Facebook has partnered with the women-only hacker bootcamp Hackbright Academy to create a special scholarship for moms.

Just in time for Mother’s Day, the Moms In Tech program will help women who once worked in the tech industry then left to pursue parenthood.

Hackbright will take 10 weeks to train the moms accepted into the program. During this time, old skills will get a refresh, and students will learn new skills. The women who participate will be prepared to return to the tech industry not as front-line code monkeys but as “technically hands-on leads, managers, or directors,” the program application notes.

RELATED: Tackling tech’s gender problem the right way: Teaching women to code

For the scholarship, Facebook will cover the entire $12,000 Hackbright tuition. Applications are open until May 17. The program will begin exactly one month after the deadline.

Attrition of women who become parents is a big concern for a lot of the folks we talk to at large tech companies. Taking steps like this may help give tech-minded moms a path back to work at top-tier companies.

Hackbright was founded by Christian Fernandez and David Phillips and is based in San Francisco.

Image credit: Shutterstock

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MENLO PARK, Calif. — Your humble correspondent caused a minor ruckus at Facebook’s Home unveiling event today when she saw Shangela Laquifa Wadley, a star who first shone publicly on RuPaul’s Drag Race, as a featured face in the social network’s latest commercial.

The spot, a decidedly surreal romp set on a commercial airplane flight, is going to air on regular, non-web-video, actual, American television within the next day or so, reps said. It features a couple underpants-clad dudes chilling in overhead luggage bins and our favorite “Halleloo!”-hollering queen werqin’ it as she rolls down the center aisle in a beverage cart. The company previewed the ad to press and guests at today’s event; CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he thought it was “fun.”

Update: We finally got our hands on the spot! Watch the whole, weird thing here.

Of course, this isn’t Facebook’s first foray into LGBT-friendly waters. In fact, using a drag queen in a major, national advertisement for a product makes total sense for Facebook since the company has long upheld civil rights for LGBT folks and celebrates the diversity of its own employees.

The company filed a brief with the Supreme Court in support of same-sex marriage, and last year, it became the first social media company to win a GLAAD award for its work with the LGBT community and gay youth in particular. The company is also especially committed to helping queer kids get jobs in the tech community.

As for today’s new mobile product, Facebook Home is designed to bring a photo-filled Facebook experience to any Android phone, turning the business-as-usual Android interface into something new, fun, and gorgeous. Check out our other Facebook Home coverage; you can download the app bundle from Google Play on April 12.

Here’s a sneak peek:

While the Supreme Court tackles a landmark case on LGBT rights, gay young folks still have to tough it out in the real world, which is sometimes loving, sometimes cruel. AnonyMouse is a service that allows gay youth to get advice and life coaching from older, wiser mentors — all while letting young people keep their true identities a secret.

The service is officially launching today with help from Change.org, the social impact platform.

In recent days, we might look around our Facebook news feeds and see signs of solidarity for the gay community. But AnonyMouse co-founder Aaron Moy (pictured) says there’s still a big need for LGBT youth and closeted folks to be able to talk anonymously with a friendly, understanding mentor.

“I think we all have the luxury of living in a major metropolitan place like San Francisco,” Moy told VentureBeat via email today.

“In some of the user research I’ve done, I feel like a majority of our users will be coming from the Midwest and South. The openness and progressive thinking in some of those cities is surprisingly outdated.”

And even in an LGBT mecca like the Bay Area, not everyone feels comfortable going public about certain issues.

“Even in liberal cities like SF, people still prefer to hide behind the cloak of anonymity,” said Moy. “In fact, I believe this is becoming more and more prevalent with teens. I research millennials for my day job and know that the their digital and real lives are becoming increasingly blurred.”

Sometimes, he said, you’re not necessarily going through a heavy personal crisis and you don’t have tons of direct questions; sometimes, you just need to talk.

“There might not be as many use cases now as there were a decade ago, but there are still many vulnerable youth that need our help,” he said. “Just look at the rising statistics of the Trevor Project.”

AnonyMouse pairs mentees with fully vetted mentors, who come from a wide range of backgrounds, from athletes to military to transgendered and beyond.

Mentees’ identities are protected; no personal information is collected, either directly or indirectly, and no information about mentees is shared with outside parties. Conversations can happen via SMS or IM.

The LGBT groups Moy & Co. are reaching out to are a great start, but the team also sees potential for the platform’s use with other groups.

“I think an anonymity-based platform could effect a plethora of demographics,” said Moy, “from recovering drug addicts and alcoholics to battered women — pretty much any group of people who are too afraid or ashamed to speak to their friends and family and want to speak to others who have gone through a similar experience. An anonymous online app could serve as a stepping stone before you gather the courage to physically attend a meeting.”

Interior, developer conference. The crowd is 80 to 90 percent male, but that’s not unusual in 2013. Women are still fighting their way into the technology industry, but since most of the female folks in tech don’t know how to code (yet), their numbers are even sparser in this particular room. As a result, many of the women who are here are rawly self-conscious, some even to the point of being defensive about their very right to be here.

BOB: I’d totally fork his repo!

CHARLIE: Think your dongle’s big enough for the job?

[Both laugh.]

ALICE: [Turns around in her seat to face BOB and CHARLIE, who are seated in the row behind her.] Excuse me. I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation, and at the risk of sounding overly sensitive, I did want to tell you that it made me uncomfortable.

BOB: Oh!

ALICE: It’s just — I’m a woman, and men don’t talk like that in front of women in any other professional context. It’s just unwelcoming and kinda offensive, actually.

CHARLIE: Well, right. We weren’t really thinking about it. To be honest, we don’t get a lot of women at these things.

ALICE: Oh, believe me, I know! Just try to be a bit more aware, ok? After all, we all want more women in the room, and we won’t get it if we keep talking like that.

BOB: Absolutely. And hey, we’re really sorry. We didn’t want to offend anyone.

ALICE: It’s cool. Thanks for being understanding.

ALICE turns back around. It took all her nerve to confront those two, and although she’s flustered, she’s proud of herself for taking a stand. She writes a tweet: “Just wrist-slapped a couple devs for locker-room bullcrap @ PyCon. But it ended well! That’s 2 brogrammers down, N to go…”

CHARLIE posts a note in his startup’s Campfire chatroom: “BOB and I were joking about forking and dongles, and this woman turned around and read us the riot act about it… in a nice way, though. I honestly had no idea anyone would find that kind of thing offensive.” A few other team members chime in, and the group has a brief conversation about women in programming and how the environment is changing.

As the session ends, BOB taps ALICE on the shoulder.

BOB: I just wanted to say, thanks for throwing a yellow flag on us. We would never have noticed we were being unwelcoming, and that could have ended so much worse if you hadn’t had the chutzpah to actually say something to our faces.

CHARLIE: Yeah, it actually sparked an internal chat at our company. We’ve been trying to hire a woman developer for ages, and it seems we still have some learning to do on the HR side if that’s ever gonna happen.

ALICE: Wow. Well, I’m really glad I did say something! Thanks. Have a great day, guys.

BOB and CHARLIE: You too!

All the conference attendees exit the hall to get lunch. There is no shitstorm on the Internet, no one gets fired, no one gets DDoSed, and a small group of people decide to change their actions to align with their values.

Image credit: PyCon

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International Women’s Day brought with it a big ol’ dose of lady-tokenism on the Internet. But it also gave us a handful of efforts to increase our long-term focus on moving toward gender equality in hugely imbalanced industries like technology.

In the latter camp, we have GitHub’s Passion Projects, a series of talks to be held at GitHub’s San Francisco headquarters. The talks will feature prominent, smart, and interesting women in the technology/startup/developer world.

Why GitHub, why women, why now? you ask. We asked, too, and GitHubber Julie Ann Horvath answered.

“I think Passion Projects was born mostly out of frustration,” she said. “I hear men talk about ‘getting more women into tech’ almost constantly. Even here at GitHub, my male coworkers genuinely want to work with more women, but they don’t know how to approach the problem. It’s sensitive. And attempts by men to address it can seem really insincere. I think I just got fed up with all the talk and wanted to start taking action.”

Horvath, pictured blurrily above, is one of GitHub’s designers. In an email to VentureBeat, she said that while she sees more women working at tech companies these days, not enough of them are in leadership positions or in board seats, where decisions are made.

“Fortunately, I think we’re going to see this change. A lot of women I know in tech are what people would refer to as ‘green’ or new to programming. … It’s hard to find women who 1) are the best at what they do and 2) Want to work at a company with so few women on its technical teams. We’re trying to work on the balance here. We know that we’re in a unique position. We know that other companies are watching us and what we do. We want to set a good example. And Passion Projects is a part of that.”

First up in the Passion Project series is Rachel Myers, resident Rubyist at ModCloth, who will speak later this week. Future talks will be led by such fierce figures as Sara Chipps (developer, Levo Lead/Girl Develop It), Jen Myers (developer/designer, Dev Bootcamp/Girl Develop It Columbus, Ohio chapter), and Timoni West (designer, Foursquare).

“The speakers for Passion Projects were handpicked by me and the other ladies of GitHub,” said Horvath. “They’re all women who have inspired us personally. I shared an early list with my coworkers, created a repo on GitHub, and asked for people to create issues in this repo for women they’d like to hear speak.”

Sexism exists in tech, but it’s usually more subtle than the overt “girls don’t know no math” bullcrap you might expect, especially at startups with an overall young, progressive staff. Instead, Horvath said, you’re more likely to encounter “a lack of understanding and a strong cultural bias created by the lack of female leadership in our industry.

“However, it is sad that we hear more about the negative experiences women in technology have than we do about the positive ones. This is also partly my motivation for starting Passion Projects. I think women should get to hear about the positive aspects of working in tech, too.”

All the talks will be live-streamed and recorded for posterity. Horvath said she’d love to see Passion Projects expand beyond San Francisco’s borders to a larger, even international audience — perhaps even as a standalone conference.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Code.org has taken the web by storm with its message of computer science for all — and according to its founder, Hadi Partovi, racial and gender balance in the tech world is a major underlying principle of that message.

“Ninety percent of schools don’t even offer computer science, and those aren’t the schools with lots of white kids in great neighborhoods,” Partovi said in a phone call with VentureBeat today.

“Coding is the American Dream. If you want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or even want a high paying job, those jobs are for programmers. … And yet the opportunity to be exposed to that is going to the top 10 percent, and that is just morally wrong.”

Code.org is an advocacy campaign focused at getting more kids interested in computer science. It’s also working to get more states, schools, and teachers on board with the program.

