Glass has been, for decades, the proverbial barrier separating capable women from oak-paneled boardrooms. As many, including men, work to shatter it they should be aware of another proverbial material, not as transparent or delicate, standing in the ladies’ way: silicon. Silicon is the key element in tech devices. And tech devices, along with the start-ups behind them, are the zeitgeist. Tech start-ups have captured everyone's attention, from investors to policymakers to college sophomores. With companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook as the main job and wealth creators America has seen in the last decade that is no surprise. The United States needs jobs and wealth. That is what a new accelerator, Women Innovate Mobile, launching in New York is focused on.

Introducing Manuela Hutter, Interface Developer at Opera Software. Her profile is the first in a new Women in Tech series.

While job opportunities in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) professions may be plentiful, many teenagers are unwilling to pursue a long-term career in these fields due to the challenges they present. According to a new study conducted by ASQ, students in sixth through twelfth grade felt that careers as doctors and engineers would offer the most job opportunities upon graduating from college, but 67 percent were unsure if they would pursue these careers, due to the numerous challenges they present.

There's no denying that the FOSS community has many virtues, but gender equality doesn't seem to be one of them. Gender-related issues and tensions have plagued the FOSS world for as long as many of us can remember, and the problem has already been picked apart on these pages time, time and time again. Well guess what? It's still a problem -- at least, if recent discussion in the blogosphere is anything to go by.

A pioneering head of ICT shares some fantastic routes into teaching children code and computing.

Women continue to leave the UK ICT sector in disproportionate numbers, yet little research has documented this phenomenon. In contrast, the majority of existing studies in this area concentrate on women who remain in the ICT workplace. The Disappearing Women: Northwest ICT project reported in this paper focused on women who left the UK ICT sector and allowed their voices to be heard, telling how they had been overlooked and effectively silenced. Drawing on nine in-depth qualitative autobiographical interviews, we identify a typology of "disappearing women" from the ICT sector and several reasons for their decision to do so. The relevance of these findings for policy and practice is also discussed.

Awareness of gender as a central feature of all aspects of everyday life and society has become more and more widespread. Appropriately social sciences research is reflecting this increasing concern with gender, especially in the field of work and organization where this journal is focused. Gender, Work & Organization is the first journal to bring together a wide range of interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary research in this field into a new international forum for debate and analysis. Contributions are invited from all disciplinary perspectives including anthropology, history, labour economics, law, philosophy, politics, psychology, and sociology.

Until just a few years ago, CIOs have largely been defined by how well they could deliver products or solutions to their core customer, the business user. However, as the cloud emerges as a truly viable alternative to IT, it has become clear that the transformative CIO must rethink the entire IT paradigm and evolve his or her organization into one that delivers competitive services to the business.

More often than not, when we hear about hot tech companies, all the founders are male (see: Google, Facebook, Twitter and Zynga). But in an effort to change that profile, a new funding source is targeting companies founded by women. Kelly Hoey thinks a lot of investors may be missing some good business opportunities because they aren't coming from someone who looks like the next Mark Zuckerberg.

The importance of science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM as it’s commonly known, can’t be underestimated in preparing students for an increasingly technological tomorrow. By 2018, the U.S. will have more than 1.2 million job openings in STEM-related fields according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Regretfully, there is likely to be a significant shortage of qualified college graduates to fill them. Consequently, Microsoft has established several initiatives to help improve student skills in STEM and to encourage youth to pursue careers in the technology industry.