One of the most powerful tools for fighting gender disparity across the tech industry is education. Girls in Tech is on a mission to provide access to as many girls and women around the world as possible. One way we do this is through our Global Classroom program, an eight-week virtual coding class that's free for all those who attend. Global Classroom 2017 is currently underway - and we're thrilled to report we're receiving phenomenal feedback from the 350 participants! The program kicked off on April 10. The goal for this session: teach women how to build a website with WordPress.

According to a report from Accenture and Girls Who Code, women in the computing workforce will shrink in the next 10 years unless immediate action is taken, and there has already been a huge 37 percent drop of women in tech since 1995. What exactly is causing the rates of women in the tech industry to fall? A skills shortage will begin to damage the economy. There were 500,000 new computing jobs in the US in 2015, but there were fewer than 40,000 new computer science graduates. As a result, a call to action has been identified to triple the number of women in computing by 2025. The report, aptly named Cracking the Gender Code, recommends what needs to be done to spark interest in tech in girls throughout their school years.

Every little girl's favorite badass action figure is back: there's now a Goldie Blox book series! Goldie Blox is the super-smart engineer figurehead of the GoldieBlox toy company, which produce ''toys for future engineers'' predominantly marketed at girls. In 2014, she became an action figure - armed with a tool belt and red converse, in place of the pink dresses and high heels usually seen on toys aimed at young girls. Now, Goldie Blox is the heroine of a whole book series.

The conference is on track to exceed 1,300 attendees converging in Silicon Valley to build strategic connections and learn from senior female leaders about impactful ways to advance women's careers in the technology industry.

In the wake of recent news about how female Facebook engineers received dramatically more code rejections than their male peers, Fortune reached out to the Anita Borg Institute's Elizabeth Ames for suggestions on how tech companies can better address gender disparity in the workplace. The Anita Borg Institute's Top Companies for Women Technologists is just one of many resources companies can use to retain and advance more women in tech. Top Companies lets companies benchmark their current successes, offers a framework for measurable improvement, and recognizes workplaces where women technologists thrive. Applications to take part in this program are open until May 10; it's not too late to join this important measurement effort.

Girls rank themselves less competent in math than boys, even when getting the same grades Girls are more likely to pursue math careers if they are confident in their ability to do the toughest problems in the book, a new study shows. A girl's decision to take more classes in math or computer science may depend on whether she feels up to the challenge. But her confidence in her abilities may be lower than it should be. Even when male and female high school students receive the same math grades, girls tend to feel they are less competent than boys, a new study shows. And that may affect her choice to pursue science - or not.

Next time you find yourself watching a panel of experts discussing the latest in technology, finance, engineering, math or science, ask yourself: Am I looking at a sea of men? Most likely, the answer is yes. Spotting a woman on a tech panel often feels like a game of Where's Waldo?. Majority-male panels are nearly ubiquitous in the tech industry - inspiring the blog Congrats, You Have an All-Male Panel!, a game of Female Conference Speaker Bingo and even a cute portmanteau, ''manel.'' In March, Goldman Sachs hosted a two-day technology conference in which 93% of the speakers were men. In January 2016, Davos hosted an all-male panel on women's equality (the woman pictured was the moderator). In April 2016, PayPal held another all-male panel on gender equality. At Business Insider's Ignition 2016 conference, a panel on smart bots included exclusively male panelists.

Facebook is disputing a former employee's analysis that female engineers have their code rejected 35% more than male engineers, telling employees internally that leaking such information damages its ''recruiting brand'' and makes it harder for the company to hire women. The original analysis, first reported by the Wall Street Journal and independently confirmed by the Guardian, was conducted by a longtime Facebook software engineer last year. The engineer studied the company's code review process, looking at the number of times code was rejected, commented upon, or updated; how long it took for code to be accepted; and demographic data about the coder, such as gender and length of employment.

Houston doctors are among the highest paid in the United States, but women physicians doing the exact same jobs make an average of $106,000 less per year than men. That translates to just 71 cents to their white-coated male colleagues' dollar - one of the biggest medical pay gaps in the nation, a national study of physician compensation found. In a city known to attract some of the brightest medical minds in the country, Houston is tied for the fourth-worst gender disparity for doctors, according to findings released Wednesday by Doximity, a San Francisco-based medical profession social media network. The group analyzed 36,000 full-time physician salaries across 48 medical specialties in 50 major metro areas. Nationally, women physicians earn on average $91,284 less than men in the same specialty, or a 27 percent lower salary. In Houston, it is $106,000, or 29 percent less.

APRIL 25, 2017 - Early Monday morning, NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson set a new record for the longest time in space for any US astronaut, hitting a landmark 534 cumulative days in orbit. Fellow astronaut Jeff Williams set the previous record only last year. Dr. Whitson will continue to extend the new record for the duration of her stay as current commander on the International Space Station, ultimately to more than 650 cumulative days, setting a high bar for those looking to break her record.