Related: Tackling tech’s gender problem the right way: Teaching women to code

The most visible aspect of its work so far has been a series of short films featuring the superstars of the digital age — Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey — talking about programming and how learning to write code can change lives for the better.

In those clips, Partovi told us, the Code.org team specifically attempted to get more women and people of underrepresented races front and center.

Here’s a short film that hasn’t been released elsewhere, given to VentureBeat by Code.org reps:

“For gender inequality, we care a lot about it, and we spent a lot of time in making these short films in paying attention to the right messages, making sure we had a balance of women and different races represented,” he said.

“The first female engineer at Facebook is the perfect example. She didn’t expect that this would even be her career. … The first part of moving the needle in the gender gap is giving them role models and dispelling misconceptions.”

Various studies have shown that by the time they’re in high school, girls steer clear of computer science because of preconceived — and largely inaccurate — ideas about what computer scientists do.

“With the montage we did of different workplaces, we wanted to get across that these are really great jobs, but also show that these people are working together in the sunlight rather than the typical media impression of what an engineer is — a geeky guy working alone in a basement,” said Partovi.

And as for the idea that girls are bad at math and therefore can’t code, a message that’s passed down in popular culture if not in tech culture, Partovi said, “Girls don’t get the idea they’re not good at math in third grade. At that point, building things on a computer is still like playing. … If you can start counting at zero, that’s all the math you need.”

Aside from getting kids away from intimidating media messages and encouraging them toward computer science careers, Code.org is also girding its loins for a battle royal with state governments and school boards. Getting more states to recognize computer science as a valid course and getting more schools to offer courses and clubs for computer science, Partovi said, “is the most important aspect of increasing diversity” in technology industries.

Related: Treehouse takes its coding education tools to Detroit

“Forty-one states don’t count computer science as part of STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math curriculum],” he said. “That means the money that goes into STEM, none of it goes into getting more computer programming. The other issue is that for students in those states, studying computer science in high school does not count toward graduation. It’s just an elective.”

The end result: The only students who go into college with a decent understanding of code are those who can afford the time and money to study programming independently. Speaking generally, these kids aren’t at-risk economically, they’re not from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds, and they’re not girls.

“I have a 3-year-old daughter and a 5-year-old son, and I’m basically using iPad games to teach them basic computer programming,” Partovi said as we wrapped up our interview.

“I think everybody should get basic exposure so they can make an informed choice. Most people never even know about the choices they’re rejecting because computer science isn’t on the menu.”

Image credit: Blend Images/Shutterstock

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In an amicus brief (embedded in full below), a couple hundred companies have signed on in support of marriage equality. The brief is being presented to the Supreme Court, which is debating DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, in the bellwether case United States v. Windsor*.

Some of the tech companies involved include (in alphabetical order) Akamai, Cisco, eBay, Facebook, Gilt Groupe, Google, Intel, Intuit, Microsoft, Oracle, Orbitz, Qualcomm, Twitter, Xerox, and Zynga. The city and county of San Francisco has also signed on to the brief.

What business do a bunch of corporations have getting involved in a highly personal political debate?

They’re glad you asked. In the brief, the amici** write that “the burden of DOMA’s dual regime is keenly felt by organizations that conduct operations or do business in jurisdictions that authorize or recognize marriage between two people of the same sex. … Far from creating uniformity, DOMA obliges employers to treat an employee married to someone of the same sex and an employee married to someone of a different sex unequally.”

DOMA, the brief continues, requires companies to treat their employees unequally when it comes to benefits for health care, child care, retirement, and more. And in competitive hiring environments, that kind of inequality is bad for tech companies in particular.

The brief also called DOMA-mandated tax issues “discriminatory,” brought up issues surrounding 401(k) plans and married couples, and touched on the difficulties in bringing in non-U.S.-born employees and their same-sex spouses on working visas.

And in states where same-sex marriages are legally recognized, employers shoulder the burden of treating the same employee very differently for federal and state purposes, including benefits and taxes. “Confusion abounds, and even sophisticated employers struggle,” the brief reads.

“Employees of Yale University, for example, learned in January 2011 that the university had failed to withhold taxes for the imputed value of spousal healthcare coverage in 2010, and that these amounts would be deducted from their paychecks in 2011.”

The result has been hiring consultants, figuring out complicated workarounds, and doing infinite legal tapdances — and still ending up with policies and practices that discriminate against employees.

“DOMA conscripts amici to become the face of its mandate that two separate castes of married persons be identified and separately treated,” the brief continues.

“We must treat one employee less favorably, or at minimum differently, when each is as lawfully married as the other. We must do all of this in states, counties, and cities that prohibit workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and demand equal treatment of all married individuals. This conscription has harmful consequences.”

Those consequences include legislation from individual employees, overall lower morale in the workplace, and a negation of some company’s missions and ethics statements.

“Our principles reflect, in the truest sense, our business judgment,” the brief concludes. “By force of law, DOMA rescinds that judgment and directs that we renounce these principles or, worse yet, betray them.”

We’ll have in-depth follow-up stories in a few hours. Stay tuned.

*United States v. Windsor is an appellate case scheduled to begin oral arguments before the Supreme Court on March 27. The case involves two New York women, Edie Windsor and Thea Spyer, who married in Canada after a 40-year relationship. When Spyer died in 2009, Windsor was required to pay $363,000 in estate taxes, which would have been waived if their marriage had been legally recognized.

**Amici and its singular form, amicus, refer to the “friend of the court” status of these parties; amicus briefs are filed by parties not directly involved in the lawsuit or legislation at hand.

Image credit: Shutterstock

Scores of LGBTQ young folks gathered in Menlo Park, Calif., last weekend to find out exactly what a career in tech means for them and their queer peers.

They were taking part in a mammoth conference-slash-job-fair called Out For Undergrad. The Out for Undergrad Technology Conference, now in its second year, was held at Facebook’s headquarters and gathered together the crème de la crème of college-age programmers, with a special focus on diversity in sexuality and gender expression.

Gay and transgender engineers and developers from Box, Yahoo, Square, and Facebook held a panel session early in the first day of programming to talk generally about Silicon Valley’s attitude toward LGBT folks and specifically about their own coming-out-at-work experiences.

“Coming out is a constant process; you don’t just come out once to your friends at school or your parents,” said Michael Ruderman, a Stanford MBA student who runs OUTC.

“Whether you’re getting a job at a bank or a large tech company or a startup, the idea of coming out can be scary. For some people, that fear is legitimate based on the towns they come from and the families they have. The goal of this conference is to make those students worry just a little bit less.

“And if they end up at a company that doesn’t support them, that they know there’s a network in Silicon Valley that will support them.”

The Out for Undergrad organization supports young folks coming out early and often, even in the more conservative halls of business and finance.

“It’s a whole lot harder to come out later in your career,” Ruderman points out. “If you start lying about your girlfriend, eventually, someone’s going to want to meet the girlfriend. But if you come out early, you won’t have to admit to a lie. And the conversations you’ll have will be a whole lot less awkward.”

Also, he points out, the tech community can be one of the least threatening environments in which to come out. It skews young and liberal; its heart beats in San Francisco, the LGBT Mecca of the Western world; and when it comes to the industry’s engineering needs, no one at a tech startup is likely to turn away a qualified candidate.

“It’s one thing to tell the students this,” said Ruderman. “It’s another thing to bring them inside the walls of one of the most important companies in technology and let them see how true that really is.”

Diversity versus meritocracy

It’s accepted wisdom in the tech startup community that diversity is good. Diverse teams build better products that appeal to a wider, more diverse swath of the general population.

The problem is, accepted wisdom be damned, we are not a diverse community yet. We lack women, people of color, and LGBT folks in some of the most important areas of engineering, management, and product development.

Another point of accepted wisdom is that tech is naturally a meritocracy. A good startup tech person making hiring decisions will look through almost any aspect of personality or appearance in order to see the code or product on the other side. Hypothetically and ideally, the work speaks for itself, and good work gets job offers.

Clara Tsao is a student at UCLA; she’s studying biology with a computation emphasis. She told us she’s also taking sociology courses. The breadth of study reflects what she describes as a chameleon-like adaptability to change. Tsao has a part-time job (and a full-time job offer) at AT&T; she’s also been active as a hackathon participant in Los Angeles.

As a self-motivated engineer with a range of interests, Tsao is already showing signs of hireability in a dev-deprived world. And as a female Asian bisexual, she’s sort of the poster child for diversity, something she says is important to her when considering her career options.

“If you work in a bureaucratic environment and people can’t be themselves and create what they want to create, you’re not able to adapt,” she said. “I think that flexibility is really important. I look for a workplace with a lot of creativity, where I can push for what I want to get done.”

In that sense, Tsao is talking like other young engineers we talk to every day — people who want to have some ownership, who want to make product decisions, who want to be involved in company-shaping discussions, even though they know they’re still earning their wings. Diversity as she sees it serves as evidence that a company can embrace other points of view — including hers — when it comes to building things.

But much like her startup CEO counterparts, Tsao places equal emphasis on diversity and meritocracy. She’s not asking for special consideration or any handouts; she wants her work to speak for itself.

“Tech is so different from business,” she continued. “You show your qualifications and abilities through code and product rather than having to conduct a meeting. Part of it is merit-based. … It’s like Second Life: You can be an avatar, it just matters what you produce. I don’t think developers will judge you as long as you can produce.”

Why a gay dev is different

“Being out in tech wasn’t something that I knew companies wanted to happen until this conference,” said John Espinosa, a decidedly fresh-faced young man studying computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He won’t graduate until 2015, but he writes code in Java, C++, C#, and JavaScript, and he’s palpably inspired by the Internet.

“The whole reason I got into computer science is Ze Frank and the Nerdfighters … this community that did all these amazing things, a bunch of people finding a medium online to connect. And I wanted to be able to facilitate things like that.”

Espinosa’s excitement is contagious. Do you, yourself, remember the first year or two that you were really, sincerely excited about the Internet? Maybe it was the first time you discovered an amazing forum. Or when Twitter launched. Or when you fired up your first blog and got your first reader. And as a college sophomore, Espinosa is still high on that first taste of how the Internet can change lives and connect people.

And the fact that diversity-hungry startups are likely to look at him as a more interesting hire? “It makes me feel extremely excited, like there’s a network of individuals who are invested in my success,” he said. “Startup companies care about not only writing good code but also about your personal life, and they want you to be okay about coming into work and to feel safe.”

Espinosa had originally been discouraged from being out to the tech industry. Several people told him that a few entrepreneurs’ bad feelings toward the LGBT community might tank his chances of a brilliant career. “But overall, for me personally, through interactions with companies and recruiters, I’ve come not to fear it at all,” he said. “The work you do speaks volumes, and if companies don’t understand how you identify, it’s their loss.”

