Learn how Top Companies for Women Technologists is encouraging organizations to promote diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

The entrepreneurship world has a new women's conference in Vanity Fair's Founders Fair. But are these events helpful for women in the industry? When Nancy Lublin and Caterina Fake, both CEOs of tech startups, agreed to speak at Vanity Fair's Founders Fair, they made a deal. If the moderator asked them about how they balance home life and work life, they'd walk off stage. Founders Fair, which took place Thursday in Brooklyn, New York, is the latest event geared toward women in entrepreneurship. As the industry laments how few women work in the field, let alone start businesses, these types of events have become a regular occurrence. There's debate about the effectiveness of women's conferences, though. Some question what the impacts are once attendees walk out the door. Others argue there's great merit in finding inspiration and even guidance in the stories of others. Regardless, women's conferences might just be a stopgap until other conferences include a broader range of attendees and speakers.

The percentage of startups that have at least one female founder was flat in the first quarter of 2017. Crunchbase's inaugural study on female founder representation of U.S.-based companies was published in May 2015. As the discussion on the lack of women in engineering teams gathered pace, we concluded that Crunchbase was uniquely placed to address the issue of women being represented in tech when it comes to founders. As the open data set for the startup community, we added gender to Crunchbase in March 2015 to further the research on leadership, founders and gender. Two years on, and with the expansion of the study to the global ecosystem, we revisit the same questions: What percent of companies have at least one female founder? Have those numbers shifted since 2009? How do female founder teams fare when raising seed, early and late-stage venture dollars?

Silicon Valley may be getting a kind of constitution of its own. Speaking before a crowd at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club on April 14, Sam Altman, president of startup accelerator Y Combinator, said he's spoken to hundreds of tech leaders and investors about creating a set of core values that all tech companies can get behind. There's a Google Doc where the big names in Silicon Valley, whom Altman would not reveal, have been drafting a statement that outlines the tech industry's position on a number of social, economic, and political issues. The document does not have a title or known release date.

Advanced Placement classes and exams, administered by the College Board have long been hailed as equalizers, allowing any high school student to engage in college level coursework and demonstrate content mastery if they so choose. However, the 2016 data on test performance reveals numerous disparities in test participation and performance among students from different backgrounds. HPR writers weigh in on the challenges facing education systems today, and what can be done to improve educational access and equity.

Uber was a start up just a few years ago. In 2009, two men, Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp, founded what would soon become one of the largest taxi services in the world. In recent weeks, they've faced a flood of users deleting their app due to evidence of rampant sexual harassment within the organization. Though all is not lost for Uber if they make serious changes to their company, it's much easier for companies to build in good practices when they're small, before they grow.Three researchers in Seattle recently led a study to find out more about the state of gender equity in their local startup industry. Though not quite as many companies are founded in Seattle as in San Francisco, where Uber is based, it's still one of the largest startup environments in the country. Their findings can be useful for most startup communities around the world looking for solutions to increasing diversity in their communities.

When it comes to mathematics, girls rate their abilities markedly lower than boys, even when there is no observable difference between the two, according to Florida State University researchers. ''The argument continues to be made that gender differences in the 'hard' sciences is all about ability,'' said Lara Perez-Felkner, assistant professor of higher education and sociology in the College of Education. ''But when we hold mathematics ability test scores constant, effectively taking it out of the equation, we see boys still rate their ability higher, and girls rate their ability lower.'' Perez-Felkner is the lead author of a study published today in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Doctoral students Samantha Nix and Kirby Thomas are co-authors of the study. The research team found perception gaps are even wider at the upper levels of mathematics ability - among those students with the most talent and potential in these fields. Boys are significantly more confident in challenging mathematics contexts than otherwise identically talented girls. Specifically, boys rated their ability 27 percent higher than girls did.

The issue of diversity and inclusion in tech is what designers call a wicked problem. It's a cluster of systemic and individual biases, compounded by years of denial, complicated by changing socioeconomic forces. Still, that's no excuse - especially since Silicon Valley prides itself on solving impossible problems, and given its exceptional influence in the business community and around the world. Diversity reporting is the tech community's most visible response to the underrepresentation of women and people of color. As the management cliche goes, ''what gets measured gets done.'' So acknowledging the problem is an important first step. After Google released its first diversity report in 2014, companies like Amazon, Pinterest, Facebook, and even my own company Atlassian followed. Since then, initiatives like Open Diversity Data, which tracks the diversity reporting of major tech companies, have called for others to do the same. In fact, new data shows that 30 percent of tech workers want their company to report diversity statistics if they don't already. But while external reporting was a great first step, we need to be more sophisticated about what we're measuring and how.

It's no secret that the technology field can be brutal to anyone who isn't a white male. New data shows just how those inequalities play out in today's tech workers' paychecks. Nearly two in three women receive lower salary offers than men for the same job at the same company, according to Hired, a job website that focuses on placing people in tech jobs such as software engineer, product manager or data scientist. That's slightly better than last year, when 69 percent of women received lower offers.

Women in technology continue to face obstacles in their careers, from unequal pay to harassment in the workplace. To learn more about how women are addressing these issue, Built in Chicago interviewed four women leaders in technology, including Tarsha McCormick, head of Diversity and Inclusion at ThoughtWorks. ''Over six years ago, ThoughtWorks decided it was time to change the gender landscape of our organization by focusing more time and attention on how we recruit, retain, support and grow our female talent,'' Tarsha explained. ''Bold decisions coupled with innovative programs and initiatives are what led to us being named the winner of the 2016 Top Companies For Women Technologists program by the Anita Borg Institute.'' Check out Top Companies webinars and learn how your organization can participate!