As careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) continue to expand, experts are still concerned about the gender gap that exists in these fields. While the National Science Foundation finds that boys' and girls' performance in some STEM topics is pretty even during K-12 education, disparities begin in college and deepen at the career level. Similar to how schools are mitigating skill gaps by teaching future-ready skills at the youngest level, they can do the same by empowering young women with STEM skills.

Sophia Spencer has done more at the age of eight than most of us will do in a lifetime. Spencer, who lives in Canada, was one of two authors of a paper published earlier this month in the Annals of the Entomological Society of America. She and Morgan Jackson, an entomologist who works at the University of Guelph Insect Collection in Ontario, wrote about the importance of social media for making science more accessible to the public.

In recent years, U.S. companies have made big strides in creating office cultures that cater to the female half of their workforce. Flexibility, paid leave, and no harassment are just the beginning, though. For our annual list of the 100 Best Workplaces for Women, Fortune partner Great Place to Work surveyed thousands of women at companies across the country and crunched the numbers to create this list of workplaces that go above and beyond for their female employees. For more about this ranking and how it was compiled.

Throughout history, countless women have made invaluable contributions to the world, despite facing gender-based discrimination. From the simple chocolate chip cookie to the first bulletproof fabric, INSIDER rounded up 14 inventions by women that you may not know about. Check out their stories.

Hidden Figures was one of 2016's greatest successes. Not only was the film critically acclaimed and financially successful, but it did the important job of telling the long-ignored story of how three Black women changed the course of history. Now, the legacies of those women - Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson - will continue to live on. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the U.S. State Department has created an educational exchange for women in STEM inspired by the film. The program, which is appropriately called #HiddenNoMore, is the first of its kind. It will invite 50 women who work in science, technology, engineering, and math across the world to the United States. The women will spend three weeks traveling around the country and meeting with organizations that promote women in STEM. The #HiddenNoMore program will end in Los Angeles, where Fox, which has donated $400,000 to the program, will host a two-day event for the women.

Most discussions around the dearth of women in STEM careers and education - the acronym stands for ''science, technology, engineering and math'' - focus on women themselves as the problem: Women and girls, the argument goes, don't apply for STEM programs, don't show interest in STEM at a young age, and often get discouraged and drop out, either during college or in the field. To be clear, most of these discussions blame the problem on society at large, which clearly discourages young women from seeing themselves as engineers, scientists or mathematicians. Still, the focus on women's individual choices, intentionally or otherwise, suggests that the solution to this gender disparity is for women themselves to tough it out and overcome inequality through force of will.

This fall, AWIS invites you to attend four webinar series focused on personal and professional development. Each of the four webinars is designed to accelerate your career by enabling you build your leadership toolbox and have been exclusively tailored to meet the needs of women in STEM.

More than 163 million women started businesses worldwide and another 111 million women were already running entrepreneurial businesses as of 2016. This accounts for an increase of 10 percent of total entrepreneurial activity by women in 74 countries since last year, according to the newly released Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2016/2017 Women's Report. The report compiled by faculty and researchers from Babson College, Smith College, Korea Entrepreneurship Foundation, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Universidad Del Desarrollo, and Universiti Tun Abdul Razak, shows the encouraging progress ''where the gender gap is closing and where women are leading change in some ways. The problems reflect the areas where there are still serious deficits and disparities, where the gender gap may still be significant.'' The two years of data showed the phases of entrepreneurial intentions, established business ownership, discontinued businesses, as well as attitudes, education, perceptions, innovation and more. In the U.S., 14.9 percent of the women said they planned to start a business in the next three years, with 10.5 percent actually starting a business.

In the weeks since the now-infamous Google memo first stirred global controversy, too little light has been shed on the underlying issue - the large and undeniable gender gap in computer science, engineering and the technology business in general. At least three times as many men as women work as computer scientists in the U.S. That suggests an enormous supply of ideas, ingenuity and creativity is going to waste. And the U.S. is already short more than half a million computer-science graduates - a deficit that will only worsen as the industry expands. Why do so few women work in tech? It isn't that they can't do math or are biologically unsuited to the tasks. It's that women - including those who excel at math - haven't been shown in a consistent and forthright way why they should want the jobs. This can change.

Gender inequality in science, technology, engineering and math has been a long documented issue, but a new study coming out of the Cornell Center for the Study of Inequality offers encouraging evidence of avenues to bridge this divide. Dafna Gelbgiser, grad, and Kyle Albert, grad, found that green fields in higher education tend to bridge the gender divide in both STEM and non-STEM fields. Gelbgiser defined green fields as those that contribute to green jobs, which provide goods or have production processes that benefit the environment. Examples of such fields include environmental science and sustainability studies. Gelbgiser explained that both she and Albert were interested in studying green fields since they could track ''what happens when a new field of study emerges in terms of gender inequality in those fields.'' According to Gelbgiser, green fields are unique because they do not have clear roots in other disciplines. So, students do not have prior gender dispositions about the field.