Espinosa, like all his peers at this conference, is a minority in a minority group. He’s not the stereotypical theatre gay. He’s not an artist or a hairdresser or a director. Finding other technically minded queer folks has been as mind-blowing for him as finding tech companies that accept and welcome LGBT applicants.

When we ask him what he’s looking for from recruiters, he doesn’t talk about LGBT affinity groups, partner benefits, or the company’s advocacy for same-sex marriage or participation in Pride events.

“What they can do is showcase their product in some way,” he said, “being able to show off your technology and the impact it’s having. I want to know I’m going to do things for your company that can blow people away.

“The second thing they can do is stress what I could do to make a huge change in the company.” In other words, he said, he doesn’t want to work on a product or feature so niche it never gets used outside a tiny department in a huge corporation.

“Leadership is huge to me, and being able to make important decisions is a huge part of who I am,” he said. “My career is not going to be sitting in front of a computer seven days a week. I want to impact where a company is going.”

Fascinatingly enough, Espinosa sounds exactly like every other young, on-fire developer I’ve talked to on the brink of a career shift. They, like the millennials they are, want to do big things. They want to be involved in big decisions.

In other words, entrepreneurs, you should hire a gay developer because he or she is exactly as talented, as enthusiastic, and as eager to take your company to big places as any of his or her straight peers. Sure, these folks may have a better understanding of certain demographics. They may have developed unique personal traits and strengths in a response to ongoing discrimination.

But at the end of the day, you should hire a gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, curious, or other developer because in all the ways that matter, they’re just like the rest of us.

How to hire a gay engineer

So, you’re ready to hire your first LGBT developer, programmer, or engineer. Here are a few tips from our interviewees at OUTC and our friends in the LGBT community about how to get started.

• Don’t make assumptions about someone’s sexuality — or, in some cases, gender.
• “Hire someone who does know that population, who is already a member of those different groups, with existing connections.” -Tsao
• “Having high-level employees, someone in the C-suite, be a vocal advocate for LGBT rights is a huge benefit to ensuring that LGBT employees feel safe and that LGBT talent wants to join those companies.” -Ruderman
• “Sometimes you don’t start out diverse, and you need to make changes to make that happen.” -Espinosa
• Take a look at your team and office through an LGBT person’s eyes. Does it look and feel safe and welcoming?
• “Have your hiring people aware of what’s appropriate and not appropriate to ask. Like in a new country, there are different customs and traditions.” -Tsao
• Be welcoming, but treat your LGBT employees like you treat everyone else. Don’t make an inordinately big deal about them and their personal lives.
• “Safety is a huge, huge thing. You will not have productive happy workers that stick with you and bring talent into the company unless they feel both safe and respected.” -Ruderman
• Bottom line: Be a great company to work for, and make great products. That will always attract the best talent, gay, straight, or otherwise.

Image credits: David Bush / OUTC, taken during OUTC 2013 at Facebook headquarters

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Hey, smart person! Just so you know, GoDaddy thinks of you as a social miscreant with horrible fashion sense and a body of unsurpassed physical awkwardness.

We’ve known for eons that GoDaddy thinks of women as wordless manequins with logo-boobs. That the company treats its spokesmodels like RealDolls is a fact as generally acknowledged as it is odious. Lest you think this is one of our trademark feminist rants, don’t worry. We wouldn’t waste our word count and your time on a topic so tired.

What bothers us more about GoDaddy’s Super Bowl spot is its denigration of smart people.

Check it out:

First point of irony: The “smart side” that GoDaddy seems to be implicating as generally undesirable? Those are most likely to be some of their biggest customers. You know, the people who build and maintain websites.

Second point of irony: The “sexy side” of GoDaddy that model Bar Refaeli represents? We’re having trouble figuring out what the “sexy side” of web hosting actually is. It’s not sexy; it’s utilitarian. It has nothing to do with looks or models or kissing or sex or boobs or weird cultural associations between our bodies and our brains. It’s just. Freaking. Web hosting. No one ever wanted web hosting to be sexy, GoDaddy.

This high school dichotomy GoDaddy perpetuates — the one wherein all conventionally hot people are vain sex idiots and all smart people are ugly (or all ugly people are smart) — demeans us all, the homely, the brilliant, the beautiful, the not-so-smart, and the alliances we all make during our lives and careers with others of varying hotness and intelligence.

But do let’s remember, GoDaddy is only perpetuating, not creating, this paradigm. Take a look at the whole “fake nerd girl” rants, memes, and assorted Tumblr-based backlashes: We expect our pretty girls to be dumb and our smart men to be ugly (and angry).

Honestly, it’s a paradigm I’ve come to love to hate. Every time I scrape myself out of my pajamas and put on a pair of fake eyelashes, my perceived IQ goes down at least 40 points. And as a devoted troll, I have had a lot of fun with that.

But for every time I’ve used the stereotype to my advantage, there are dozens more where it’s been used against me with much greater damage. (Again, see “fake nerd girl” Internet poop-storm.)

The best thing to do, then, is to carefully examine our own minds for traces of these prejudices. Is your smart friend dating a hot person? Are you assuming the hot person is less smart? Did you assume that nerdy-looking guy was smart or socially awkward just because he had a neckbeard and hipster-thick glasses? Be vigilant, my friends. Nerds of all genders, races, orientations, ages, and body types need to band together to ward off unfounded societal assumptions about ourselves and one another.

In conclusion, sod off, GoDaddy. You’ve long been a joke among advertisers and technologists alike. Your tactics suck, your stereotypes are completely unfair and unrealistic, and no one is laughing.

Have a GoDaddy account? If you’ve had more than enough logo-boobs-and-SOPA-supporting bullcrap for one lifetime, may we suggest getting away from the creepers who run that joint?

Here’s a detailed post on migrating off GoDaddy with little or no site downtime. There’s also a good LifeHacker post on taking your business elsewhere, and here’s a good Forbes article with five reasons to ditch GoDaddy and how to go about doing it.

Andrée Brazeau was a project manager with a degree in mechanical engineering. Eighteen months ago, she moved to San Francisco and started looking for work. A year into her job search, she had heard the same response time and time again: “We’re looking for someone with programming experience.”

So Brazeau learned how to code.

As the old women-in-tech debate fades out of the current hype cycle, a related trend is starting to gain momentum. In the the learn-to-code craze, online schools like Codecademy and in-person courses like Dev Bootcamp are springing up to meet a huge need for more developers across a wide range of industries.

Speaking volumes about both trends, Hackbright Academy is a women-only school in San Francisco that teaches its students everything they need to know to become entry-level programmers and get job offers right away — and does so in 10 weeks.

By putting her life and career on hold and signing up for a $7,500, full-time crash course, each student hopes to change her life, to jump from a salary of $30,000 or $40,000 to something that can sustain one person or even a family in an expensive city like San Francisco. But while this option is a quick fix for tech’s gender imbalance, some worry it’s not enough to fix the industry’s brogramming culture.

Girlschool

“For any person who wants to learn programming by themselves, San Francisco is the best place,” Brazeau said in an email to VentureBeat. “There are so many people in software here that it was easy for me to find group to help me learn.”

She started out with the usual suspects of online tutelage: W3Schools and Learn Python the Hard Way. Between these tools and a couple in-person groups, she was able to put together her first website.

“But you know, there is a big difference between building a static website and a web application,” she said. When she heard about the Hackbright program, she said, “I knew right away this was exactly what I needed.”

Ashley Lorden also had experimented with various online tools to learn to code. A nonprofit employee with an econ degree from Brown, Lorden was technically inclined and ended up doing web-related work wherever she went.

But to make the jump into a career as a software developer, Lorden said she only saw two options: returning to university for a computer science degree or doing nonprofit work at a tech company where she could eventually transition into a technical role. Neither route seemed particularly expeditious.

“I didn’t think it was possible to become a developer in a reasonable timeline until I found out about Hackbright,” said Lorden.

The most interesting part of Hackbright’s program is its gender split: 100 percent women students.

“I have always been surrounded by men,” Brazeau said, “at university in mechanical engineering and in my past jobs.” In spite of the radical change, Brazeau said she easily made friends and overcame her fears. In the end, she said, “I was not uncomfortable. I guess Christian and David were lot more uncomfortable than we were.”

By men, for women

“Christian and David” are Christian Fernandez and David Phillips, Hackbright’s cofounders. Fernandez is the veteran coder of the two; he’s worked at places like Fuzebox and Ask.com and has done a bit of developer instruction as well. In fact, Fernandez taught at the first-ever Dev Bootcamp.

Philips had been making apps with Fernandez for about a year, with Fernandez teaching him how to code, when the pair got the idea to offer a coding class. Eighteen guys and just three women showed up. As much as they wanted a 50/50 split between the genders, they realized it was unrealistic.

So why not offer a class only for women?

While that idea has been posited by many women’s groups in recent times, it seemed more audacious coming from a couple dudes. ”That was the biggest risk,” said Phillips in an interview with VentureBeat. “We’re two guys. We expected to be judged; it was kinda scary.”

Fernandez and Phillips started meeting with developer women’s organizations, “getting to know everybody and letting them know what our intentions were.” The duo was pleasantly surprised. “We really got a positive response from everybody,” Phillips said.

And with that, Hackbright was a go.

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Today, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) is taking aim at the U.S. Department of Defense and a handful of tech companies that block access to websites with LGBT content.

We’re not talking about adult content here; we’re talking about sites like The Trevor Project (youth suicide prevention) or sites dealing with LGBT health issues and legal rights.

The tech company in question is Blue Coat Systems. Blue Coat helps IT admins block potentially harmful or merely distracting web content by filtering out certain categories inappropriate for workplaces, schools, or other institutions with large networks.

For example, you could choose to block sites about gambling, alcohol, and pornography on a high school’s network. Or you could block bandwidth-sucking peer-to-peer sites on a workplace network.

In a statement on its site, Blue Coat specifically says that LGBT sites do not contain explicit or mature content and “are generally suitable for viewing by all age groups” and contain “reference materials, news, legal information, anti-bullying and suicide-prevention information, and other resources for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people or that relate to LGBT civil rights.”

Oddly enough, Blue Coat’s LGBT category is the only one of its kind that separates a group based on its non-chosen, legally protected status. No categories, for example, group websites with content on people with physical disabilities or people belonging to an ethnic group or even content on women’s issues.

Ergo, LGBT content is the only content of its kind that can be blocked — and blocked it is on military computers, school computers, and other places where legal and health information for gay audiences is not only needed but vital in many cases.

