As mentors leave and schools continue remote learning, lifting up the future female worker requires thinking differently, says the CEO of Girls Who Code. Even with all the progress made in getting more women to study computer sciences, this next generation of girls may have it harder than others trying to jump into a tech career. As students continue remote learning, a lack of resources at home can make it nearly impossible to study properly and connect with teachers. And when women do enter the workforce, it will be harder to find female mentors as we emerge from the COVID-19 era. Multiple family demands in the pandemic are causing women to abandon the workforce four times the rate of men.

On Computer Science Education Week, we can join Jannie Fernandez from the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) and TECHNOLOchicas to talk about the impact of CS Ed Week over the years, how we can better support women –specifically Latina women – in technology, and what it means to have the first female vice president in United States history.

re:think, a thought leadership magazine from NCWIT, advocates for a more diverse, equal, and inclusive technology industry. Gain insights on inclusion from experts who guide our shifting culture, from technologists whose innovations undoubtedly impact our daily lives, and from change leaders who use their positions of influence to reveal the potential in everyone. It’s time to re:imagine the parts each of us play in creating a better future.

The Coordination Hub is looking forward to facilitating a conversation with Dr. Heather Metcalf, Dr. Ayesha Boyce and Dr. Tiffany Smith on December 3 at 3 pm ET. They will be exploring ways to sustain our work on broadening participation in STEM by embedding equity-centered practices in what we do.

A massive study of mentoring, gender, and career outcomes released by Nature Communications has ignited a firestorm of criticism for its conclusions, which have been labeled as sexist by many scientists on social media. The study is a "black eye’’ for the popular open-access title, one bioengineer tweeted, adding that she will no longer review papers for the journal. In response to the uproar, the journal’s editorial team announced it is reviewing the study, which concludes that mentorship by women can damage the careers of female students and early-career scientists; it recommends encouraging male mentors for women instead. The study, published on 17 November by a trio of researchers at New York University, Abu Dhabi, used a data set of more than 200 million scientific papers published over the course of more than 100 years to identify several million mentor-mentee pairs. It then followed the career achievements of the mentees, based on citations to papers they authored during their first 7 years as ‘’senior scientists’’ - determined here only by the time since a researche’s first publication. They found that early-career scientists who co-wrote papers with what the authors call "big-shot’’ researchers-defined by their yearly citation rate - went on themselves to have citation rates that were higher than average. More controversial, they report that, overall, the more female mentors an early-career scientist had, the lower the impact of the papers they published when they became senior scientists. They found that the effect on impact, which was measured by citation rates, was particularly strong for female mentees. They also noted that female mentors of women "suffer on average a loss of 18% in citations on their mentored papers.’’

This year, the Ad Council’s She Can STEM campaign has added STEM recruitment to its previous emphasis on STEM retention and role modeling. Here is why. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced nationwide school closings last spring, Michelle Hillman, chief campaign development officer for the Ad Council, saw ‘’a huge opportunity’’ to broaden the appeal of the council’s She Can STEM campaign. The closings, Hillman noted, had left millions of American tween and teen girls learning virtually from home without access to the kinds of fun, challenging, hands-on experiments and do-it-yourself (DIY) activities typically associated with STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) subjects. ‘’Knowing that they were home, looking for things to do,’’ Hillman said, ‘’meant we now had a much larger potential audience of girls to inspire and engage with ways to pursue STEM at home.’’ Hillman’s underlying assumption: These newly homebound girls probably had no idea about STEM’s fun, challenging, ‘’experimental’’ side - or about the ways many DIY activities connect back to aspects of STEM. But what if they did? Could exposing them to such activities and their STEM connections help ignite a spark? That insight was about to send the She Can STEM campaign and its advertising agency partner in an unexpected new direction.

A multiyear study shows increasing interest in computer science education, though retention of minorities and female students remains a challenge. K-12 educators and parents still hold computer science education in high esteem and believe it is a core component of students’ future success, according to the latest research from Gallup and Google. While parents in every demographic believe computer science is important for their own child to learn, Black parents and guardians in particular (78 percent) agree that learning computer science is important or very important for their children. Sixty-two percent of parents and guardians say it’s likely their child will need computer science knowledge for a future career–consistent with findings from previous Google and Gallup studies on this topic. Educators believe computer science education plays an important role in students’ futures–superintendents (75 percent), principals (73 percent), and public school teachers (66 percent) say offering computer science is just as important as offering core curricular subjects.

The reveal of gender and race wage gaps in the tech industry was among the findings compiled for a new ChartHop report. Just how far has the US come in narrowing unfair wage gaps? Unfortunately, not very, according to a just-released report from ChartHop. There have been some, if minor improvements. The new 2020 Charting Better Workplaces report finding that men earn 22% more than women is an improvement over 2018’s report, which found men earned 30% more than women. Still, it’s a slow slog to close the gap, and one that might surprise those who assumed equity would be in practice by now. The report was compiled from compensation and demographic data of more than 16,000 employees and revealed that employers need to exact change to close gender and race gaps. The report also noted that while most human resources (HR) departments do not have an option for non-binary designations yet, the number has increased, and that the salaries of non-binary employees are broadly closer to women's in this context.

The employment gap for people of color continues to be a problem for US tech providers (Silicon Valley writ large), just as it is for women. There’s also a salary gap for those who do manage to get hired, with minorities and women making less than their white and male counterparts for the same jobs. New data from ChartHop shows that the pay gap in the tech industry is narrowing for women, but not for people of color. (The data includes no IT organizations in enterprises, government, or education - just tech providers.) Based on anonymized personnel data from its tech industry customers, ChartHop was able to look at salary data by gender, ethnicity, and role of more than 16,000 employees at companies using its business operations software. ChartHop can’t say how representative its data is of the tech industry as a whole (which includes tech providers as well as business, government, and education). But its findings align to other published data from Glassdoor and the US Census Bureau.

Students and educators from The National Center for Women & Information Technology lead a virtual Lunch & Learn on diversity in computing When you think of computer science in western Pennsylvania, what do you see? A lab at Carnegie Mellon University? A course at the University of Pittsburgh? Maybe a big meeting at Google’s local office? What you might not picture is a group of high school girls in a Venango County library, studying computer science with peer mentors via Zoom. But this is what’s possible through the connective power of a learning ecosystem–one with regional heart and national reach. Thanks to a partnership with The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), students enrolled in the Girls Excelling in Math and Science (GEMS) club received tutoring, mentoring, and even a field trip to a few of Pittsburgh’s famous campuses. And these experiences, according to club leader Laura Jones, have changed the girls’ lives forever.