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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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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The plaintiffs — Dawn-Shemain Weeks, Margaret Hines, and Shannon Schlagenhauf — formerly worked as executive assistants for CMEA and are making 35 different allegations regarding inappropriate sexual behavior. Most of the complaints are direct at John Haag, who served as CMEA’s chief operating partner between 2006 and 2012.

“Throughout the duration of their employment at CMEA, Haag spoke and/or behaved in sexually and racially inappropriate ways. Comments and ‘jokes’ about women, sex, and race were a common and tolerated part of the work environment at CMEA. CMEA’s owner and partners also spoke and behaved in ways that inappropriately injected sex into the workplace,” the lawsuit outlines.

Allegations the three made against Haag include watching porn on his work computer, rude nicknames, explicit and vulgar gestures, and threats to fire the plaintiffs if they “did anything to displease him.”

On April 30, the plaintiffs decided to report Haag’s conduct to CMEA’s three managing directors, who were allegedly aware of it through the reports of other women. They reportedly conducted an investigation through the third-party human resources providers, which uncovered years of the alleged behavior, and negotiated a “buy-out” of Haag’s interest in CMEA’s funds. The firm then took measures to improve the workplace atmosphere, but it allegedly continued to act inappropriately and make comments implying the plaintiffs’ jobs were on the line. Weeks resigned at the end of January.

The plaintiffs are claiming to have suffered significant injuries, trauma, and distress that have adversely impacted their mental and emotional health as well as financial loss. They are asking for a jury trial for all causes of action, general and compensatory damages, attorney’s fees and costs, punitive and exemplary damages, and prejudgment interest on all amounts claimed.

Sexual harassment and gender discrimination are pervasive problems in the male-dominated tech world, and part of this is due to the lack of women in the industry. A study conducted by Stanford in conjunction with the Kauffman Foundation and Women 2.0 found that nearly 18 percent of women in tech had experienced discrimination, and the average tech workplace is not an inviting environment for women and minorities.

Last year, another major sexual harassment scandal hit tech when Ellen Pao brought a sexual harassment and gender discrimination suit against her employer, well-known venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Mistreatment of women in tech extends all the way from executive offices in Sand Hill road to offhand jokes in co-working spaces.

Women represent less than 10 percent of venture capitalists, 3 percent of startup founders, and 14 percent of executive officer positions.

Warning! Not for innocent eyes- read the full suit below:

Haag Case

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

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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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.

The social web has a big problem with self-harm.

Cutting, anorexia, bulimia — all of these behaviors are vilified, glorified, and graphically depicted on services as mainstream as Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr and on more private communities like LiveJournal.

As outsiders to these issues receive a window with a view, they have reacted in a variety of ways. Some mock. Others call for programmatic censure. A few try to find ways to help.

But the problem and its solution are too intertwined to make helping very simple. As a HelloGiggles blogger wrote recently:

Part of me feels like Instagram should delete each and every one of these photos. Disable all related hashtags. Show zero tolerance for such content. I know that even if Instagram washes itself clean of these posts, the problem does not go away. But as much as I personally love social media, I think it’s exacerbating the problem. It’s making these girls feel like they’re not alone, but in a backward way. For as many people that get help and solace from others suffering from similar issues, there are just as many who get encouraged to continue their highly dangerous and destructive behavior.

It’s a dangerous, sad, baby/bathwater scenario, one that young filmmaker Monica Zinn has been exploring and researching for some time. Zinn, a 19-year-old college sophomore, is of the perfect age to relate to her subjects’ struggles with youth culture and with the new world of online media. Her 2011 short film Perfection won awards for its depiction of eating disorders, mostly in teenage girls. Her new project, Self-Inflicted, is currently in the crowdfunding stage and aims to correct some common misperceptions and create empathy for those who engage in self-harming behaviors.

And, as Zinn knows well, the Internet is and will continue to be a huge part of that overarching goal, as much as it is part of the overarching problem.

Here’s our interview with Zinn about her upcoming film, her research, and how the social web is shaping and being shaped by self-harm.

VentureBeat: A big part of media these days is the web and social sites. There are at least two aspects to self-harm and the Internet: The first is the proliferation of techniques or methods of self-harm and encouragement to indulge in such behaviors, and the second is a nonjudgmental support system for people caught in cycles of self-harm.

Monica Zinn: I also think there is another one, and it is the judgmental talk from people who are uneducated about self-harm. #cuttingforbieber was started as a joke by someone on 4chan. It’s so obvious that we don’t know nearly enough about this practice and its effects if people are willing to start a trending topic like that.