“GLAAD has reached out to Blue Coat Services to discuss its practices around LGBT sites,” a GLAAD rep wrote to VentureBeat via email today, noting that the organization is asking concerned folks to sign an online petition about this issue.

Additionally, the spokesperson continued, the tech community is encouraged to be extra vigilant about site-blocking and to report it.

“GLAAD encourages individuals to report any companies or schools using web-filtering software that blocks LGBT content. Reports can be submitted at GLAAD’s LGBT web filtering page. Of course, all personal information is strictly confidential. We encourage your readers to let us know if their company blocks LGBT webpages.”

In a statement to reporters, DoD officials said, “No filter is perfect, and some sites may have unnecessarily been blocked. The Department Chief Information Officer will work with relevant components to address these situations.”

Image credit: Shutterstock

So here I am, minding my own business, writing a long, researched think piece about why more women aren’t in technology, and I get an e-mail with the subject line, “Play with my V spot.”

Having occasionally written the odd line of clickbait in the past, I disregarded the tacky come-on and proceeded to the full e-mail, where I was greeted by a pair of long, sexy legs in high heels and a woman’s red-glossed mouth, parted in a perfect RealDoll state of relaxation.

It was an ad for Voco, a voice-control company. It wanted me to come to their CES booth and test out its tech “Because oral is better,” again with the image of the slippery-looking open mouth.

Sex sells, right? And disembodied female body parts coupled with Beavis and Butt-head-level puns are super-sexy, right?

Guys, this is why we don’t have more women in tech: It’s a cesspool. As long as we’re passing offensive schlock like this off as marketing for a major technology conference, we don’t deserve more women in tech.

Voco calls these ads “playful.” Maybe “playful” is in the eye of the beholder. Maybe the beholder doesn’t think of women’s body parts as playthings. Maybe that kind of play isn’t in any way related to voice-control technology or consumer electronics — you know, the kind that aren’t sold at Babeland.

Or maybe they just pitched a journalist who isn’t in the mood to play those pubescent, sniggering games anymore.

Voco, I regret to inform you that I will be unable to visit your CES booth this year. I moreover regret that I will never review, recommend, or use your products, no matter how interesting and innovative they are. I most deeply regret that you don’t have enough respect for me to put yourself on my level and look at the world and your ads through my or anyone else’s eyes.

I regret that the only consumer or reviewer you care about reaching is the man who likes women’s disembodied sexy-parts. I regret that you don’t know any men who think women’s brains are sexy, too.

I regret that you didn’t have a woman on your leadership team with the authority to nix these ads as the irrelevant smut they are. I regret that you’ll probably pass the buck to Dirk Marketing* for designing the ads, and also that Dirk Marketing doesn’t employ strong women in leadership roles.

I regret that not enough little girls in my kindergarten class took an interest in technology and went to college to study computer science and flooded the tech industry, making this kind of marketing out of the question.

I regret that the only women you think this industry can relate to are a smattering of tarted-up body parts — not even a whole person, not even a whole face.

Matthew Juaire, the marketing and sales director for Voco, I regret that you actually thought this email would work.

More than all that, though, I regret that you guys at Voco will probably write this off as the angry rantings of some hairy-legged women’s libber. But believe it or not, the views I’m expressing are the views of many consumers — you know, the people you’re trying to ultimately reach through your marketing efforts at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas? And if you want consumers to do you the great favor of purchasing your products, you can’t treat half of them like sex dolls and call it “playful.”

If you, dear reader, would like to contact Voco, it has a contact form on their website. Or you can e-mail the company’s marketing director, Matthew Juaire, at mjuaire@navvo.com.

Now, let’s get back to the news, shall we? This time, with less vagina hatred.

*Note: Dirk Marketing is run by Angie Dirk, a woman. Patriarchy wouldn’t be patriarchy without women’s participation, and we wish Ms. Dirk would have had the wherewithal to do better work and demand higher standards of her clients.

Next week, Google is presenting a web video series featuring brilliant, successful women in tech — specifically, women who develop and design technology and applications, and who advocate for more gender balance in our industries.

The series is part of Google Developers Live, an ongoing program of Google+ Hangouts for web and mobile developers. Sometimes the episodes are Office Hours with product leads from Google; sometimes, they’re moderated conversations with industry leaders.

The new series, called Women Techmakers, is the latter. A five-part series, Women Techmakers will bring viewers face-to-face with a bevy of Google’s own leading ladies as well as luminaries from other companies.

Notable participants include:

• Hilary Mason – Chief Scientist, Bitly
• Bettina Hein – Founder and CEO, Pixability
• Diane Greene – former VMWare CEO; Board of Directors, Google
• Stephanie Palmeri – Principal, SoftTech VC
• Leslie Bradshaw – President, COO and Co-founder, JESS3
• Megan Smith – Vice President, Google (pictured)

The series will begin November 5 and run through November 9. Episodes will air daily at 2:30 pm Pacific on the Google Developers Live page.

Interested parties can also ask questions and submit comments through the Google Developers page on Google+.

The series was inspired by an event held the night before Google I/O, the company’s developer conference held in San Francisco each year. The evening featured a panel discussion with five high-ranking Googlers: Smith, ads SVP Susan Wojcicki, engineering director Anna Patterson, payments VP Angela Lai, and product management director Gayathri Rajan.

Here’s the panel:

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More than a decade ago, I met an executive for lunch at a business club in a wealthy U.S. suburb. As we entered the club, the conversations grew oddly hushed. Heads turned sharply. Diners shot glares at me, as if I were a street person. The brusque maitre d’ looked blankly through me, as if I was invisible, while warmly greeting my lunch partner. My face flushed.

Clearly, dark-skinned folks – even a tax-paying, God-fearing American in a business suit who spoke perfect English – were not welcome there. How would the club members have reacted if I had a “foreign” accent? Women barred from all-male private clubs, or white males targeted by anti-foreigner sentiment while travelling abroad, know the feeling.

Luckily, times have changed in much of the United States, which is still the world’s model for business and cultural diversity. Today, a new global business and workplace diversity is dramatically changing the corporate world here and rippling overseas to modern and emerging countries alike.

Traditionally, the diversity practices of U.S. companies focused mostly on legal compliance and federally-required hiring data – a product of the civil rights era. The result? A more diverse workforce in the United States. But as the pace of globalization quickens, more U.S. and global business leaders – AT&T, Coca-Cola, IBM, Intel, Procter & Gamble, Cisco Systems, Unilever, Renault-Nissan, American Express and others – are raising diversity to a higher level than ever before and broadly redefining the concept.

Rosalind Hudnell, corporate director of diversity for Intel, calls it “the new calculus of diversity” in an interview, while Ernst & Young CEO James Turley and others describe it as a new global mindset.

Not surprisingly, technology and telecommunications giants – AT&T, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel and others – are at the vanguard of global diversity efforts. Why? Because much of the world still needs to get wired. And once the whole planet of 7 billion connects to the Internet and mobile devices, there will be 7 billion points of cultural convergence – a mash-up of people, ideas and businesses fusing in unimagined ways.

Not content with toothless mission statements and diversity policies, many companies are embedding diversity strategies into their daily business practices. They’re integrating their workforces and hunting globally for talent like never before. They’re seeking new ways of thinking and working. They’re looking for local knowledge and experience that expatriates don’t have. They’re studying different cultures, religions, languages and dialects. They’re creating hybrid teams from a world talent pool and migrant workforce of many millions.

“Smart people can be found anywhere in the human family,” Ron Glover, IBM vice president of global workforce diversity, said in an interview.

This has nothing to do with political correctness, and everything to do with business survival and the relentless march of commerce, culture and demographics. To truly compete, our workforces must reflect the world.

Beyond feel-good moral arguments for diversity, the most visionary companies know that cross-border diversity goes hand in hand with global economic growth. They know that a multicultural workforce and a cross-cultural mindset create real business value. While many continue to debate the volatile issue, a growing number of recent studies show that diversity clearly pays.

A McKinsey & Company study, for instance, of 180 publicly-traded companies from 2008 to 2010 found that firms with higher levels of foreign and women executives boasted 53% higher return on equity than other companies. “The findings are startlingly consistent,” write McKinsey principal Thomas Barta and consultants Markus Kleiner and Tilo Neumann. “These successful companies are simultaneously pursuing top-team diversity, ambitious global strategies and strong financial performance.”

In tech land, IBM, Cisco and Intel will remain global leaders in their sectors because they get the new calculus of diversity. They have: Truly multicultural workforces of all castes, colors and cultures. Strong global partnerships and alliances. Cross-border business, manufacturing and R&D facilities. Products and services tailored to a Babel of clients and consumers. “Inclusion and diversity are at the heart of globalization,” said Leo Scrivner, vice president of human resources at Cisco Globalization Centre East in Bangalore, India, in an interview.

The enormity of global change is mind-boggling, even for those who closely follow global business news. Many economic and cultural mega-forces are converging more rapidly and on a far greater scale than ever before: The growing migrant workforce of many millions. Record numbers of middle-class, multicultural consumers who are creating a new global mainstream. The fusion of popular and urban culture in hundreds of countries. The rapid rise of powerful multinationals that are challenging U.S. and European corporations.

In the corporate realm, much of the sweeping change comes from a rising breed of cross-cultural executives and entrepreneurs who are global citizens, cultural chameleons and business shape-shifters. Their cross-border leadership styles – a fusion of collaborative management practices and philosophies from West and East – are emerging as a model for the business world.

Among others, they include: Ralph de la Vega, AT&T Mobility CEO and a Cuban-American immigrant from Miami. He has made AT&T one of the strongest players in the multibillion-dollar U.S. and global market for Hispanics, among the most avid technology consumers in the world. David Neeleman, founder of JetBlue and fast-growing Azul airline in Brazil. A devout Mormon from Utah and a Portuguese speaker, Neeleman quickly gained the trust of Brazilian consumers and travelers, who helped Azul become the No. 3 airline in Brazil in only three years.

Carlos Ghosn, the multilingual CEO of Renault-Nissan with roots in Europe, Japan, Latin America, and the Middle East. Ghosn turned around the troubled Renault and Nissan 10 years ago, built an industry-famous alliance between the two, and is positioning the auto companies to thrive.

Claudia Fan Munce, head of IBM’s Venture Capital Group, is a native of Taiwan and Brazil and one of the most successful women in technology. Much of IBM’s success with 1,500 global startups and venture-backed partners comes from Fan Munce’s chameleon-like skill at blending into other societies by respecting their cultural values,  knowing their social customs and understanding their business practices.

