Tech companies are competing for recruits and retention: same old, same old. What's new is their strategy - something other than on-site massages, nap rooms, and haircuts. Google, Facebook, Netflix, and most recently, Amazon, are now bragging about their generous family leave policies. Who would've thunk it? Companies have heard the message: today's top talent cares about work-life balance. But the devil's in the details. Which family leave model will actually attract and retain valued employees? Mark Zuckerberg's recent announcement of his intention to take two months of parental leave provides the crucial clue.

Venture capitalist Sharon Wienbar is taking the helm as chief executive of Hackbright Academy, a San Francisco computer engineering school whose mission is to bring more women into the tech industry. Ms. Wienbar, a partner at Scale Venture Partners since 2001, succeeds Hackbright co-founder and CEO David Phillips, who will become chairman of the school. The two met in 2014 when she was researching an article on how to hire more female engineers. The next day she offered to advise the school. In an interview, Ms. Wienbar said her venture capital experience will help the school grow by reaching beyond its San Francisco campus to serve more aspiring female software developers and companies looking for talented workers.

The position of women in tech is something Silicon Republic spend a lot of time discussing it. Through the Women Invent campaign, they aim to highlight inspiring women in technology - from the legendary Hedy Lamarr to modern inspirations like astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Techmums founder Sue Black. Silicon Republic is also the driving force behind Inspirefest, an international sci-tech festival that also aims to promote diversity in STEM. In 2013, just 26pc of computing jobs in the US were held by women while only 11pc of all engineers in the US were women. Less than 20pc of technical roles at Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter were held by women when this infographic was compiled, despite the fact that women are the lead adopters of technology. Read on for more statistics that may give you pause for thought.

In schools across America, there are 'Help Wanted' signs advertising jobs that desperately need to be filled. They're all for teaching positions in STEM fields - which have 100,000 open positions nationwide. 100Kin10 is a New York nonprofit trying to fill those roles. Its name reflects its goal: train and place 100,000 new STEM teachers by 2021.

Massive layoffs over the past year hit Microsoft particularly hard in one of its sorest spots: women. Microsoft attributes the change "to the restructuring of our phone hardware business." In other words: The company's $7.5 billion write-down of its Nokia acquisition led to jobs cuts where a higher percentage of the workers were women. "The workforce reductions resulting from the restructure of our phone hardware business...impacted factory and production facilities outside the U.S. that produce handsets and hardware," Gwen Houston, Microsoft Global Diversity and Inclusion general manager, wrote in a blog post. "This was the main cause of the decline in female representation at Microsoft."

Women have made strong advances in entrepreneurialism, an area of business long viewed as the domain of men. In fact, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the share of women-owned businesses increased 7 percentage points since 2007. As women continue to launch companies at increasing rates, it begs a question: What does it take to be a successful female entrepreneur? KPMG explores this topic in Women Entrepreneurs: Passion, Purpose and Perseverance, a recent survey of 200 female entrepreneurs from Inc. 5000 companies.
The key findings shed light on what propels women's success in business - and what could propel yours.

Christianne M.Corbett, American Association of University Women (AAUW) senior researcher and Catherine Hill, AAUW vice president of research, co-authored a paper based on their findings, titled "Solving the Equation: The Variables for Women's Success in Engineering and Computing," which Corbett discussed at a session at last month's Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference. Not surprisingly, the research revealed that women remain drastically underrepresented in the fields of engineering and computing, but Corbett's research also highlighted best practices and recommendations for increasing the proportion of women in STEM fields.

Twitter's head of engineering apologized Thursday night for his department's slow movement on diversity, two days after a former African-American engineering manager spoke out on the matter and blamed lack of diversity in engineering for the company's slowing user growth. Along with his apology, Alex Roetter, Twitter's senior vice president of engineering, announced a number of new practices Twitter will implement to more effectively move toward the inclusion and retention of women, Hispanics and African-Americans. "Twitter and our industry must make faster progress on the issue of diversity," Roetter said in a note published on Medium. "That requires people in leadership positions in technology to stand up, state it's a problem, set ambitious goals, and invest in solutions that move us forward."

So many of the ads for cybersecurity jobs, products, and services are filled with ominous voiceovers and images of pipes, binary code, and masked hackers. They portray working in cybersecurity as a career in the shadows, a field made up of secretive techies who toil through the night, fueled by Mountain Dew, relentlessly defending our networks from attacks and intrusions. An online search for 'cybersecurity jobs' returns job postings seeking candidates who possess an alphabet soup of certifications, 'ninjas' who like to 'work hard and play hard,' and militaristic calls for "cyberwarriors." These ads are certainly attention-grabbing. But ultimately, this one-dimensional portrayal is problematic, because they are only tailored to half the population: men.

Just less than one-third of American doctors are women, as are just more than one-third of American lawyers. Yet women make up just 10 percent of those working in information security. At a moment when computer security is receiving more attention than ever before, and as people become increasingly concerned about whether we are training enough security professionals to meet the growing demand, the lack of women in the field is especially striking - and concerning.