VentureBeat: It seems that by trying to get rid of all evidence of self-harm on the Internet, one might also be throwing out valuable emotional resources for people in need.

Zinn: We shouldn’t be trying to get rid of all of the evidence online; from what I’ve heard and seen, the Internet can be a beautiful place if you are looking for help. We can’t force people to find help, though, but erasing the evidence of self-harm on the Internet won’t do anything.

People were self-harming way before the Internet — and a lot of these kids don’t have anyone else to talk to besides people on the Internet, and there are a lot of people there to help them. For example, I run a blog now for the film where I post anonymous stories, and people have found it very therapeutic. Gives them a chance to connect!

You just have to know how to use the Internet. And I think we really need to be teaching our kids not only how dangerous the Internet can be but also how great and wonderful it can be!

Growing up, I was taught by adults how awful and scary the Internet was, and that I shouldn’t be on it, logging onto chat rooms. But I did anyway, and I taught myself how to use the Internet for good. Not all children will do this, though. We need to stop being afraid of our children using the Internet; they’re growing up with it like oxygen, and can do a lot of good by being that connected with one another.

We can teach our kids how to safely use the Internet without only exposing them to all of its horrors. The Internet is like the real world: You can’t go walking down an alley at night and feel completely safe. You also can’t go to certain websites or talk to certain people.

VentureBeat: What motivates you as a filmmaker? Why have you chosen these difficult topics?

Zinn: As a filmmaker, I am motivated and driven by the stories around me. These difficult subjects chose me, really.

I had an experience when I was 16 that was not only traumatic to me and my family but made me feel like people no longer saw me just for me anymore. They saw someone they felt bad for, someone they couldn’t connect with. My mom would always tell me, “They’re young. They don’t understand.” But I have seen that the simple fact of knowing there is misunderstanding doesn’t make the hurt any easier.

Being mislabeled is incredibly harmful, but I noticed that I am a mislabeler as well. We all are. And that’s OK as long as you are aware of it and work against it. We all put people into categories so that we have a basis on how to interact with them. … We do it with everything: age, race, gender, education, accent, and nonverbals. We judge people before we know them naturally because otherwise, we have to put in effort with every single person we meet.

People who don’t fit the “norm” are going to be mislabeled. Heck, if you’re labeled as the “norm,” you’re being mislabeled. But it’s not as harmful as the other.

I make films to show people the truth they’re missing, the truth they passively ignored. The truth they thought they knew. I’m still very young, though, and I really make movies to understand the things I don’t already. I see myself mislabeling something and I think, “Huh — Why am I doing that? What can I do to stop that?”

VentureBeat: What makes themes on self-harm so unique to young women in particular?

Zinn: Well, self-injury is evident in all genders, ages, races, and so on. I think what we have been seeing is more women are willing to talk about it. Women can be drawn to the practice because we internalize our emotions, generally speaking. We were “allowed” to cry, but we have also been stereotyped as more emotional because we have been brought up to be OK crying or showing emotion.

Men, on the other hand, have not grown up with this, so men who turn to self harm generally won’t speak about it as much for the same reason they won’t cry in front of someone. It’s not commonplace — yet.

Also, young women grow up with a lot of pressure to look/act a certain way different than men. In fact, men don’t have that much pressure, appearance-wise, growing up. … So, as young women, we take it upon ourselves and instead of blaming society and the media for creating and promoting nearly impossible standards for us to live up to, we blame ourselves. “I’m not good enough, I’m not pretty enough. I’m worthless.”

Anyway, because generally women internalize, those emotions build up. And you release them through self harm.

VentureBeat: When “normal” people see portrayals of eating disorders or self-injury, what are the range of responses you’ve seen?

Zinn: Most people are pretty shocked when they see self-injury or eating disorders portrayed in the media or in real life. … People do one of two things: disconnect or connect.

Usually when people connect it’s because they’ve had personal experience with it either with themselves or a loved one. Everyone else pretty much disconnects, and those are the people I am trying to reach. Films have a chance to connect everyone on a universal level — so do books! Not that many people read anymore, though. Narrative films can be interpreted a bunch of different ways and automatically disconnect you from any real connection to the characters/actors because they are not real. Documentaries don’t give you this option.

VentureBeat: How do you think self-harm is portrayed correctly or incorrectly by the media and the culture?

Self-injury normally isn’t portrayed correctly in media or culture. I remember in middle school people would say, “Not like I’m going to go cut my wrists about it.” Or, “Why don’t you go cut about it,” as if it were no big deal.

