A look at the role women have played in technology, getting to know some of our most inspirational women in the field, and thoughts on where women will continue to participate in social, mobile and gaming.

Iowa State has made a point of promoting women in science and technology through the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) program, but the Williams sisters have taken that a step further. More specifically, they went to the White House. Cassidy and Camryn Williams, a junior and a freshman respectively, were invited to be two of the 10 women at the Tech Inclusion Summit. Their presence was on behalf of the National Center for Women and Information Technology, an organization that they stayed involved with after each winning the organization’s Aspirations Award in high school

Kellan Elliott-McCrea, a former architect at Flickr and co-author of the OAuth spec, is now the CTO at Etsy, the world's most vibrant handmade marketplace. During his tenure, he’s played a critical role in the company’s restructuring of its engineering organization; now, Etsy hires for diversity, particularly gender diversity. After witnessing first-hand how challenging it can be to attract women engineers, Kellan shares lessons in building a process and culture to attract female engineers. Etsy’s decision to pursue women engineers is indicative of a broader change: making diversity a core value.

Did you know than when a company's male CEO becomes a father, particularly if his first-born is a girl, his employees' pay goes up? New research studying 18,000 male CEOs in Denmark found that when a male chief executive had a baby, particularly if it was a daughter, employee wages rose (particularly female employee wages): male employees’ salaries went up .6%, and female employees' salaries went up 1.1%. Even when the CEO had a son (which, interestingly, was tied to shrinking salaries among employees,) female employees' salaries shrank less. And when the executive’s first child was a son, female employees’ salaries actually went up by .8%.

Academic institutions are churning out ever-more female graduates. But the very skills that propel women to the top of the class in school are earning us middle-of the-pack marks in the workplace. Indeed, a recent study found that women account for 51.4% of middle managers in the U.S. but only 4.2% of Fortune 500 CEO's. Based on our experience, the CEO statistics will continue to improve, but only incrementally, until women recognize that the boardroom is not the schoolroom. To be successful, we must now do the very thing we were always taught not to: be disruptive.

Nechama Kenig, a pedagogical coordinator on World ORT’s Kadima Mada team in Israel, examines the obstacles in the way of women who want to pursue careers in science and technology and the need to encourage girls to pursue and excel in these subjects while at school in an article for eJewish Philanthropy. It is a topic close to her heart and one which she discussed at last year’s International Lion of Judah Conference in New York.

It's not how smart students are but how motivated they are and how they study that determines their growth in math achievement. That's the main finding of a new study that appears in the journal Child Development.

Despite the values of freedom and openness, the free culture movement’s gender balance is as skewed (or more so) as that of the computing culture from which it arose. Based on the collection and analysis of discourse on gender and sexism within this movement over a six-year period. I suggest three possible causes: some geek identities can be narrow and unappealing; open communities are especially susceptible to difficult people; and, the ideas of freedom and openness can be used to dismiss concerns and rationalize the gender gap as a matter of preference and choice.