Cisco CEO: To Achieve Gender Diversity in Business, 'Men Have to Consciously Lean In' (Fortune)

In March 2013, Cisco CEO John Chambers sent out a memo to all 400 of his most senior employees, vice president and above. "We can no longer pretend that biases don't exist, nor can we talk around them," he wrote, quoting Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in her book  Lean In . "The result of creating a more equal environment will not just be better performance for our organizations, but quite likely greater happiness for all."  Earlier that year, at a conference, Chambers heard Sandberg talk about the shortage of women in leadership positions throughout the corporate world. He realized that if he didn't start taking about the gender divide in the technology industry seriously, Cisco would fall behind its competitors. Read more here .

Attracting Latina Students to STEM Careers, One Role Model at a Time (cognoscenti)

I remember the day I told my parents I was pregnant. It was 1997, the fall of my junior year of high school. We had immigrated tot he U.S. from Mexico a little over a decade earlier. We - my parents, my siblings and I (plus some extended family) - lived in a cramped two-bedroom apartment outside of Los Angeles. My parents worked at a bungee cord factory....Today, my daughter is 16 years old, and I have three degrees from MIT. In my work as an engineer and technical leader at Boeing, I drive improvements in the company's product development programs. I love my job in aerospace, but every time I sit in a meeting and realize that I'm the only Latina, I wonder why. Although research shows that jobs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are increasing, the umber of Latinas pursuing degrees in these fields is slight. While women account for 24 percent of the STEM workforce, Latinas represent only 3 percent. Read more here.

UMass Research Adds Wrinkle to Finding Gender Gap Solution (Boston Globe)

For years, educators and policy makers have been faced with a stark gender gap: physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers tend to be men A reasonable goal has been to even the scales, so that the number of women probing the edge of the cosmos, designing new software, or building rocket engines is the same as the number of men. But a recent study by a University of Massachusetts Amherst researcher adds a wrinkle to this seemingly straightforward solution. Researchers set up an experiment in which women engineering college students participated in groups with different gender rations and found that even when they are represented 50-50, women speak up less during those meetings than when they are in the majority. Read more here.

Mentoring Programs See Girls, Economically Disadvantaged Students Get Head Start in STEM Careers (NY Daily News)

Stuyvesant High School senior Wendy Chou is getting a head start on a career as a researcher thanks to a mentoring program at the American Museum of Natural History. That's where Wendy, who's 18 and lives in Flushing, Queens, discovered a spider fossil in a 52 million-year-old amber sample on March 12. "This is a really good experience because not many people my age are able to work with a museum scientist," Wendy said of the program. "It's much closer to what I'll experience in college." Read more here.

 

#GirlsCan: Girls Who Code and COVERGIRL

Girls Who Code and CoverGirl team up to inspire girls to pursue careers in STEM - particular IT. Watch video here.

#GirlsCan: Girls Who Code | COVERGIRL

 

STEM Women Stories: Aspire and Inspire (Huffington Post Impactx)

The push to attract women to STEM education and careers is gaining steam, but the impact is questionable. Young women have ample cause to be discouraged given the decrease of the number of women professionals to many STEM fields. Bucking the trend, efforts to encourage women to embrace STEM have increased dramatically. Those efforts span the country, including in Tennessee where the Women Ground Breakers recently held their annual Chattanooga Groundbreaking Storytelling featuring women in STEM. 

 

With the goal to Inspire & Aspire, the storytellers shared the challenges they overcame, the trends they see emerging, and their words of wisdom for young women. The nominees chosen to be storytellers were a diverse group of women. Here are four of these storytellers and their perspectives on women in STEM. They included an immigrant, a first-generation born American, an American transplant to the Southeast, and a Southern African American. Read more here.

Is Education Technology Where Women are Starting to Buck the Tech World's Sexist Trends (Fast CoExist)

The landmark San Francisco trial between iconic venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins and Ellen Pao, the woman who did not become partner, may be over. But its repercussions - and the quest to fix sexism in Silicon Valley and, by extension, the technology industry - are ongoing. Venture capital may be one of the toughest areas to be either female or a minority - and at the technology high-fliers that are their favorite investments, it isn't much better. Women made up only 11% of founders in the most recent class of lauded tech incubator Y Combinator. 

 

But in the geeky boys' club of tech, education tech may be one of the few slightly more bright spots where female founders and CEOs are showing up - and staying the course - in greater numbers. Read more here.

 

National Hiring Experiments Reveal 2:1 Faculty Preference for Women on STEM Tenure Track (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA)

The underrepresentation of women in academic science is typically attributed, both in scientific literature and in the media, to sexist hiring. Here [the PNAS has] reported five hiring experiments in which faculty evaluated hypothetical female and male applicants, using systematically varied profiles disguising identical scholarship, for assistant professorships in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, men and women faculty members from all four fields preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males with matching life styles (single, married, divorced), with the exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference. Comparing different lifestyles revealed that women preferred divorced mothers to married fathers and that en preferred mothers who took parental leaves to mothers who did not. Our findings, supported by real-world academic hiring data, suggest advantages for women launching academic science careers. Read more here.

 

IU to Lead First-Ever Investigation into Subtle Cues' Influence on Women's Success in STEM (Lab Manager)

The National Science Foundation wants to identify obstacles that keep women from entering and remaining in STEM careers, and Indiana University's Mary C. Murphy is working to reveal a previously hidden factor that may be preventing advancement in these fields. 

 

Recognizing the importance of Murphy's work - that there may be subtle, environmental signals that discourage some women from entering or remaining in careers in science, technology, engineering and math - the NSF recently awarded the experimental social psychologist more than $2.2 million to support the investigation into these invisible barriers. "There are many subtle cues in our environment suggesting whether they are 'identity safe' or 'identity threatening' with regard to gender identify," said Murphy, assistant professor in the IU Blommington College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. "Anything from the number of men versus women in a room to segregated seating patterns, to friendship networks, to whether men or women are praised as the top performers on a team..." Read more here.

 

Woman's Website Seeks 'Pink' Peers in the Oil and Gas Industry (NOLA)

Katie Mehnert can pinpoint the launch of her energy career to a single room. It was late 2005 and Mehnert, a Mandeville native and a Louisiana State University graduate, had just been hired by Shell as a temporary contractor to manage a process and systems project for the company in Houston. Early into the job, she walked into a room and saw Peggy Montana, now CEO of Shell Midstream Partners, standing across from here. Mehnert was immediately nervous. She decided to approach and introduce herself anyway. She and Montana hit it off and kept in touch. When Shell offered Mehnert a full-time position, Montana encouraged her to take it... Read more here.