For the most part, the portrayals of self-injury I’ve seen in the media are pretty sensationalist and are built for the purpose of getting a reaction. … I remember the media freaking out over [singer] Demi Lovato’s eating disorder and self-harm issues, and the only reason people found out about them was because someone noticed scars in a public photo of her and she was forced to explain herself.

VentureBeat: How is self-harming in the digital age different from self-harming in past eras, pre-Internet?

Zinn: Self-harm is really a new thing as far as people knowing about it. The awareness and education are growing. So there isn’t much information about people who self-harmed before the digital age. I know that it used to be classified as something only young women with eating disorders did.

Like anything, though, the digital age with self-harm allows self-harmers to connect with each other, for good or for bad. But honestly, it’s better for them to connect than not. You can’t force someone to not hang out with the “wrong crowd”; they are with them because they feel connected on a level that they’ve never felt with anyone else. And if you let them figure it out, they will find out what they really want for themselves. But yanking away the only community they’ve found is just wrong.

When I first saw a thinspiration blog, all I wanted to do was get it shut down. Then I saw how much my friends were getting from it. This wasn’t my battle; it was theirs. They have to show themselves they have the power not to look at blogs like that. If it’s forced, there will be no results.

VentureBeat: How do you think blocking specific hashtags or search terms does or doesn’t help the situation?

Zinn: Removing a hashtag does nothing. Do you know what it does? Makes it harder for people who don’t self harm to not see self harm, and that’s not what I’m about at all.

If anything, those hashtags show us what we’re doing wrong. We need to be embracing our youth and educating them and understanding them.

We also can’t act like we do understand them! With every generation there are new problems and new solutions, we can’t keep acting like because we were 13 once, we know what it’s like to be 13 in today’s world. We need them to tell us what they need, and be willing to give it to them. And again, taking that hashtag away defeats the purpose. Everyone knows that you stick to something when you choose to do it yourself.

Image credit: photomak/Shutterstock

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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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.

AMC’s Mad Men paints a picture of a male-dominated world, in which women either stayed home with the kids or enlisted as secretaries while their husbands took on huge clients on Madison Avenue.

While this stereotype has largely changed and women now account for 46.9 percent of the U.S. workforce, women in senior management positions in the growing ad-tech industry are still severely under-represented, seeming to better reflect Don Draper’s era than the twenty first century.

Although a very male-dominated industry, it’s hugely dynamic, constantly evolving, employing many smart individuals, and none of us could imagine working in any other sector. However, it can be challenging, especially for females. So, based on my years of experience in the ad tech world, I’ve compiled our top tips for women who want to break through the allegorical glass ceiling and succeed as an executive without sacrificing family or sanity. Good luck!

Embrace what sets you apart from your male co-workers.

Women tend to diminish their abilities or doubt their qualifications far more than men do. It’s fair to say that all of us have worried about being ‘one of the guys’ in order to fit in with our colleagues and customers and felt we had to mirror our male colleagues. However we’ve realized this is not necessary and no one had asked us to be one of them. Women are different than men. We speak differently, we act differently, we are innately compassionate, great listeners and excel at problem solving. Be yourself and play to both your personal and gender-specific strengths.

Be vocal and make sure your boss knows your aspirations.

Be sure to establish open communication with your boss – and maybe even your boss’ boss – especially in regards to your career trajectory. Men are more aggressive about letting everyone know what they’ve achieved and where they want to go, whereas women tend to be more passive or equate their success to good luck rather than their own skills. Put yourself on the radar of the people who not only need to know you have goals for yourself, but can help you achieve them.

Invest in building your own brand

Identify the personal qualities you bring to your business that are distinct from your colleagues and make sure this is recognized. Visibility is important – don’t be shy in highlighting your successes to ensure you receive the credit for them. Use all opportunities to share your thoughts about your company and the industry, be that via networking, writing articles or publishing blog posts, to bring you greater exposure and position yourself as a source of expertise. Also take advantage of any speaking opportunity that might arise: although conference agendas are dominated by men, organizers are crying out for good female speakers to address this imbalance.

Talking is good: find a mentor you relate to.

Your mentor should be someone who you feel can offer both the emotional and technical perspectives you need to grow your career. They need to have experienced the work and family challenges you’re facing and make you realize that you actually aren’t crazy when attending a ballet recital or ducking out of the office early to go to a pediatrician appointment the week before a big pitch. Talking is positive, so never see mentoring as a form of weakness: men do it all the time but just in a different environment.

Working long hours does not mean working effectively.

