A look back at some women who have made strides in technology this year - from taking top positions at companies, to encouraging other women to adopt a career in the field - and salute Marissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg, Virginia Rometty, Neelie Kroes and Louise Phelan.

It comes as no surprise that Google, Facebook, Twitter and a host of digital ad-tech and data firms are hiring data scientists. But as consumer data proliferates, companies including Unilever, General Mills and Wyndham are also recruiting people with mathematics, economics, statistics and computer-science degrees to wrangle a growing flood of consumer data.

Researchers have previously demonstrated that approximately half of the pay gap between men and women (women earn about 20% less) is due to women having a tendency to work in different occupations and industries than men, a phenomenon called gender segregation. But what causes this gender segregation? Wharton management professor Matthew Bidwell and Roxana Barbulescu, a management professor at McGill University in Montreal, decided to find out and what they uncovered is that negative employer behavior isn't the only cause of gender segregation. How women view the employment landscape even before starting the job application process can lead them to choose different jobs than their male counterparts, thus further promoting gender segregation.

Women are underrepresented in science in general, but the gender gap is bigger in some fields than others: physics, for instance, has a much lower percentage of women than biology. Researchers decided to ask scientists themselves why they thought this was - and male and female scientists turned out to have pretty different ideas.

An unusual job paradox has occurred in the United States. The U.S. continues to face high unemployment rates (7.8% as of September 2012) yet American companies cannot find enough workers to fill all the available STEM positions. According to the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy research organization based in Washington DC, “American companies urgently need professionals trained in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, but there are not enough workers with the necessary skills and too few Americans earn post-secondary STEM credentials.” How can companies bridge the gap and be able to fill all those available STEM jobs? Microsoft is an example of one company not only seeking today’s answers, they are looking into the future and focusing on the group believed to be a key solution: Women.

Silicon Valley is figuring out the single most vexing problem for ambitious working women: how to spend time with their children without ruining their careers. In an extract from the book The End Of Men, female executives at such as Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg reveal how they make it work.

In the first study of its kind, researchers have found that numbers of women in the science, technology and innovation fields are alarmingly low in the world's leading economies, and are actually on the decline in others, including the United States. The study maps the opportunities and obstacles faced by women in science across the US, EU, Brazil, South Africa, India, Korea and Indonesia. It was conducted by experts in international gender, science and technology issues from Women in Global Science & Technology and the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World, and funded by the Elsevier Foundation. Despite efforts by many of these countries to give women greater access to science and technology education, research shows negative results, particularly in the areas of engineering, physics and computer science. Women remain severely under-represented in degree programs for these fields - less than 30% in most countries. In addition, the numbers of women actually working in these fields are declining across the board. Even in countries where the numbers of women studying science and technology have increased, it has not translated into more women in the workplace.

Science professors at American universities widely regard female undergraduates as less competent than male students with the same accomplishments and skills, a new study by researchers at Yale concluded. Information given to professors describing a recent graduate looking for a laboratory manager position. When the name of the applicant was changed from Jennifer to John, professors regarded the applicant as more competent.As a result, the report found, the professors were less likely to offer the women mentoring or a job. And even if they were willing to offer a job, the salary was lower. The bias was pervasive, the scientists said, and probably reflected subconscious cultural influences rather than overt or deliberate discrimination.

As the burgeoning tech industry continues to do its part to create jobs in a struggling U.S. economy, a major portion of the population has been mostly left out of the tech boom. Despite playing an early role in tech's expansion in the 1990s, women are currently a noted minority in the industry -- an issue that must be addressed immediately. Although technology jobs are predicted to grow faster than all other jobs in the next decade -- up to 22 percent, according to National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) -- the field has historically lagged behind when it comes to equal gender representation. Women aren't studying tech, and those already in the industry are leaving.

Women have always been a minority group in information technology, from university halls where they're outnumbered four to one by their male counterparts, all the way to the executive suite where female CIOs are thinly scattered amidst a sea of ties. Some techie women rail against a culture they say is passively unwelcoming to females and nudges them towards less technical roles or out of the industry entirely. The sheer imbalance in numbers - women make up 52 per cent of the population but only 18 per cent of the ICT workforce, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics figures - is rarely highlighted as sharply as at a hardcore computing conference.