In today’s fast-changing, borderless world, it’s easy to think that we’re not culturally biased. We jet around the globe for business and vacations. We hang with diverse friends and colleagues. We have a half-black U.S. President, a Latina Supreme Court justice, openly gay celebrities and broadcasters. Narrow-minded and xenophobic? Not us.

The truth is we know very little about the new wave of diverse business people and companies in the 21st-century economy. We’ve barely skimmed the surface.

The new era cries out for a more diverse global state of mind that transcends business borders and cultural biases. Companies may survive poor financial performance. But they’re less likely to survive long-term if they fail to know the world’s myriad cultures and people — whether a 15-hour flight away or a short walk down the hall. Whether we like or dislike the changes, the future is here. Our economic fate rests on understanding those who are different.

Edward Iwata is an award-winning journalist based in Silicon Valley, a former USA Today business writer and author of Fusion Entrepreneurs: Cross-Cultural Execs and Companies Revolutionizing the Global Economy. He blogs at CoolGlobalBizcom. Cover art by Edel Rodriguez.

The above is a sweet video our LGBT pals at Facebook cooked up for National Coming Out Day.

Facebook is one of the most openly supporting tech companies we’ve seen when it comes to queer issues. From taking on bullying head first to helping queer folks more accurately define online their real-world relationships to celebrating the panoply of queerness among its own employees, the social network is as full-on pro-gay as they come.

In fact, Facebook even won a coveted GLAAD award this year for its stance on LGBT issues, specifically for its creation of the Network of Support, a ring of LGBT organizations that consult Facebook on how best to protect and help the queer community within the confines of their social graphs.

“We’re committed to helping people express who they really are,” said COO Sheryl Sandberg in a statement on the company’s goals for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and other queer communities.

“We’re grateful for all you do in the world and honored to be able to build technology which can support your efforts,” she said.

In another statement released around the GLAAD awards news, The Zuck Himself firmly stated his desire for Facebook to be a safe and welcoming space for people of all persuasions to connect.

DEMO 2012 in Silicon Valley was sensational. Launch day for a new company unspools like a 24-hour rollercoaster ride; our own team returned to Washington, DC, sleep deprived, technology addicted, and ready to try out a dozen new web and social innovations shared by our co-presenters from other startups.

Yet as I stood outside the packed ballroom at the Santa Clara Hyatt grabbing the mini-sliders and puff pastries, the girl in me emerged. I couldn’t help but scan the crowd looking for other female co-founders and C-level execs.

Frankly, there weren’t too many. So I grabbed one of the few women I saw right away — Catherine Spence of HireQ — to help me hunt down more women for some pre-conference female bonding.

Coming out of an education non-profit, I am keenly aware that we need great models of female CEOs and leaders to inspire the next generation of girls to choose entrepreneurship and STEM related opportunities.

For instance, Inc. Magazine recently reported women make up half of the workforce but only one in four workers in the technology industry and 15 percent of senior management.

And according to the National Center for Women and Information Technology, women comprise only 11 percent of tech workers in Fortune 500 Companies.

So who were some of the rock star women of DEMO 2012? How can we all cheer them on as they build great companies that will build more jobs for our country? In their own words, here is what several had to say on how they got into technology and their advice for the next generation.

How did you get into technology?

Catherine Spence, co-founder of HireQ: I am a bit of an accidental entrepreneur.

While some people know they want to start a business (or many businesses), I was driven by my passion for this idea: everyone should love their job, and companies should love their employees.

My background is not in technology, but it’s clear to me that technology has the potential to solve some of the challenges that face job seekers and companies in finding each other. Using technology in sleepy industries like recruiting is way to create big change.

Rebecca Bahr, co-founder of Flinja: I got into technology from high school when my physics teacher would introduce us to various technologies and just make everything sound really cool from the invention of post it notes to solar systems.

Melissa Tyree, co-founder and CIO of Itography: Both my father and grandfather were programmers, so I took all of the computer science classes that I could in high school.

I ended up studying civil engineering at Texas A&M but followed my tech roots and was a systems analyst at Deloitte right after college. It seems that whatever industry I work in, tech always draws me back in.

Anna Anisin, CEO of 4sync: I think of myself as a geek in heels. I was that girl wearing pink lipstick and playing around with all the latest gadgets.

I finally took a leap of faith and launched my first startup in my early twenties and have been an active member in SF’s tech community ever since.

Courtney Titus, co-founder and CMO of GivingTrax: It all started in 2002 with my first marketing internship for KACE in Silicon Valley.

What career advice would you give young girls?

Tyree: Don’t be afraid to fail. Do things that scare and challenge you and you will never be bored. I encourage my daughters to try many different things. You never know what might inspire you!

Titus:Intern, if you’re in college. Find great mentors. Try and try again; don’t give up.

I’m currently part of the startup leadership program down in San Diego, and it’s been a great experience. I would definitely recommend it to other aspiring women in tech.

Anisin: No matter what career you pick, it’s very important to work hard and never stop believing in yourself.

It is also very helpful to find one or two solid mentors, who can guide you and also brainstorm with you. I wouldn’t have made it this far without the support from my mentors.

Bahr: My advice to all girls thinking of going into technology is to never lose hope and never get intimidated by others. Technology can be fun, creative and challenging, but its not an easy journey so don’t give up.

Spence: As women, we hear a lot about the challenges that we face balancing work and family as we move through our careers. These challenges are real, and there are no right answers.

What works for you might not work for your best girlfriend. But these challenges do not need to be constraints. We are empowered by choices, to construct our lives and our careers based on our values, hopes, and dreams.

I am reminded of a quote by Marianne Williamson: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

My advice to girls is to accept the challenge of dreaming big and making choices.

Photo credits: Demo Fall 2012

Julie Kantor blogs weekly for Huffington Post and In the Capital on issues around social recruiting, job search, entrepreneurship, women in the workforce and more. She is the co-founder of Barrel of Jobs, a startup that made its debut at DEMO Fall 2012.

This is a guest post from Media Ideation Fellowship’s, Erin Polgreen 

The Slurpee straw is the pinnacle of straw innovation. Widened to accommodate refreshment the consistency of baby food — and with a little shovel-shaped bottom — the Slurpee straw gets it done.

So, consider a Slurpee straw with a hole in the side: Can it even be called a Slurpee when the would-be slurper pulls unsatisfying sips of air through her straw? No. The technical term for that, I believe, is a soggy paper cup full of food coloring and sucrose.

The tech field has a similar problem. The pipeline for entrepreneurial talent, like a broken Slurpee straw, has many strengths and is delivering new products and tools faster than ever before. We are officially up to our ears in accelerators and incubators, which is terrific. There are so many accelerators, in fact, I recently learned that they’re running out of land for all of them.

Yet, despite intense growth in the field, today’s leading entrepreneurs are generally white and generally male. Women and people of color are sorely underrepresented, despite the fact that these demographics represent the largest consumers of emerging technologies, such as mobile.

Accelerators perform the valuable service of providing the founders of promising early enterprises with direction and support. Accelerators launch new ventures and support new talent by providing invaluable critical feedback, a network of support, and, often, access to future investors.

Before enterprises are ready for accelerators, however, what structures exist to support individuals capable of launching such promising enterprises? Few to none.

The learning curve for would-be entrepreneurs is incredibly steep, and valuable swaths of runway are eaten up by minutia and misdirection. Less time plus less support equals fewer leaders who are able to take the leap and start their own ventures. This is especially true for would-be entrepreneurs that are also women and/or people of color, contributing to the virtual absence of diversity we see among tech entrepreneurs.

When it comes to social entrepreneurship and social ventures, things can be even more challenging. Social change-makers who want to take the leap from idea to venture often need extra support developing strong business plans and smart pitches necessary to bring their concepts to life. The risks are greater.

Between having an idea, acquiring the hard skills, and arriving ready to benefit from everything that accelerators offer, there is a gap in the entrepreneurial pipeline. That’s right, techies: There’s a hole in our talent-Slurpee straw.

We must patch our pipeline and diversify entrepreneurship. We need a means of supporting talented individuals with early-stage ideas–ideas that are mere twinkles in techies’ eyes. This concrete problem is something I’m trying to address with the Media Ideation Fellowship program. According to one recent estimate, only 1 percent of tech entrepreneurs are African American, despite the fact that the coastal capitals of U.S. tech — Silicon Valley and New York City — are among the most diverse places in the United States. The fact is that we are leaving talent untapped. Tomorrow’s entrepreneurs need better early-stage support.

As a sector, technologists are failing to utilize the full sum of talent our nation offers. Why is it that we should strain to think of a dozen African American or women tech entrepreneurs? Or even a half dozen? A recent article in The Guardian claims that young entrepreneurs are the future – yet all of the visionary, game-changing entrepreneurs mentioned in the article were men.

Long prosper the accelerators capable of helping ventures reach their potential. Might we offer them better prepared and more diverse enterprises to choose from, though? Let’s give individuals opportunities to fulfill their potential. Let’s flood the tech sector with a new crop of diverse, talented leaders that we, as a nation, are capable of providing.

Erin Polgreen coordinates the Media Ideation Fellowship program, which supports entrepreneurs for social good at the earliest stages of their careers. Applications for the fellowship’s inaugural class open on Sept. 11, 2012. Learn more at mediaideation.org. 

I feel extremely lucky to be working at a job that combines my passion for technology, entrepreneurship, and meeting interesting people who dare to challenge the status quo. Don’t get me wrong, after living in the outwardly glitzy New York for four years where Gucci loafers and bottle service were practically synonymous with success, Silicon Valley is a breath of fresh air.

However, there is one thing that unsettles me as much here as it did in the New York finance world, and that is the lack of women.

There are many theories why we are under-represented in the tech industry, but one that resonates most with me is women’s skewed perception of technology and venture capital.

During my time at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (“the GSB”), one of my favorite professors, Joel Peterson introduced me to the book Mindset by Carol Dweck, which changed my thinking style in a very fundamental way. In the book, Dweck draws a distinction between two personality types:

• The “fixed” aka “Enron” mindset: People who believe they are born with a set of traits that cannot be changed and therefore have a tremendously difficult time bouncing back emotionally from failures.
• The “growth” mindset: People who think of failures as learning opportunities and therefore consistently seek out challenging situations to improve their skills. (This mindset applies to anything from business to dating, but more on that later…)

People in the fixed mindset are defined by stereotypes and expectations. For instance, a recent study shows standardized test-takers who are forced to identify themselves as female or African American end up with statistically significant lower scores as compared to a control group who does not have to disclose such information. Of course, an individual’s mindset often lies on a spectrum between fixed and growth and can always change over a lifetime, but it is hard to deny that stereotypes still play a powerful role in people’s career aspirations.