Who says that the person in the office for 12 hours a day is more effective than someone who works seven hours? It’s simply not true. Rather than leaving your calendar entirely open, book time for key activities such as research, brainstorming, keeping up to date with the industry, etc. See if you can even book days to leave early to spend time with your family. As a result, you will probably find that you are more efficient without spending more time in the office because you’re shifting focus from everything to just the most important things.

Base hiring on improving your team’s bench strengths, not who may be next on maternity leave.

When in a position to hire, women will often focus on the person and their qualifications rather than predict what their family might look like in a few years. All of us have been in a position multiple times to hire female candidates despite our male counterparts questioning whether the prospective employee may go on maternity leave in the future. This should not be a determining factor and women themselves should not stop forwarding their careers because they are planning a family. If someone is right for the job, that’s all that matters.

Don’t pay attention to what everyone else is doing.

Success in ad tech doesn’t mandate that women prioritize work over family – but that impression is often what drives many women away. While women like Yahoo!’s CEO, Marissa Mayer, may have cut back their maternity leave, this is their personal choice and others may choose a different career and parenting approach that works for them. No one should have to put their life on hold. Find a way to make it work for YOU.

Make a plan to balance your personal and work lives.

If you find that you love your career in ad tech and also have a family – or plan to start one – don’t immediately assume you can’t do both. Make a plan with your spouse to balance work and family, rather than simply reacting to demands on your time. That way, you both will know what’s happening, there won’t be any surprises and you can support each other in both career and personal aspirations.

Learn as much as you can from as many people as you can.

To succeed and lead within an ad tech company, you are expected to know the product and its underlying infrastructure. For many women, this is the hardest part of their job. Don’t be afraid to sit in a room with an expert (either an engineer or a product person who knows their stuff or a veteran who has been in the industry for decades) and get answers to your questions. The deeper your knowledge of the industry and your product, the more success you will have in your career, and the more valuable you will become to your company – be you male or female.

Remember to take care of yourself.

While you need to take care of your work responsibilities, you also have to take care of your family and yourself! Find time to exercise, even if it is at 5 a.m., and, as hard as it sounds, try to eat healthy – even on the road. If you are not happy and healthy, the rest will never work.

With reporting by Nicolle Pangis and Maureen Little

Denise Colella is the chief revenue officer at Maxifier, a company that provides inventory optimization services to online publishers, ad networks and leading media companies throughout North America and Europe. 

Prior to joining Maxifier, Colella was the CRO at AudienceScience, and a vice president at Yahoo!. 

Follow her on Twitter @decolella

Facebook has released some truly awesome statistics about your embarrassing parents and how weird they get on your Facebook timeline.

In a breakdown of how families interact on social media, data scientist and Facebook employee Moira Burke shows us a few surprising facts: A child is least likely to add their parent as a friend around age 20. And daughters are much more likely to initiate Facebook-based communication than sons are. Daughters are strangely infantilized in comments and posts, and parents just loooove posting Kenney Chesney videos to their kids’ walls.

“We investigated anonymized and automatically processed posts and comments by people self-identified as parents and children to understand how conversation patterns with each other might be a bit different from those with their other friends,” Burke wrote today on the company blog.

Although the data was stripped away from individual identities and broken into one-, two-, and three-word segments for processing, Burke said, “We are happy to see that our data surfaces the affection, care, and closeness of family ties.”

The research starts with the initial friendship requests. In spite of the well-worn phrase, “I’m not your friend; I’m your parent!” — those words so endearing to moody teenagers — parents are more likely to initiate a friendship on Facebook than are their offspring for most age groups. That stat is only reversed for young teenagers; for 13-year-olds, for example, the child sends the friendship request in 65 percent of cases. Once the child is 20 years old or so, that stat drops to 40 percent.

When it comes to ongoing communication, parents and daughters are relatively equally chatty with one another. Sons, not so much, as you can see from the charts below.

But the weirdest part (at least to this gender studies minor and loyal Bitch subscriber) is the terminology used in wall posts for sons and daughters and, to a lesser extent, mothers and fathers.

Daughters are frequently referred to with diminunitives and childlike language such as “baby girl/babygirl/baby/babies,” “angel,” and “princess.” Also common are words referring to physical appearance — “gorgeous,” “beautiful,” and “picture” — and affectionate terms such as “darling” and “all my heart.”

But for sons, the language is wildly different. While “I love you” pops up once in the son-specific word cloud and moms will use the phrase “my handsome son,” other words are more like, “the game,” “ass,” “shit,” “money,” and “dude.” Interestingly, moms tend to tell sons “don’t forget” and “be careful,” phrases that they don’t say as much to their daughters.

Both genders will hear some form of the phrase “I’m proud of you,” but only sons showed a high occurrence of the phrase “thank you.”

