Adjectives used to describe potential candidates in awards solicitations and nominees in letters of recommendation can influence perceptions about what an award winner should “look like”. When awards solicitations contain male-associated words, for example, women are less likely to consider themselves eligible for the award, and are less likely to be nominated. Similarly, letters of recommendation for men are typically longer and include more ability, standout, and research words; while letters for women are shorter and contain more teaching and grindstone words, in addition to references to personal attributes.

Despite all the complaints about the glass ceiling, the United States is actually doing a relatively good job of getting women into high-achieving jobs. Other developed countries have much more family-friendly labor policies than the United States does. The United States is one of only a handful of countries in the world (rich or poor) that do not offer paid maternity leave, for example. And while prominent American companies like Yahoo and Best Buy are banning work-from-home arrangements, European Union countries have legislated that parents can request part-time, flexible or telecommuting arrangements without penalty. In some countries, employers are not allowed to say no to these requests, and in places where they can, there’s often a pretty involved process required to justify the refusal. Some places, like Germany and Spain, also require companies to keep a job open for an employee on parental leave for as long as three years.

Diversity training programs lead people to believe that work environments are fair even when given evidence of hiring, promotion or salary inequities, according to new findings by psychologists at the University of Washington and other universities. The study also revealed that participants, all of whom were white, were less likely to take discrimination complaints seriously against companies who had diversity programs. Workplace diversity programs are usually developed by human resource departments to foster a more inclusive environment for employees, but aren’t typically tested for their effectiveness. Nonetheless, their existence has been used in courtrooms as evidence that companies treat employees fairly.

It might be the most fool-proof argument for ending the disparity between men and women in the boardroom: A new study finds that women just might run a company better. The study, published in the International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics, surveyed 600 board directors (75% of them were male) and found some striking differences between the way men and women make decisions in corporate settings: the men opted to make decisions based on tradition, rules, and regulations, while the women tended to shirk tradition, consider the interests of all stakeholders, cooperate, and be more inquisitive.

A scientist's gender can have a big impact on how other researchers perceive his or her work, according to a new study. Young scholars rated publications supposedly written by male scientists as higher quality than identical work identified with female authors. The research found that graduate students in communication - both men and women - showed significant bias against study abstracts they read whose authors had female names.

Riding the tailwinds of the “lean in” movement, Chelsea Clinton and a panel of female tech entrepreneurs urged the Women in the World audience to encourage more girls to study computer science - and take over Silicon Valley.

Women do better in situations with “low structural ambiguity”: where there is more information and lower uncertainty about the potential salary range and appropriate norms for negotiation. Linda Babcock herself, the author of the studies that gave rise to the “women don’t ask” industry, has shown that women don’t negotiate for a very simple reason: they sense correctly that it will hurt them if they do. Babcock and her colleagues found that women don’t negotiate their initial salaries as much as men. No doubt you’ve heard that. This finding has received a wild amount of coverage in the press. What you probably haven’t heard is what happens when women do negotiate. Often, they end up worse off than if they’d kept their mouths shut.

Last month, news broke that Etsy increased their female engineer base by nearly 500 percent by changing the way they recruit and develop their female talent. This sort of triple-digit improvement, in less than a year, reimagines a industry previously flanked by a supply problem on the one hand and a well-documented “brogrammer” culture on the other. Now boasting an industry-leading 20 female engineers on a team of 110, Etsy’s move to a “Hacker School” model and away from traditional headhunting and pure interview-based evaluations has sent a strong signal to other technology-driven companies: it can be done.

According to Women 2.0, private tech companies with female executives achieve a 35% higher return on investment. Further, when these companies are backed by venture, female leaders bring in 12% more revenue than their male counterparts. Fiscal responsibility isn’t the only asset female leaders bring to startups: Based on a 2012 report by Harvard Business Review, survey results show that “at all levels, women are rated higher in 12 of the 16 competencies that go into outstanding leadership.

Host Melissa Harris-Perry was joined by an all-female panel to discuss S.T.E.M. (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and its relationship to girls. They addressed how important each of the S.T.E.M. fields are in promoting self-esteem and nourishing potential, as well as in eliminating negative stereotypes for women.