The fight for equal rights for working women remains an uphill battle. That's one reason why about 3 million people around the world recently participated in women's marches and thousands took part in demonstrations on International Women's Day. An analysis from the Center of American Progress estimated that A Day Without a Woman could have cost the U.S. GDP $21 billion if every woman who worked outside the house went on strike. While it's well-known that women make key contributions to the economy, gender disparities remain, particularly in the tech industry. A recent report from the National Center for Women & Technology explained that women made up 57% of the professional workforce but only 25% of the employees in computer-related occupations in 2015. When considering the number of female tech workers in leadership roles, the numbers look just as bad. According to Silicon Valley Bank's 2017 Startup Outlook Report, roughly 70% of startups say they have no women on their boards of directors and 54% report having zero women in executive roles. Gender pay inequality remains in the tech industry as well at every level. Data from Payscale reveals that the uncontrolled gender pay gap for individual contributors and managers/supervisors is 19% and 22%, respectively. But that's not the case in every U.S. city. In order to identify the places with the smallest gaps in gender pay and the highest ratio of female tech workers, SmartAsset ranked the best cities for women in tech.

Howard University is opening Howard West at Google, an effort to pave the way to tech careers for more African-American computer science students. This summer, 25 students from the historically black university, which is based in Washington, D.C., will train at the tech giant's headquarters in Mountain View. Google, like the tech industry overall, is making slow progress toward hiring black engineers. Last fall, Google released its latest employee diversity report, detailing the gender and ethnicity of everyone it hired in 2015. While the number of black employees went up, they still represent only 2 percent of Google's workforce. At the time, Google said it fell short of its diversity goal. With Howard West, Google believes it can meet that goal faster, said Bonita Stewart, the company's vice president of global partnerships.

Uber Technologies Inc plans to outline diversity goals and publish the results of a sexual harassment investigation over the coming weeks, part of a commitment to fix its corporate culture. A report on workforce demographics, which will be Uber's first, is expected by the end of this month, Liane Hornsey, the company's senior vice-president for human resources, said on a conference call with reporters. Releasing such data has become common practice for technology companies in recent years. Arianna Huffington, an Uber board member, said a probe into the company's culture and harassment claims is likely to be completed by the end of next month. Huffington is helping oversee the inquiry process, along with Eric Holder, the former US attorney general. She said there's an ''absolute commitment that the findings will be made public and that they will inform all the actions.''

Female executives in male-founded tech companies are more likely to head HR than to hold other leadership positions, and that's if they're among the relative few who make it to the C-suite, a new study reveals. U.S. tech startups have made little headway in getting women on boards of directors and in executive suites in recent years. This despite growing industry attention on women's underrepresentation in those arenas, according to Silicon Valley Bank's (SVB's) 2017 Women in Technology Leadership report. Seventy percent of U.S. firms responding to the survey don't have any women on their boards, the report found, and more than half (54 percent) have no female executives; both percentages are higher than those reported in the previous two years. In 2015 and 2016, the percentage of U.S. startups with no female directors stood at 68 percent and 66 percent, respectively, while 53 percent had no female executives in 2015 and 46 percent had no women in the C-suite last year.

You can spend your summer break writing code and learning about open source development with the 2017 Google Summer of Code. Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development. Students work with an open source organization on a 3 month programming project during their break from school.

Technology has a gender problem, as everyone knows. The underrepresentation of women in technical fields has spawned legions of TED talks, panels, and women-friendly coding boot camps. The women who are so assiduously learning to code seem to be devaluing certain tech roles simply by occupying them. Conventional wisdom says that the key to reducing gendered inequality in tech is giving women the skills they need to enter particular roles. But in practice, when more women enter a role, its value seems to go down more.

Several years ago, after devoting many years to the study of the gender gap in STEM fields using nationwide data on first-year college students, it became clear to me that the study of STEM in the ''aggregate'' was no longer a realistic or useful way to examine women's progress in these fields. Not only does women's representation in undergraduate STEM vary dramatically by field (constituting as many as 58% of bachelor's degree earners in the biological sciences and only 18% of degree earners in computer science and engineering [NCES, 2015]), but STEM fields are distinct from each other in many other ways, including curriculum, career paths, and the types of students they attract.

The Facebook CEO joined students at North Carolina A&T, a historically black college and university (HBCU), to kick off the chancellor's speakers series on Monday. During the discussion, which was streamed live from his page, a student asked Zuckerberg how he plans to make his company more inclusive. She also asked what people of color can do to get jobs in those non-inclusive spaces. He told her that was the onus is on tech companies to fix the problem.

To celebrate International Women's Day March 8, Microsoft announced Tuesday it is building upon last year's campaign encouraging girls to MakeWhatsNext. The new campaign aises awareness of the issues that cause girls to drop out of or lose interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), and ''aims to pique their excitement in how they can change the world - if they stay engaged,'' writes Mary Snapp, corporate vice president of Microsoft Philanthropies. A new video challenges girls to stay in STEM so they are empowered to solve the problems they care about most, ranging from finding solutions to climate change to curing cancer, Snapp says. Additionally, to help shift perceptions about STEM jobs, Microsoft and LinkedIn launched a new experiential tool in conjunction with the campaign to demonstrate how girls can pursue their passions across industries and social causes.

The White House just gave women in STEM a boost. President Donald Trump signed two laws on Tuesday that authorize NASA and the National Science Foundation to encourage women and girls to get into STEM fields. Those are science, technology, engineering and math. The Inspire Act directs NASA to promote STEM fields to women and girls, and encourage women to pursue careers in aerospace. The law gives NASA three months to present two congressional committees with its plans for getting staff - think astronauts, scientists and engineers - in front of girls studying STEM in elementary and secondary schools. The full name of the law is the Inspiring the Next Space Pioneers, Innovators, Researchers, and Explorers Women Act, in case you're wondering where the acronym Inspire comes from. The second law is the Promoting Women in Entrepreneurship Act. It authorizes the National Science Foundation to support entrepreneurial programs aimed at women.