Similarly, for parents, moms are more likely to get words of affection from sons than are fathers; and they’re more likely to get compliments on their physical appearance in photos. But terms of gratitude, like “thanks,” “thank you,” and even “support” only showed up in the dads’ word cloud.

Why are we not telling our female family members “thank you,” people?

Finally, the country musicians swept the most-shared videos category, with parents and kids sending each other clips for Tim McGraw’s “My Little Girl,” Brad Paisley’s “Letter To Me,” Martina McBride’s “In My Daughter’s Eyes,” Kenney Chesney’s “There Goes My Life,” and Carrie Underwood’s “Don’t Forget to Remember Me.”

We’re off to collaborate on an obnoxiously feminist master’s thesis; you go ahead and have a look at these charts. And call your mother.

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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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.

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

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

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

Leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers got hit with a sexual harassment and gender discrimination suit earlier this month, rocking a firm that has been known for bringing women into the venture capital industry.

The complaint (below), filed May 10 in superior court in San Francisco, reads like a melodrama. Ellen Pao, who is currently an investment partner with the firm, alleges that in 2006, fellow partner Ajit Nazre pressed Pao to have sex with him on a trip to Germany. Nazre, who had been at the company for two years longer than Pao was managing her trip to Germany. After refusing and returning home, Pao alleges that Nazre continued his advances until she acquiesced and began a personal relationship with him later in 2006.

After ending the relationship after three intimate encounters, Pao says Nazre (pictured right) launched a five-year campaign of retaliation against her, the complaint claims. This included convincing a chief executive she was courting for a seat on one of her company’s boards to join one of Nazre’s boards instead. VentureBeat has identified that company as RPX Corporation, a patent litigation management company.

Pao’s complaint also alleges that KPCB partner Randy Komisar gave her a book by Leonard Cohen, “The Book of Longing,” that contained graphic sexual imagery, and invited her to dinner on Saturday night when his wife was away, a combination that Pao felt was “inappropriate in the workplace.”

Her complaint also alleges that the firm as a whole did not respond adequately when she brought the harassment to the attention of senior partners, including John Doerr, Ted Schlein, and Ray Lane.

TechCrunch broke the news earlier today.

Pao’s lawyers declined to comment when contacted by VentureBeat. KPCB provided a statement, which we’re including below.

Needless to say, KPCB is feeling some heat from the issue. Some are saying that the company should have informed the limited partners associated with the venture firm. Melinda S. Riechert, an employment lawyer with Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP (which is not involved in the case), thinks this would have been a mistake on Kleiner’s part.

“It’s exceedingly difficult to deal with a case by a current employee, because people have privacy rights. You try to keep these things on a need-to-know basis,” Riechert told VentureBeat. “The more people who know about small suits and claims… the more people who can be accused of retaliating.”

Kleiner is likely to argue that Pao turned to a harassment case after she began to receive poor performance reviews, as a way of deflecting responsibility. Pao’s lawyers, of course, will argue that this gets things backwards, and that the poor reviews were part of the harassment.

Why would Pao stay at a firm for years, given the negative climate? Riechert puts it into perspective:

“She obviously has the right to [keep her job at Kleiner], and I have many cases that I handle that are brought by current employees… It’s difficult, it’s not easy for everybody, but they have the right to stay employed and we make sure that rules and law are followed.”

Kleiner has been otherwise well-known in the venture industry for bringing on female partners. The venture firm has 12 female partners at the firm, of which nine are active investors. A number of these female partners have names well known in Silicon Valley, including Mary Meeker, who has invested in Twitter and Groupon, and Aileen Lee, who recently decided to create her own seed fund. However, its newest fund, KP15, only includes one woman among its 10 managing partners.

Here’s the full text of Pao’s complaint.

Here’s the statement from Kleiner:

In response to a discrimination complaint filed in the Superior Court of San Francisco by Ellen Pao, Christina Lee, a Kleiner Perkins spokesperson, stated the Firm regrets that the situation is being litigated publicly and had hoped the two parties could have reached resolution, particularly given Pao’s 7-year history with the firm. Following a thorough independent investigation of the facts, the firm believes the lawsuit is without merit and intends to vigorously defend the matter. The Firm has been a diversity pioneer in its industry and was one of the first venture capital firms to hire women as partners. The number of women partners at the firm is one of the highest within the venture capital arena and the firm has actively supported women in all respects.

Photo of Ellen Pao via KPCB; photo of Ajit Nazre via djevents/Flickr

People often say Silicon Valley is not like the rest of the world. We’re more tolerant of failure, embrace risk-taking more eagerly, get more enthusiastic about technical solutions, and have a huge, deep pool of engineering and marketing talent to draw from.

