News Roundup | National Center for Women & Information Technology

News Roundup

There’s been a flurry of interesting news nuggets lately, so below we’ve rounded up several of them that we don’t want you to miss, grouped loosely by topic.
K-12 Education

Tell the parents! Although you’ve known it for a while, The Wall Street Journalis now reporting about computer science and engineering being among the best-paying jobs for college grads.
The National Academy of Sciences thinks it would be a good idea to establish national standards for teaching engineering in K-12 schools, but that it might prove to be “too difficult.”
Here’s a nice profile of several U.S. organizations hoping to turn more young people from tech consumers into tech innovators.

Higher Education

We love this! MIT is “Teaching Real World Programming” by encouraging students to find their personal “coding style”, and then recruiting volunteers from the tech community to review the students’ code.
Arizona State University is celebrating the success of its WISE (Women in Science and Engineering) mentoring program, as well as the launch of CareerWISE, an NSF-sponsored, online “resilience-training” program for graduate women students in STEM fields.
Stanford University’s School of Medicine has won a $2 million NIH grant to help female faculty overcome stereotype threat.
Two members of Spelman’s Spelbots team have won a $10K scholarship from AT&T for their iPhone app (congrats!)

Workforce

A survey of corporate diversity practices among S&P100 companies finds that, despite increased public commitment to gender and ethnic diversity, board and C-level diversity has essentially remained flat; and that for the many companies who didn’t share workforce data, “no disclosure means no accountability”.
The New York Times looks at how changing the American workplace for women really requires changing it for men, too.
A McKinsey survey finds that although 72 percent of respondents surveyed think there is a direct connection between  a company’s gender diversity and its financial success, companies that consider it one of their top three agenda items are more likely to have more of it.
Most Fortune 500 female CEOs are mothers, it turns out, but many of them have non-fast-track husbands.

Entrepreneurism

Did you know that women start biotech firms at higher rates than other tech firms? Like, MUCH higher rates. Read more about it at Slate.
Businessweek has a nice interview with blip.tv founder (and NCWIT Entrepreneurial Hero) Dina Kaplan on Making More Women Entrepreneurs.
The Founders Block rings in on The Gender Gap in Venture Capital.
If you’re a start-up looking for tech talent, how do you compete with the big companies when stock options and foosball have lost their caché?

Social Science Research

Research from Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams at Cornell finds that “Women’s Choices, Not Abilities, Keeps Them Out of Math-intensive Fields”.
Two Princeton computer scientists have developed a new algorithm for tracing the origins and spread of ideas, which is based on language use rather than professional citations. It reminded us of Joanne Cohoon’s research on women authors of conference papers; how might a shift in tracing and crediting people for their ideas affect women?

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