And herein lies the problem in my opinion: the Silicon Valley tech stereotype is fixed, and not one that plays favorably to women.

When most people think of the average tech entrepreneur, the pale guy who codes while playing World of Warcraft in his gadget-filled basement pops up. This image goes against society’s definition of femininity, and as a result, little girls who aspire to become extroverted women who have interests ranging from fashion to business do not consider computer science or engineering as a viable career path.

I have been told repeatedly by my colleagues in tech that I do not fit into the Silicon Valley mold….that I seem too “New York” or too feminine to be a VC. Truth is…I love fashion, I love art (I was this close to enrolling in Parson’s School of Design), and I read InStyle just as regularly as I read VentureBeat. But I am also a former gaming addict — I programmed my own RPG game in middle school, and I was an engineering major who spent half of my weekends in college writing code in Matlab.

These things are not mutually exclusive, and being an engineer, a computer programmer or a venture capitalist does not mean a woman has to give up what makes her feminine. But I recognize that I was very lucky. My mother is an engineer and fashion designer in her spare time, and I never believed that a woman had to be one or the other.

So how do we solve this problem? By having more female tech entrepreneurs and VCs in the public eye who are unafraid to break down stereotypes (for instance, stylish, highly competent leaders like Yahoo’s new CEO, Marissa Mayer). Ultimately, more young women need to see that programmers and VCs don’t always have to be a “he”. In 2011, only 17 percent of computer science grads were women, and only 5 women appeared in the Midas List, Forbes’ annual list of the top 100 venture capitalists.

When I look at Blumberg Capital’s portfolio companies, I feel very lucky to be able to look up to some amazing female entrepreneurs, including Philippa Pauen at Wummelkiste, and Joanna Riley at One Page Company. But, we need more women in technology who are willing to break the mold. Silicon Valley has got to produce a female Mark Zuckerberg or Vinod Khosla, so girls will aspire to be in tech from a very young age.

Jenn Wei is a venture capitalist at Blumberg Capital, an early stage venture capital firm based in San Francisco. Prior to Blumberg Capital, Jenn worked in technology investment banking and consumer/fashion private equity in New York. Jenn received her MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and B.S. in Engineering from Duke University. Follow her on Twitter: @jennjwei

Culture Kitchen co-founders Abby Sturges and Jennifer Lopez want to share treasured recipes that have been passed down through generations of families. The San Francisco-based startup has turned home-cooking expertise into a viable small business.

Full disclosure: I was enrolled in a design and business class with the founders at Stanford.

Culture Kitchen connects foodies with local cooks willing to share tantalizing, home-cooked, ethnic food. ”These are men and women who have immigrated to the US and brought with them their incredible generations old recipes,” the team explains on its Kickstarter page. “No fancy chefs here, just really passionate people who love cooking and love sharing their culture through food.”

The founders hope to raise $150,000 on the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform. In the first 24 hours since launching the funding page, they have already received over $8,000 in financing. If successful, they plan to develop six new cooking kits, which will include live videos filled with advice from the chefs. In the current form, the pre-packaged kits contain all the ingredients, 3 recipes with step-by-step directions and photos, and personal mementos from the cooks.

Culture Kitchen’s co-founders, mother’s with no formal training, spend months compiling recipes and rooting out hard-to-find ingredients for the kits. Place an order through the company’s website, and learn to cook Paloma’s Poblano Mole or Suchrita’s Chicken Tikka — personalization is core to the user experience. Included are tips and tricks from the chefs, so you’ll feel like you’ve inherited a family recipe.

Culture Kitchen’s co-founders, Jennifer Lopez and Abby Sturges

When I knew the two at Stanford, they were focused on organizing cooking classes to bring a second income to women who loved to cook, mainly drawn from nearby neighborhoods like East Palo Alto. Meanwhile, wealthy students from the university with limited skills in the kitchen were eagerly participating in the cooking classes, often held in local community centers. Suddenly, the smell of pumpkin curry was wafting through dorm rooms, replacing the usual ramen and Mac ‘n’ Cheese.

“Students often left classes inspired to go recreate dishes at home,” said Sturges in an interview with VentureBeat. “Sadly, they would report that they weren’t able to navigate the ethnic markets we sent them to and couldn’t get the ingredients they needed.”

This feedback inspired the team to eke out a new model to scale the business. Now they work with 15 master chefs and send kits to hundreds of subscribers on a monthly basis. It’s great for a dinner party of 4 to 6 people, or you could make like Jolie O’Dell (our resident domestic goddess) and singlehandedly prepare a week’s worth of recipes.

In a foodie city like San Francisco, we are inundated with options. Why choose to order a kit through Culture Kitchen? The founders feel they are onto something unique with the subscription model and the mingling of cooking and culture. “You know we all eat every day, and some of us cook every day.  That felt like such an untapped opportunity, taking the mundane activity and super charging it with meaning,” said Lopez.

Image courtesy of The Peninsula Press

When Marissa Mayer threw away her VP job at Google to take over as Yahoo’s new CEO, she was making a very conscious career decision, and one that would take her straight to the top of a huge, global company.

While female tech founders are growing in number all the time, women heading up established companies in technology and working as prominent partners at influential VC firms are still something of a rarity. But they do exist, and they’re shining examples of ambition, talent, political prowess, and perseverance.

Check ‘em out, and be sure to congratulate Ms. Mayer on her long-awaited C-suite position.

Top image courtesy of wavebreakmedia ltd, Shutterstock

At the GLAAD Media Awards last weekend, Facebook was recognized for its support and protection of the LGBT community over the past couple years.

But why, you ask, would an ostensibly neutral, public platform want to support and protect any group of users, especially ones in such a controversial demographic?

In a video sent to the GLAAD gathering, Sheryl Sandberg speaks to the lesbians, gay men, bisexual and transgendered folks, and their straight allies in the audience, saying, “We’re committed to helping people express who they really are,” referencing the site’s “in a domestic partnership” and “in a civil union” relationship statuses, but also nodding to the company’s ongoing work with GLAAD to stop online bullying, harassment, and hate spech towards LGBT youth and adults.

“We’re grateful for all you do in the world and honored to be able to build technology which can support your efforts,” Sandberg said.

Facebook was recognized by GLAAD for its years of work to stop online bullying of gay youth in particular, an effort that was spurred by a rash of high-profile gay teen suicides in 2010. We were on hand to capture the awards show itself, a star-studded event that highlighted the importance of positive LGBT role models and fair and accurate portrayals of queer folks in the media.

Accepting the award for Facebook were Andrew Noyes and Sara Sperling, whose longer comments about the “network effect” of creating an LGBT safe space online and the stories Facebookers see and hear about their queer users are included in the extra clip below at around 2:15.

We told you earlier that Facebook had won a coveted GLAAD Media Award for its significant, long-term work with and for the LGBT community. We told you that the awards show would be a Cirque du Soleil-meets-Glee-meets-Beverly McClellan, star-studded orgy for the senses.

So natch, we just had to go there and snap a few pics to show you.

Glee’s Diana Agron (pictured above) acted as MC for the evening. Accepting Facebook’s award were Facebookers Andrew Noyes and Sara Sperling, who drove the creation of the Network of Support, a ring of LGBT organizations that consult Facebook on how best to protect and help the queer community within the confines of the social network.

Also of interest to you webizens, Huffington Post took home a GLAAD Media Award for writer Max J. Rosenthal’s heartwarming post, Adam and Pete: Love in a Time of War, a true story about two men who met at West Point and were married just days after the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. (Side note: HuffPo also took home the blogosphere’s first-ever Pulitzer Prize a couple months ago.)

Without further ado, here are the pics we gathered at Saturday’s star-studded fete:

Have you taken inventory of your coworkers recently? And have you noticed the lack of women, and specifically women in leadership roles within the science, technology, engineering and math (or STEM) fields? Why is that?

To me, the definition of a leader is someone that looks at the big picture, takes action, guides and directs a group and is strong enough to stand alone in the decision making process. Women by nature are born leaders.

We are taught at a young age to think of others and take on responsibility. There are plenty of highly respected women leaders throughout the world; however, there needs to be more women leaders in STEM. As Harry Truman once said, “Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.”

It is important for more women to take on leadership roles in the STEM fields. Women leaders can attract and, as mentors, help guide more women toward rewarding careers in these fields.

The value of mentorship is immense. Finding a mentor early on can do wonders for building confidence and adding to one’s job satisfaction. The people who we choose as mentors need to have the capacity and capability to lead us toward success. A mentor is not only someone who is willing to take the time to teach us techniques and processes, but also someone who takes an interest in our long term advancement.

Because this person can see one’s potential, a mentor is willing to go beyond job duties and put in the extra work to ensure that we gain the understanding that is needed to progress.

Women need to be confident in their abilities before anyone else will be. If not, women will be unable to prove to others that they are capable of a role that they have been hired to fill. A women’s confidence is her lifeblood. Without it, women begin to second guess that the right decisions were made regarding their careers, which, in turn, inhibits them from making clear choices moving forward.

Maintaining confidence at all levels throughout your career is important, especially as a leader. Showing a lack of confidence helps others buy into the notion that women do not belong in the STEM fields.

Early in my own STEM career, there were times I just wanted to go into the bathroom and cry — but I didn’t. Instead, I took a deep breath and refused to let others intimidate me.

As women, we need to let our work do the talking. Showing someone that we are capable and confident in our work speaks much louder than words. By constantly performing our jobs at a high level, we will prove our abilities and help build our own confidence.

Women are gaining numbers in traditionally male-dominated fields, but we are still significantly outnumbered in STEM occupations. Getting talented women into male-dominated careers is one struggle, while keeping them is another.

The issue is especially apparent in STEM careers, which are extremely important to the global economy. Attracting and retaining more women in STEM careers will help tremendously to improve diversity, maximize creativity, and boost competitiveness.

Having people with different mindsets, capabilities, and imaginations on production teams improves the creative process and helps to minimize avoidable mistakes. Products rooted in science and technology are likely to better meet the needs of both men and women if the products are designed by a team comprised of both genders. It is a matter of designing products that are compatible with a broad audience; it is a matter of safety; and it starts with attracting more women into STEM careers and STEM leadership roles.

As a society, we learn about the world and advance our well-being through science and engineering. The United States may be known around the world for its higher education, but compared to many other leading and steadily emerging countries, we lack a strong focus on educating scientists and engineers.

One significant reason that we have fallen behind is that we do not encourage our female students to pursue career paths in science, technology, engineering or math. This needs to change, as the lack of women in STEM fields will continue to plague our country until all students, regardless of sex, have adequate opportunities to explore math and science throughout elementary, middle, and high school.