As a result, the region has produced some of the most disruptive, world-changing ideas: The semiconductor, the integrated circuit, the PC, the Internet, and the search engine, to name a few.

Then there’s Facebook. The company has transformed interpersonal networking online and has captured a huge portion of the world’s internet users. Facebook’s initial public offering later this week is about to produce a new crop of billionaires and millionaires, who will go on to become the Valley’s next crop of entrepreneurs and angel investors. That cash will help fuel the next round of innovation.

But does the Silicon Valley model still work? Or is it possible that living in a world of its own could come back to bite the Valley’s tech community? I think we’re already seeing the beginnings of a dangerous disconnect.

For instance, Facebook’s aggressive moves to control all the information it possibly can about its users has made many people a little nervous — no surprise there.

A bigger issue: Silicon Valley is dominated by men and tends to favor products targeted at men. That might make a certain sort of sense in the realm of enterprise technology, where most executives still are male and, therefore, so are most IT decision-makers. But it’s just crazy for any consumer-oriented product (outside of inflatable dolls and men’s razors). Women are the primary purchasers of almost everything. They make 85 percent of all consumer purchases, if we believe that 0ft-cited figure. Even with computers, which you might think are a guy’s domain, women are responsible for 66 percent of the purchases, and ladies are spending more than ever on consumer electronics, almost as much now as men.

Last week I was speaking with Mariam Naficy, founder and chief executive of Minted, and she drove the point home. Minted, a stationery and art sales site, is a female-centric company with an all-female executive team and a customer base that’s primarily women. I asked her what it was like running a company like that in the midst of Silicon Valley.

“It is a little disconcerting when you go outside your peer group,” Naficy said. “In Silicon Valley — unlike most of the country — companies are marketing to a different demographic, a more male demographic. … It can be a little bit of a lonely endeavor.”

While Minted eventually found backing from the A-list of Silicon Valley investors (its $5.5 million second round in November, 2011 was led by Benchmark Capital), other companies have struggled.

Naficy told the story of Pinterest, of which she was an early fan. She recalled introducing the company to seven or eight investors, all male, who just couldn’t see how it could be a serious business. (My initial reaction to the site was bewilderment, too. I mean, I’ve already got Pinboard, why do I need Pinterest? Shows how clueless I was.)

Fortunately, smarter heads prevailed in the end. Pinterest went on to raise $27 million in October, 2011, led by Andreessen Horowitz, and the company is now worth an estimated $500 million, a reflection of the rocketlike growth that has made it, by some estimates, the third-largest social network. Eventually, even the boys have to pay attention.

Silicon Valley has other blinders working against it. Geography, for instance: If you’re not in San Francisco’s backyard, you might not as well exist as far as venture capital is concerned.

As Rod Turner noted earlier today on VentureBeat, according to the National Venture Capital Association, the VC industry invested $3,945 per person living in Silicon Valley in 2010, compared to a nationwide average of $43 per person — and just $15 per person in Detroit.

No surprise, then, that while the recession grinds painfully on in the rest of the country, Silicon Valley seems to be in the middle of a boom. Not only are we seeing no recession here, we’re hearing talk of a bubble. While VCs might deny the bubble talk, the fact that Facebook just paid $1 billion for a photo-sharing app suggests that, yes, pricing might be a little out of whack. A lot of money is just sloshing around these days.

All this contributes to a climate where everyone thinks they should start a company and believes they have the ability to do so. One early-stage startup CEO I spoke with last week talked about the difficulty of hanging onto engineering talent, because engineers keep leaving to start their own companies. Unfortunately, he noted that most of these engineers lack real business sense. There’s a disconnect between their technical skills and their ability to create products that people actually want.

For a similar take on this problem, read VentureBeat columnist Penelope Trunk’s story on Browsemob and the dangers of building a product before you know what your customers actually want.

The most successful companies to emerge from the region in the past decade have understood that they’re selling to Main Street, not El Camino Real, and have been willing to alienate their core audience of geeks if necessary to reach a wider market. Apple’s the classic example. Facebook, to its credit, understands this too, and is used by 900 million people, 57 percent of whom are women and most of whom are not in Silicon Valley.

My advice to startups and investors? Get outside the Valley and talk to people. Come here for the funding but keep roots somewhere else in the world. Read Zikria Syed’s take on the importance of startup culture, because your company’s culture will have a big impact on the market you wind up reaching. And keep it real: Hire people outside your peer group, because otherwise, you’ll have no chance of recognizing when you’ve got blinders on.

