A $3.5 million grant for UMass Lowell will fund a new initiative that aims to remove barriers for women in science, technology, engineering and math. The new initiative, called Making WAVES, comes thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation. The program is designed to help universities estabilsh a supportive environment for female faculty and faculty from other underrepresented populations. A UMass Lowell team of faculty researchers will develop new approaches to prevent microaggression and subtle biases that could discourage women from succeeding in a STEM environment.

Last week the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), one of the nation's largest biomedical research charities, offered news about two programs intended to help early-career scientists. One press release announced a new effort to create a more diverse biomedical research workforce through fellowships to postdoctoral students who are black, Latino, or from other underrepresented groups. The other named 84 young faculty members who had just won a prestigious grant aimed at bolstering the next generation of scientific superstars. The timing of the two statements from the Bethesda, Maryland, nonprofit was coincidental. Put side-by-side, however, they unintentionally highlighted the continuing difficulties that the biomedical research community faces in diversifying-both its demographic makeup and also the mix of institutions that tend to win a lion's share of prestigious awards.

The 46th Annual Frontiers in Education (FIE) Conference is a major international conference focusing on educational innovations and research in engineering and computing education. We welcome submissions related to educational issues in electrical and computer engineering, energy engineering, software engineering, computing and informatics, engineering design, and in other engineering disciplines. FIE 2016 continues a long tradition of disseminating results in these areas.

Girls Who Code, an organization that connects girls with coding classes, is launching its own social network to give its students, alumni, and teachers a way to connect both during and once the program is over. Think of it as the equivalent of a newfangled old-boys club. The app is called the Girls Who Code Loop and it operates much like Reddit. Users join different loops or discussion threads based on their interests. Some Loops include Android developer, iOS developer, or jobs and internships. The main purpose of the app is to not only help women and girls in tech develop a community, but also get them to form and engage in local events like meetups. It's also devised to help them feel less isolated as they move through college and ultimately into the workforce.

It's no secret that boardrooms need more women. Only one in five board members of companies in the S&P 500, a leading stock market index, are women, according to a 2015 study by Catalyst, a non-profit organisation focused on accelerating women's progress in the workplace. But new Accenture research points to an opportunity: many women who have succeeded in getting on boards have professional technology experience to help propel them. In fact, female directors are nearly twice as likely as their male counterparts to have professional technology experience. The purpose of the research - in which Accenture examined women's representation on the boards of more than 500 Forbes Global 2000 companies in 39 countries across five continents - was to understand the gender composition of corporate boards and the role technology plays in the careers of female board members. The research found that 16 per cent of female directors, compared with 9 per cent of male directors, have professional technology experience.

As the lead federal agency responsible for building the research knowledge base for Computer Science (CS) education, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is pleased to announce more than $25 million in awards since the administration's CS for All initiative launched just seven months ago. These new awards accelerate NSF's ongoing efforts to enable rigorous and engaging CS education in schools across the nation by funding: Creation of, and research and evaluation on, scalable professional development for teachers ofExploring Computer Science, Advanced Placement (AP) CS Principles, and other instructional approaches; Development, piloting, and study of the effectiveness of instructional materials on computational thinking and computing for use in pre-K through 8th-grade education; Establishment of best practices for ensuring equity in CS education; Research on mechanisms for implementing CS education, including CS for All and Support for teachers newly prepared to teach computer science, such as coaching, mentoring, master teacher corps and online communities of practice.

Women are making major gains in enrollment in engineering and computer science at some of the nation's most prominent colleges and universities, a breakthrough that shows that gender parity is possible in technology fields long dominated by men. More than half of engineering bachelor's degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology went to women in 2015, federal data shows. The same was true at Dartmouth College this year. The majority of computer science majors at California's Harvey Mudd College are women. Here at Carnegie Mellon University, women account for nearly half of first-year computer science students - 48 percent, a school record.

The research uses data from the National Center for Education Statistics' Beginning Postsecondary Students longitudinal survey, which tracks a cohort of students for six years after they start college. The study examines trends for STEM fields, where women are severely underrepresented in disciplines such as engineering, physics and computer sciences, along with fields such as life and social sciences, which have higher concentrations of women.

Enrollment among female students in Carnegie Mellon's engineering and computer science programs is at its highest point ever, with the ratios for both at more than twice the national average. Carnegie Mellon's incoming computer science class is 48 percent female - in contrast, just 16.5 percent of undergraduates in 121 computer science programs across the country in 2015 were women, according to the Computing Research Association's annual Taulbee Survey.

SAN FRANCISCO - Business software company Salesforce.com will name a chief equality officer who will report to CEO Marc Benioff, who called on the tech industry to strive for ''greater racial equality.'' The announcement, made by Benioff during an onstage interview at the annual TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, reflects the increasing emphasis being placed on diversity efforts in the Silicon Valley executive suite. Benioff, a well-known philanthropist, is an influential leader in Silicon Valley.