A year after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella backpedaled from a gaffe at a women's tech conference and announced a major employee diversity push, Microsoft reported in November that roles for women in its tech positions had actually gone down. At the same time, roles for African Americans and Latinos had barely budged, with them holding just over 6% of tech jobs at the company. Results for other major technology firms, despite their public pledges, aren't much better. Which can lead to the question: Is all this talk of diversity just empty words?

Tech industry leaders are constantly talking about the so-called ''pipeline problem.'' On corporate stages and at academic conferences, CEOs and activists pledge their commitment to ''fixing the pipeline for STEM'' - the acronym for science, technology, engineering, and math - by which they mean they want to get more young women and people of color into the coursework (and, ideally, the internships) that will eventually turn them into attractive job candidates for tech companies.

Technology is a fast-growing, high-paying, creative field. Here are 10 ways that you, as a family member, can encourage the girls in your life to study, and have a career in, computer science and related technology fields.

A link to the list of books promoting computer science for elementary, middle and high school children.

The documentary that follows the 2015 Technovation Challenge, in which girls from all over the world code mobile apps to address problems in their communities.

Since the 1980s, there has been robust real-world evidence of a preference for hiring women for entry-level professorships in science, engineering, technology and math (STEM). This evidence comes from hiring audits at universities. For instance, in one audit of 89 US research universities in the 1990s, women were far less likely to apply for professorships - only 11% - 26% of applicants were women. But once they applied, women were more likely to be invited to interview and offered the job than men were.

You can often tell much about how seriously a company regards a new strategy or initiative by whether or not someone's compensation is tied to its success. Erica Lockheimer, Linked's director of engineering growth and women in tech, somewhat casually mentioned that 20% of time - and therefore a portion of her salary and bonus - is tied to the social media company's overall diversity goals.

In 2012, an experiment on gender bias shook the scientific community by showing that science faculty favor male college graduates over equally qualified women applying for lab manager positions. Though the study was rigorous, many didn't believe it. 'This report is JUNK science. There is no data here,' said one online commenter. Others justified the bias saying, 'In every competitive situation, with a few exceptions, the women I worked with were NOT competent.' Now, a study published in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) provides crucial clues about why some people were critical of the original finding - and other studies that have followed. The new study's authors reasoned that men especially might devalue the evidence because it threatens the legitimacy of their status in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Men might also be critical because of prior beliefs that gender bias is not a problem in STEM.

Some businesses believe that voicing support isn't enough. They also have to set discrete goals. When bonus time rolls around at Johnson & Johnson, top managers are evaluated on revenue, profits and other metrics. This year, their payout will be partly determined by a new set of numbers: diversity metrics, including how many women they hired in the past year. Realizing that simply voicing support for diversity initiatives won't lead to meaningful change, big companies are setting discrete goals for hiring and retaining women. These include mandating that diverse candidates are interviewed for jobs, and ensuring that new hires get interviewed or vetted by someone other than white men.

Despite support at the top, gender equality is a long way off at most U.S. companies. A study by Lean In and McKinsey reveals why - and what employees and companies can do about it. A new LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Co. study on Women in the Workplace finds that corporate diversity initiatives aren't helping women break the glass ceiling. WSJ's Shelby Holliday takes a closer look at the reasons why and other key takeaways from the data.