Is Silicon Valley losing touch? Let me know what you think.

Bug photo: Raul Lieberwirth/Flickr

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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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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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

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.

Why is this such a stubborn issue? Why aren’t more women making it to (and staying at) the top?

The answer may lie in a deeper understanding of why women leave and of what they bring to the table.

Women now represent about half of the hiring pipeline, entry-level positions and total workforce. But at each level of management, women represent a lower percentage.

According to research from Catalyst, while women represent 47.6 percent of today’s workforce, in the Fortune 500 in 2011 they represent only 14.4 percent of executive officers, 7.6 percent of top earners and 3.2 percent of CEOs. The professions reflect the same pattern. Catalyst reports, for example, that in law firms women make up about 4 percent% of associates but only 19 percent of partners.

Where do women go between the entry and upper levels? They leave. All relevant research confirms that women have higher attrition rates than men.

Even if women don’t literally leave, they disengage, stall out or just quit climbing. “Leave” is shorthand for all of that. And, when they literally leave, few drop out of the workforce; most go to another employer or start their own businesses.

There is lots of focus on the issue. Last spring the Wall Street Journal devoted several pages of ink to the question, “Where are all the senior level women?” A new Catalyst research report shows the problem is not that women aren’t doing the right things to get promoted. Those who do still lag behind men. A recent article in McKinsey Quarterly concludes that the problem lingers because it arises from “invisible mind-sets.” I agree.

The “quit rate” of women is hardly a reason not to hire and support women. It is a reason to try to keep them. The business case for gender diversity in leadership is compelling.

Companies with a balance of men and women leaders do better on most financial measures — return on equity, return to shareholders, stock price, etc. They tap into a huge women’s market. They attract the best talent from the gender-diverse talent pipeline. Gender diversity is simply good business.

To increase retention rates of women, business leaders need to understand why women leave.

The first cause people tend to name is work-life balance, the fact that women generally spend more hours a week caring for children and aging parents. This factor is obviously real. But it is overblown.

First, not wanting to burn bridges when they depart, smart women often use the common and acceptable reason, they “want to spend more time with family,” rather than talk about other factors. Second, research shows that work-life balance becomes less tolerable when there are other factors at play.

These factors lower the engagement of women, which lowers retention and bottom line results. Both Catalyst and the Center for Work Life Policy divide the causes of women leaving the business world into “pull factors” (like family care) and “push factors,” negative elements about the work environment or job. Two major push factors involve:

• Acceptance: Women not feeling fully valued or accepted, and
• Advancement: Women feeling they can’t advance or succeed.

There are two drivers of these feelings:

• The “comfort principle” and
• An unconscious preference for how leadership and excellence look.

Neither is malicious, intentional or usually even conscious. But they create barriers for women. Making them conscious can cause barriers to fall.

The Comfort Principle

Access to informal networks is key to getting great work assignments and therefore great experience and exposure that lead to promotions. The “comfort principle” can create a barrier to full access for women. It is a natural phenomenon; we like to spend time with people like ourselves.

Speaking personally, given a choice, I’d prefer to go shopping or share a bottle of wine with my women friends than play golf or hang out in a cigar bar with men. I don’t judge men for preferring to hang out with men more than with me. Gender differences at work can create discomfort rather than comfort.

But “hanging out” enables the development of trust and relationship. The people who come to mind when we are handing out great assignment or giving our time as a mentor are naturally those with whom we are most comfortable.

We can’t (and shouldn’t) legislate away the comfort principle. What we can do is bring it to the conscious level.

Leaders can pause and monitor whether the comfort principle is influencing to whom they give assignments, whom they mentor and to whom they give a second chance when things don’t go perfectly. Then they can balance the benefit of diversity to their team and organization with their own comfort.

In other words, awareness can assure that the comfort principle doesn’t result in less access for some groups.

An Unconscious Preference

The builders of American business were primarily men. They got there first. It is natural that ideas of leadership and excellence have a more masculine than feminine flavor.

Studies show that “leadership” is associated with words that are characteristic of men more often than women. In fact, when women exhibit some of these traits, they are not favorably received. In evaluating a woman, men may find her approach unfamiliar and may judge her style rather than focus on the results she delivers.

Leaders can stop and notice whether previously unconscious preferences are influencing how they evaluate a woman. They can take the time to understand differences in masculine and feminine approaches, and the strengths and limitations of each. Then they can appreciate and value both.

Invisible Mind-Sets

Both the comfort principle and unconscious preferences are part of the “invisible mind-sets” named by McKinsey. The starting point for removing these mind-sets and the barriers they cause is awareness.

