of the WiDS conference for 2018, and will take place February 1-28, 2018. Winners will be announced at the WiDS Stanford conference on March 5, 2018. The WiDS Datathon is a joint effort with InterMedia Survey Institute, a grant recipient of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in their Financial Services for the Poor program, as well as Stanford ICME, Intuit, Kaggle, and West Big Data Innovation Hub. The data has been collected by InterMedia to alleviate global poverty by learning how to help the world's poorest people take advantage of widely available mobile phones and other digital technology to access financial tools and participate more fully in their local economies. InterMedia's Financial Inclusion Insights program includes annual nationally representative surveys on financial behaviors and attitudes in eight countries in Africa and Asia. This competition seeks to encourage women data scientists to engage in social impact solutions by participating in a predictive analytics challenge.

The Internet Association told lawmakers this week that its new campaign aims to ''improve diversity and inclusion in the tech industry.'' A key voice for Amazon, Facebook, Google and other tech giants in the nation's capital is kicking off a new initiative to try to diversify the industry's predominately white, male ranks. For years, Silicon Valley and other tech hotspots around the country have faced constant condemnation for failing to hire and retain employees from underrepresented groups. Among the critics is the Congressional Black Caucus, a powerful group of lawmakers that has even threatened regulation if tech doesn't make major changes. In response to that political pressure, a key lobbying group for the industry, the Internet Association, told lawmakers this week that it would create a new role to focus on those issues - and kick off a campaign that aims to ''improve diversity and inclusion in the tech industry.''

College-bound women are less likely to enter specific fields because of the gender discrimination they are likely to encounter in those fields, finds a new study published in the American Educational Research Journal by Joseph R. Cimpian. College-bound women are not less likely to enter specific fields because more math or science is required, but rather because of the gender discrimination they are likely to encounter in those fields, finds a new nationally representative longitudinal study published in the American Educational Research Journal. Women are often underrepresented in many science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors and some non-STEM majors, such as philosophy and criminal justice. Rather than dividing majors into STEM and non-STEM, this new study looks beyond the STEM/non-STEM dichotomy to understand the underlying attributes of majors that may attract or repel women - in an effort to learn how to achieve gender equity in all fields.