If we want to attract the best and brightest minds into the fields that will move us forward, we can no longer look to only half of the population. More women can contribute to our field and we can help make that happen.

As women become more prevalent in STEM careers, more and more young girls will begin to recognize the additional career opportunities open to them. With more women in the field, it will become more evident to young girls what they, as scientists, technology professionals, engineers or mathematicians, can offer the world.

Without being able to see this link, they will continue to have problems envisioning certain positions as viable possibilities, even if they have some intrinsic interest in the subject matter. If girls cannot visualize themselves in STEM careers because they have never seen women in those positions, they will be much less likely to ever use their innate aptitudes and abilities in a math or science oriented specialty. That will truly be a loss of gigantic proportion, for our women, our profession and our country.

What will your role be in changing the face of STEM?

Karen Purcell, P.E., is the founder and president of PK Electrical, an electrical engineering, design, and consulting firm in Reno, Nevada. She is the author of Unlocking Your Brilliance: Smart Strategies for Women to Thrive in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.

Top image courtesy of Kurhan, Shutterstock

Forbes today published its Midas List, an annual recounting of who’s who among the top investors around the globe.

We took a look at the tech sector, and of the top 100 investors chosen to be listed, only five were women.

Giving wide berth to the complicated sociological discussion of why only five women appear on the Midas List for tech investment, let’s take a look at these remarkable ladies and their careers.

Mary Meeker

VITAL STATS:

• Firm: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
• Education: MBA, Cornell University; B.A., DePauw University.
• Position on the Forbes Tech Midas List: 42

Mary Meeker was a Morgan Stanley analyst — and quite a good one — until January 2011, when she came to Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. But her Internet street cred stretches back deep into the dotcom era.

Meeker’s claims to fame start with “The Internet Report,” a Morgan Stanley publication from 1995 that became a sort of bible for dotcom investors. Dubbed “Queen of the Net” in 1998 by Barron’s, Meeker was part of the Morgan Stanley team that oversaw Google’s 2004 IPO. In 2006, a writer for Fortune said Meeker was “absolutely first rate when it comes to spotting big-picture trends before they come into focus,” and in 2010, the magazine called her one of the ten smartest people in the technology industry.

Meeker is doubtless one of the strongest and smartest people in tech, but her biggest strength in her career might be her unrelenting focus on data. Her background as an analyst gives her work a no-nonsense focus on numbers. Since, as her research has shown over the decades, around 5 percent of tech companies create around 90 percent of the industry’s wealth, she looks at the balance sheet first, market opportunities second, and management teams third.

Recommended: Text and audio from Meeker’s 2001 speech at her alma mater; The Internet Report that started it all.

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This week, we told you about Etsy’s new grant program to get women into a summer school for hackers.

Marc Hedlund (pictured) is Etsy’s vice president in charge of all things engineering-related, and he’s actually the one who spearhearded the initiative. Hedlund first approached Hacker School co-founder Nick Bergson-Shilcock earlier this year with the idea of providing financial support to women who wanted to attend Hacker School’s intensive summer session.

“Marc’s idea was awesome: Etsy would host and sponsor the next batch of Hacker School and provide scholarships to get as many qualified women into the batch as possible,” Bergson-Shilcock wrote on the Hacker School blog.

The idea isn’t immune from controversy. On aggregation site Hacker News, commenters expressed concerns about the grant program, writing things like, ” I dislike the implicit message being sent by offering money specifically to women to go into engineering/computer science” and “How [is] giving money to women because they are women [not] sexism?”

So, to clarify the grant program’s premise and to get the information straight from the horse’s mouth, we went to Hedlund for a frank chat about why and how Etsy is singling out women for financial aid in their programming educations.

VentureBeat: Why does Etsy think it’s important to specifically reach out to women?

Marc Hedlund: While I’ve seen very small numbers of women in engineering departments elsewhere, it seems like Etsy has both a huge amount to gain from employing female developers who love and use the site, and a great platform with which to recruit women, whether engineers or otherwise. The company has historically had many very strong and talented women working with us, but not enough of them in Engineering and Operations. We felt that we had a better shot at making a meaningful difference on this issue than almost anyone out there, and that in some ways we stood to benefit more, too.

VB: What role to women play in the larger Etsy community?

MH: Women make up the majority of Etsy members, both as buyers and sellers. Hundreds of thousands of women run their businesses on Etsy. Within the company as a whole, we are fairly well balanced. Although the Engineering and Operations teams are mostly male, many of the other teams are heavily female. It’s safe to say that women play a vital part in everything that happens on the site.

I would say that this makes Etsy a great place to begin to address the larger problem across the industry.

VB: What will the summer program be like?

MH: Unlike most schools, there are no grades, teachers, or formal curricula. Instead, Hacker School is entirely project-based. Two of these rules are “No well-actuallys” and “no feigning surprise.” We don’t have these rules to make Hacker School “female-friendly.” We have these rules because we think they make Hacker School human-friendly. We have them because they help remove the ego and fear of embarrassment that so frequently get in the way of education.

Students have written Ruby gems, Python web frameworks, JavaScript libraries, and code in everything from Erlang to Haskell. Everyone writes free and open source software, because it would be antithetical to Hacker School to write code that couldn’t be read, used, and improved by others.

VB: What skill level do you need to apply? What languages do you need to know?

MH: Applicants should love programming. That’s most important. The Hacker School program spends time talking about technical problems and writing code, not working on startups and products.

They look for curiosity, passion, raw intelligence and a desire to build things. The best way to show this is to have a track record of writing code and learning new things.

Hacker School will be selecting female students the same way they’ll be selecting the men. They’re looking for people who are passionate about writing code, playing with technology, and learning in a collaborative, group environment. The Etsy grants will be given based on financial need, which will be determined on the honor code. It’s important to note that Hacker School is free. The scholarship money is meant to cover living expenses. New York City can be pricey!

Image courtesy of James Duncan Davidson, Flickr

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Etsy’s community is famously female-driven, so it makes sense that the company would look to women in hosting a developer initiative, as well.

The company is an online marketplace for handmade and vintage goods, and it boasts a huge audience of women — lady crafters, lady artists, lady online retailers, lady shoppers. Bringing lady developers into the conversation isn’t just an affirmative action move to get more women involved in tech; it’s an acknowledgement that Etsy is, to a huge extent, a marketplace populated by women, and Etsy wants to give more women “behind the curtain” access on the tech side, as well.

Etsy’s newly announced Hacker Grant will bring a class of developers to the startup’s Brooklyn headquarters for the summer, where they will hone and perfect their coding skills. For women who need financial support to participate in the summerlong program, ten grants of $5,000 each will be awarded to ten lucky hackers.

The program is being conducted in partnership with Hacker School a full-time summer school in New York. Hacker School is open to any participants, male or female. The organizers are hoping to bring in 40 participants this year, and they’re aiming for a 50/50 gender split. The Etsy grants are simply an extra incentive for women to join the summer school.

The idea for the grants was spearheaded by Etsy engineering VP Marc Hedlund. The Hacker School team said female and male applicants will be held to the same programming standards (a.k.a., no “girls’ handicap”).

“I’ve spent the last several years in heavily male-dominated environments,” writes Hacker School co-founder Nick Bergson-Shilcock on the program’s blog. “I think about them whenever I’m in a room of programmers and there’s only one woman. No matter how welcoming and friendly the environment, you burn at least a few cycles being cognizant of the fact you’re different from most of the people around you.”

The Etsy/Hacker School program is free for anyone who wants to attend, and it begins on June 4, 2012. Applications are open now for the summer batch, and interested women programmers can apply now for an Etsy Hacker Grant.

Top image courtesy of StockLite, Shutterstock

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Women might be outnumbered in tech, but there’s one area where we outnumber the dudes: virtual freelancing.

Yes, according to one study, women make up 55 percent of the online marketplace of freelancers. Data from talent firm Zinnov show the online talent pool is between 4.5 and 5 million strong, with more than half that number being composed of women.

Other stats from the same study show the market of female freelancers is growing quickly, with more than 100 percent growth in the women online freelancer population during 2011. While women currently make up less than half the overall workforce, Zinnov said its study showed women more willing to work virtually to give themselves a better work/life balance. In fact, some sites, such as Shelancers, focus exclusively on the needs of female freelancers (although for employers, using such a site may violate employment law, but hey, it’s a nice thought).

Altogether, the study concludes that between 10 and 15 percent of the total workforce could be composed of virtual freelancers over the next several years, with strong support from women workers.

Around 40 to 45 percent of the online talent pool is based in the United States, the study showed, with between 12 and 15 percent of online freelancers calling India home. Canada and China are also hubs for virtual freelancers.

As far as job types are concerned, the vast majority of jobs and fastest-growing verticals for online work are multimedia (including web design), writing and editing, and technology jobs such as web programming. Zinnov expects to see niche skill sets such as SEO and mobile development continue to increase in popularity and demand.

Using online or virtual freelance help is a relatively new phenomenon that we’ve talked about in some detail in the recent past. Online freelancers are more affordable for small businesses and can give a lot of flexibility to newer companies, especially cash-poor, bootstrapped startups.

To get the data for this study, Zinnov analyzed 30 of the largest marketplaces for virtual freelance talent, including powerhouses like Elance, oDesk, and Freelance.com. The research showed the marketplace trending toward $1 billion by the end of 2012, with Elance, Guru, and oDesk claiming the lion’s share of those transactions and jobs.

Top image courtesy of ostill, Shutterstock

Jeremy Lin is the talk of the NBA. Sportswriters everywhere are busy cranking out column inches on what people have called the ultimate Cinderella story: The emergence of an Asian-American Harvard graduate, seemingly from nowhere, as one of the NBA’s biggest stars.

On February 3, Jeremy Lin was the Knicks’ third-string point guard. Less than two weeks later, Sports Illustrated announced that they would put him on the cover of the February 20 issue with the caption, “Against All Odds.”

Yet one group wasn’t surprised by Lin’s success. A new breed of basketball statheads (the hoop equivalent of the SABRmetricians popularized in “Moneyball“) had predicted Lin’s success from the start.

Prior to the 2010 draft (where all 30 NBA teams passed on Lin) their analysis ranked Lin #10 out of all players, and #1 among undrafted players. This analysis is purely statistical; the models don’t consider height, vertical leap, foot speed, and perhaps most importantly, skin color. They simply look at statistical contributions made during basketball games.

Statistical analysis continued to rate Lin highly on his rookie season. He produced .157 wins per 48 minutes played, or more than 50% better than the average player, who produces .100 wins per 48 minutes played. (Incidentally, Carmelo Anthony produced .140 wins per 48 minutes played that season).

