Kick off your WE17 conference week in Austin with the NXP Foundation's prestigious event recognizing the brightest young women students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics world-wide. On October 25, 2017, in Austin, Texas, the NXP Foundation will proudly launch the inaugural Women's STEM Leadership Forum to honor the best and brightest young women and their academic and innovative achievements. In addition to an exceptional line-up of speakers and panel discussions, the Forum will offer attendees an extraordinary opportunity for professional interface and dialogue with some of industry's top female technology leaders.

A Google engineer who got fired over a controversial memo that criticized the company's diversity policies said that there might be biological reasons there are fewer women engineers. But top computer science schools have proven that a few cultural changes can increase the number of women in the field.

Tech companies with more women in leadership enjoy some unexpected perks. In addition to improving salary equity among men and women, they also have higher rates of employee satisfaction and lower employee turnover, according to a new report from Redfin and PayScale. The two Seattle-based companies worked together to study how a higher percentage of women executives impacts a company. They discovered that women at companies with high rates of female executives women earn 91 cents for every dollar men earn. At companies with low rates of female leaders, they earn 77 cents, based on the median incomes of male and female employees at each company. Redfin and PayScale also compared the salaries of men and women at similar job levels with comparable years of experience. By that criteria, companies with high rates of female executives paid two cents more for every dollar than men in similar roles earned. For example, female employees at those companies make $98,000 when their male counterparts make $100,000.

Facebook made progress in improving the gender and racial balance of its workers, with women, African Americans and Hispanics all gaining more representation in the Silicon Valley company's ranks over the last year. Women now make up 35% of Facebook's global workforce, up from 33%, and hold 19% of technical roles, up from 17%, the company said Wednesday. In the U.S., Facebook brought aboard more people of color. Three percent of Facebook workers are African American, up from 2%, and 5% of them are Hispanic, up from 4%. This marks the first time Facebook has increased the percentage of African Americans since it began publicly reporting its workforce demographics three years ago. But the giant social network fell short where the lack of diversity is most acute, in the proportion of African-American and Hispanic workers in technical roles, which has stayed flat at 1% and 3% respectively since 2014. The percentage of African Americans and Hispanics in senior leadership positions have also remained largely unchanged over that time period. A big part of the problem, according to Facebook's global diversity chief Maxine Williams: Too few people of color have the specialized education and training for technical roles at Facebook and too few of them apply for jobs there.

CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion is cultivating a new type of ecosystem centered around collaboration and sharing. The actions, available via CEOAction.com, showcase real-life examples of the open and transparent conversations to cultivate more diverse and inclusive workplace environments. The addition of new signatories expands the impact of this work beyond the office to communities and industries.

High-school girls are taking more Advanced Placement computer engineering exams than ever before, according to a new report from Code.org and the College Board. In 2017, largely thanks to a new test aimed at expanding the reach of engineering classes, female participation in these AP tests increased at a faster rate than young boys' participation on the exam in 2017. For women hoping to have careers in computer engineering, this kind of early training can make all the difference. The field of computer science is growing so fast it outpaces all other occupations in the US. It's great work if you can get it. In fact, 70 percent of students who take this AP exam say they want to work in computer science. Trouble is, it's mostly white or Asian men who land these high-paying jobs.

Tesla has bucked its trend of appointing mostly men to its board of directors. And the move could mark a new direction for other Silicon Valley companies as they make their leadership teams more diverse. Tesla welcomed Ebony Media CEO Linda Johnson Rice, the second woman out of a group of nine board members and the first African-American to hold that role, according to Fortune.

A nonprofit community of nearly 900 universities, businesses, and organizations nationwide, the National Center for Women and Information Technology, or NCWIT, takes a three-pronged approach to increasing women's participation in the computing industry. By connecting change leaders, providing free resources, and developing programs for reaching underrepresented groups, NCWIT inspires change at a national scale. The organization helps raise awareness and implement change by distributing research-based information on how to attract, develop, and promote women and minorities in technology.

The 'mystique' of engineering needs to be removed by getting women engineers and more young male engineers to engage in schools more frequently, according to Anne Taylor, Deloitte LLP vice chairman and managing partner. ''Young girls need to meet engineers, hear about their jobs and lives on more than a single career day,'' Taylor told Rigzone. The Deloitte partner believes that more needs to be done to help girls understand the types of careers available to them and how an engineering degree can help them give back to society, as well as have a challenging and profitable career.

Maryam Mirzakhani, the first and only woman to win the prestigious Fields Medal, called the Nobel Prize of math, died on Saturday. Mirzakhani was a professor at Stanford University, which made the announcement, saying she had breast cancer that spread to her bones. She was 40. Mirzakhani won the distinguished award, given every four years, in 2014 for her work on geometry and dynamical systems. Much of her work was highly theoretical, and Stanford's statement said it could read like ''a foreign language'' to those outside the field-''moduli spaces, Teichmuller theory, hyperbolic geometry, Ergodic theory and symplectic geometry.'' In practice, her body of work may change theoretical physicists' understanding of how the universe was formed, as well as quantum field theory. Her Fields Medal marked not only the first time a woman won since the award since its inception in 1936, but also the first time an Iranian had won.