Balancing the technological needs of the research and education community is a task Internet2 has been successfully completing for the last 20 years. Achieving balance is also the aim of Internet2's Gender Diversity Initiative (GDI). Through community scholarships, mentoring opportunities, and enhanced awareness, the GDI is leading a discussion about balanced gender representation in the technology workplace. At Internet2's recent 20th anniversary Global Summit, Laurie Burns McRobbie and Marla Meehl hosted a panel about the place of male advocates in the effort to achieve gender parity. McRobbie is adjunct faculty for the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, and Meehl is networking manager for the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.

Google, which two years ago publicly addressed the gender and racial imbalance in the tech industry by disclosing the demographics of its workforce, says it's making slow progress in diversifying its staff, which is still mostly made up of white and Asian men. Women made up 31% of Google employees in 2015, up one percentage point since 2014, according to statistics released by the Internet giant on Thursday. One in five technical hires were women in 2015, raising the number of women in technical roles to 19% from 18% in 2014 and 17% in 2013. In 2015, women held nearly a quarter of leadership posts at Google, up from 22% in 2014 and 21% in 2013. Google says it's also hiring more black and Hispanic workers.

In the last two years, diversity practices at major Silicon Valley tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter have been held under a microscope. The big question everyone seems to be asking is ''Why are these companies overwhelmingly made up of white men and what can be done to cultivate more diverse talent?''

The Ars Electronica Festival for Art, Technology and Society is a gathering of artists, scientists and technologists, offering a setting for experimentation, evaluation and reinvention.

The latest policy update from NASBE outlines what states need to consider as they adopt standards for computer science instruction, highlighting several promising efforts.

New analysis of the gender-pay gap in tech unearths some hidden inequities and some surprising steps forward. Comparably, a platform that provides anonymous data on compensation and insights into work culture did an analysis of the self-reported salaries of 10,000 workers in the tech industry. Using algorithms to detect and remove false reports, Comparably's researchers averaged the compensation data for all the jobs they have in tech, and broke it down by gender. They then broke the data out by education level, ethnicity, location, department, and age.

Google has launched a program to give students in computer science and related courses at accredited U.S. universities free access to all of the company's Cloud Platform products. The new Google Cloud Platform Education Grants program will give college students an opportunity to use the same tools and infrastructure available to enterprises to build and test cloud applications.

One of NCWIT's most popular reports has been updated for 2015-16. See what's changed and what hasn't. Women in Tech: The Facts brings together the latest findings from recent research on technical women including the current state of affairs for technical women, a summary of the key barriers to women's participation in technology, promising practices for addressing these barriers, and tools to support your organization's change efforts.

Need a dose of insight? Listen to Girls Who Code founder and CEO Reshma Saujani offer a creative solution to encourage young women to make bold decisions in her inspiring TED Talk.

Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg is in Washington this week, meeting with politicians and speaking about bias at Facebook, immigration and women in the workplace.