He also shone in the NBA’s Developmental League (a minor league of basketball), where he produced at a .211 clip.

In other words, when you looked at pure production, Lin was a top prospect. His rise only seems unlikely when you consider non-basketball factors, like his race or educational institution.

Trendy sports blog Deadspin tweaked the madness best, titling a February 7 blog post, “Asian Harvard Grad Somehow Succeeding In New York.”

It’s a funny one-liner, but it underscores a more serious issue.

Lin’s high school coach noted that his star player wasn’t recruited by any colleges, despite leading underdog Palo Alto High to the California state title. He also noted that the following year, a number of scouts came to games to watch another of his players who wasn’t as good, but was African-American.

Stereotyping has legitimate purposes. If you knew that Harvard University had produced twice as many presidents (8) as NBA players (4), you would be right to guess that any generic Harvard basketball player would be unlikely to make the NBA. But stereotyping only makes sense in the absence of better data.

In the case of Jeremy Lin, publicly available statistics proclaimed his value, but scouts preferred believing in stereotypes to trusting in data.

Sadly, this kind of bigotry isn’t limited to the world of sports. Even here in Silicon Valley, where we like to think of ourselves as a meritocracy, we practice a particularly pernicious form of stereotyping on a daily basis.

Investors love to talk about “pattern matching.” A common expression is, “I’ve seen this movie before.” There’s a reason why entrepreneurs constantly pitch themselves as “the AirBnB of ice skating” or “the iPhone of Valentine’s Day cards” (hmmm, that actually doesn’t sound so bad….).

This made sense in the absence of better data. When investors had to make decisions based on a PowerPoint deck and some rough prototypes, falling back on stereotypes was a good strategy. Indeed, I like to describe the default investing strategy of Silicon Valley as “invest in charismatic 20something Computer Science graduates from Stanford, MIT, and CMU (with Berkeley, UIUC, and Harvard as fallbacks), as long as they’re male and either Caucasian or Asian.”

In today’s world, with the ability to judge entrepreneurs based on a vast amount of publicly available data, ranging from social media to GitHub, with the ability to launch MVPs and generate tangible engagement and conversion statistics without raising money from investors, we now have the better data we need to make stereotyping AKA “pattern matching” AKA bigotry obsolete.

But old habits die hard. Just in the last few months, we saw a CNN special on black entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Whether or not you feel that CNN used ambush tactics to help stir up controversy, the fact is that African-Americans make up only 1 percent of venture-backed entrepreneurs nationwide. And just last month, Whitney Hess conducted an analysis of top venture capital firms that showed that the most gender-balanced firm was Kleiner Perkins at 23% female, while the majority of those firms had zero female investors.

Discussing such topics makes people in Silicon Valley uncomfortable. Few of us like to think of ourselves as racist or sexist. Yet I know of many entrepreneurs who feel that they are overlooked because of their skin color, gender, age or simply because they didn’t go to the right schools.

Jeremy Lin has been called the Asian Tim Tebow (or is it that Tim Tebow is the white Jeremy Lin?); we need to extend the lessons of Jeremy Lin beyond sports to the startup world. Decisions need to be based on performance on the field of play, not race, gender, age, or education.

And for those who are the first to recognize “pattern matching” for what it is, the rewards can be great. How many of those other 29 NBA teams could use Jeremy Lin on their team right now?

Chris Yeh is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and angel investor based in Silicon Valley. He also blogs at Adventures in Capitalism, where the above story also appears. The story is reprinted here with permission. 

“However, I don’t want other naive youngsters to be forced to make the same decision and find an unsatisfactory or unsavory result.”

These are the words of Aaron Moy, co-founder of AnonyMouse.

AnonyMouse is a web-based network of vetted mentors who are available to coach young, closeted, or struggling LGBT folks through the tough times.

AnonyMouse is more than just Q&A and more than just crisis intervention, said Moy. It is focused on long-lasting relationships between gay youth and mentors with a range of experiences, from kids and marriage to conservative families and careers in athletics.

We first ran into the AnonyMouse team at a hackathon in San Francisco last year. The Hack for Change event brought together many bright engineers who also wanted to have some positive social impact through their work. AnonyMouse ended up being a runner-up in the hackathon, but the team kept building the concept and website long after the hackers had gone home.

“The version we have now is actually a from-scratch rewrite versus the hackathon version,” said Moy in an email conversation with VentureBeat. “We learned a lot (especially technically) from implementing our ideas but ultimately decided to rethink the entire experience.”

Aashay Desai is the technical mind behind the app. He built a quick SMS-based interface using the Twilio API; the app would allow mentees to talk to mentors simply and confidentially. His stack also includes Node.js with socket.io (via Now.js) and the Express framework. You can read the full run-down on Desai’s blog.

“What started as a pet programming project quickly became a true passion,” he told us. “I began to develop a true empathy for the cause.”

Soon enough, AnonyMouse will include a mobile app, as well, Moy revealed. Also, the co-founder told us the team sees uses for the concept far beyond the gay community.

“I think an anonymity-based platform could effect a plethora of demographics,” said Moy, “from recovering drug addicts and alcoholics to battered women — pretty much any group of people who are too afraid or ashamed to speak to their friends and family and want to speak to others who have gone through a similar experience. An anonymous online app could serve as a stepping stone before you gather the courage to physically attend a meeting.”

Moy told us the story of a young man that he had mentored who had tried many times in the past to find guidance only to be taken advantage of.

“He was also pertubed by the fact that there weren’t any sites that focused on the everyday, closeted gay man. He wasn’t in a crisis mode and didn’t have any particular questions he wanted answered; he just wanted someone to talk to where he could vent and blow off steam. He wanted to talk about things he’d never voiced before, like his attraction to guys in his class.

“Though I was able to help him, the experience was very clunky and took too long to develop,” Moy concluded. “With AnonyMouse, I hope to speed up this process and give anyone in the closet the helping hand they need.”

Image courtesy of prodkov, Shutterstock

However, as the cloud emerges as a truly viable alternative to IT, it has become clear that the transformative CIO must rethink the entire IT paradigm and evolve his or her organization into one that delivers competitive services to the business.

This new strategy requires not only a very different approach, but also quite literally a different mindset. In my current role at technology business management provider Apptio, we’re seeing an increasing number of women taking the helm of IT organizations, which makes me wonder whether women possess certain qualities that make them particularly well suited to this role of services transformation.

One of the reasons for this shift is that the very nature of IT has undergone its own evolution. No longer is IT focused on managing and delivering a portfolio of IT products. Rather, the advent of providing services has translated into a demand for IT to speak the language of the business.

Consequently, collaboration, communication, and the ability to manage change are now the vital skills for IT leadership.

Women are more inclined to work collaboratively with others rather than implementing changes with an iron fist approach. In a 2008 survey of female IT leaders by the CIO Executive Council, women were reported to take a more cooperative team approach than their male counterparts. The female survey respondents said they try to listen, empathize, and build connections with employees and stakeholders.

Rebecca Jacoby, CIO for Cisco, has proven particularly skilled in managing and communicating with her staff during efforts to re-organize the company four years ago.

As Cisco made structural changes to re-orient their organization into the role of service provider, Jacoby armed employees with the ability to speak their mind and give input on the changes. To do this, Jacoby and other senior management set up “cohorts” comprised of 12 to 15 people and one leader, bringing together employees from various teams from within the organization and enabling them to share their ideas about leadership.

The cohorts at Cisco now meet eight times a year. Each session revolves around a topic picked by senior staff, with at least four related to Cisco’s transformation into a services organization. By implementing cohorts, Jacoby fosters open and ongoing cross-functional communication between IT stakeholders and the business.

In addition to working collaboratively, women CIOs are particularly effective at incorporating in-depth knowledge of the business in decision-making. In 2005, research conducted by the University of New Mexico and University of California-Irvine showed that females have more white matter in their brains than do their male counterparts. Since white matter works to network various parts of the brain, this might explain why women are often more effective than men in integrating and assimilating information from distributed regions.

This might also explain why women CIOs are more effective at assimilating data from across the business into something meaningful that leadership can act upon.

Debbie Gash is another IT leader who effectively applied her understanding of multiple parts of a business to make complex decisions. Gash is the longtime vice president and CIO of Saint Luke’s Health System, a network of 11 hospitals in Missouri. By surveying the various hospital departments and ongoing technology projects, Gash was able to determine that Saint Luke’s needed a new system for tracking the IT budget. Once the new program launched, Gash used her institutional knowledge to determine what problems to tackle first. Gash juggled the needs of distinct hospital groups, employees, and vendors to create a smooth, company-wide system.

A final area in which female CIOs prove particularly effective is their ability to embrace change and guide organizations through periods of major overhaul. CIOs need to influence others who may be resistant of change, and women often bring the flexibility and tact required for such maneuvers.

One female leader who demonstrated grace during major change is Debbie Guild, CTO of Bank of America. When her bank merged with Merrill Lynch, Guild needed to create a unified financial transparency program.

At the time, Bank of America and Merrill Lynch were each using their own applications. Guild needed to assess the existing systems and also consider the complexity of the organization’s financials. At the time, Bank of America had 100,000 servers, product costs that changed monthly, and outdated cost forecasts. To top it off, employees within the financial transparency team weren’t convinced that they needed major change.

To begin the overhaul process, Guild called a meeting with her team and hashed out the problems. They eventually reached what she terms a “come to Jesus” moment. The team agreed to launch a new project — and made an important decision to brand the project to galvanize the various stakeholders — in order to improve organizational financial transparency.

With her employees, Guild worked to establish guiding principles for the program and develop a new system to bill the actual usage of Bank of America’s products. She made sure that the company’s head of finance and head of enterprise CTO were on board with what she was doing, and insisted that both verbally agree that they were going down the correct path. Then, Guild recruited people who were enthusiastic about the project and eager for results to move the project forward.

The new program is now producing real results and an improvement in financial transparency. By using both communication and diplomacy skills, Guild effectively steered the company in a new direction and was able to marshal widespread employee support.

In today’s service-oriented IT world, the ability to work effectively with others has become critical. Likewise, the role of the CIO continues to evolve from a purveyor of technology to one who delivers capabilities to their business users. Female leaders such as Jacoby, Gash, and Guild represent just a few examples of this changing mindset, one which puts a premium on communication, collaboration, and consensus building.

Chris Pick is chief marketing officer at Apptio, a Seattle-based provider of technology business management solutions. Apptio is focused on changing the world by giving IT and finance leaders the insight they need to minimize IT cost, make ROI-optimized decisions, align IT resources around services that align with business strategic needs, and ensure that business leaders clearly understand the value of IT.