By becoming aware of the barriers and of the strengths of both masculine and feminine approaches to work, leaders can assure that women and men feel accepted and valued and feel they can succeed. The result will be higher engagement, higher retention and a better bottom line.

Business Consultant Caroline Turner, former senior vice president of Coors Brewing Company (the first woman to hold a position at that level at the company) is releasing Differences Work: Improving Retention, Productivity and Profitability through Inclusion on January 9th, 2012. In Difference Works, Turner points out how the lack of gender diversity in the workplace, particularly in the C suite, has significant impact on a business’ productivity and bottom line.

Every now and then, we hear from a female startup founder who says she’s having a hard time raising money. She can’t quite figure out if it’s her idea or her slide deck or — and no one wants to think this — if it’s simply the fact that she’s a woman pitching an idea to a roomful of male investors.

We recently invited Comcast Ventures‘ Amy Banse into the VentureBeat studio to discuss the phenomenon of subtle sexism in the world of venture capital. After all, who better to ask for advice about female founders fundraising than a female VC?

Banse also talks about trends in startups — especially technology-focused startups — and gender. We got to discuss the controversial topic of women doing startups in “girly” categories such as beauty sites or dating sites and whether that’s reinforcing negative norms about what women can and cannot do or understand.

Stay tuned for all nine minutes of a fascinating conversation with a wildly intelligent, experienced lady… and a cornball reporter, too.

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Every now and then, we hear from a female startup-founder who says she’s having a hard time raising money. She can’t quite figure out if it’s her idea or her slide deck or — and no one wants to think this — if it’s simply the fact that she’s a woman pitching an idea to a roomful of male investors.

Women 2.0 CEO and co-founder Shaherose Charania came into VentureBeat’s studio to chat about a few issues experienced by a lot of female founders, not the least of which is experiencing subtle sexism during fundraising.

Charania also names a few names — VCs who enjoy working with women and make a point of including female-founded companies in their investment portfolios.

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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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In the midst of my life as a fundraising CEO, I am going to posit one thing: That the ramen-eating, asocial women entrepreneurs have it harder in starting a VC-backed company because VC funding is harder for women.

A recent op-ed written by Penelope Trunk and published in VentureBeat suggested that women aren’t cut out for entrepreneurship because they are too distracted by childbearing and the desire for “a good house, good clothes and a cushion for emergencies.”

But Trunk overlooked the fact that women are great at management and leadership, and they’re great at the most important aspects of building a new business.

Why women have a hard time as entrepreneurs

A CEO’s job is in a state of perpetual dynamism. In the beginning, you have to have a great idea and to use your impeccable market sense to finesse it into the first version of a business. Then, you have to find the right people, to sell your dream to build a great team, to nurture that team to do great things, and to find partners and customers to evolve your business. In all these tasks, women excel.

If you doubt this, just look at how many more small business owners who are women than men. According to statistics from the White House, women are starting new companies at a rate 1.5 times higher than the national average.

Speaking for my fellow female entrepreneurs, we generally don’t feel more troubled for working just as hard as our male counterparts. We generally don’t feel sad that we can’t afford some things.

Entrepreneurs are rare, but all entrepreneurs, men and women, have these values.

Women as a group don’t have a hard time doing startups because of the tasks involved. It’s not the type of work, the amount of work or the low financial returns in the beginning.

Yes, many women have to overcome more barriers to achieve their entrepreneurial goals — as Trunk said, there is an extra burden (and extra joy) in tending to a family and making a home. But that excuse, in addition to being unrealistically old-fashioned, misses the crux of why startup life is more difficult for a woman.

Here’s the truth: Getting funding, the very backbone of almost every company, is harder for women.

The funding question

At the beginning of building a great company, there’s institutional funding. For a lot of entrepreneurs, funding helps the company accelerate so that the team can keep on doing what it’s great at.

While almost every entrepreneur will tell you his or her least favorite part of the job is canvassing for funding, I will argue that VC funding gives women much more grief than men.

In order to be a good fundraiser — like every good male CEO is — we as women seem to have to overcompensate and overcome and do what is contrary to our very sociologically ingrained nature. Many of my female CEO friends and I thoroughly enjoy what we do, but we agonize over fundraising more than over any other stress of running a company.

Women aren’t as good and don’t like fundraising because the current mode of fundraising is built by men and for men. Most of the characteristics that are best for fundraising are especially aligned with typically male characteristics — characteristics like asking for what we want without apology or projecting confidence bordering on arrogance.

I’ve had to fundraise now two times. I get trained by my mentors, almost all of them great entrepreneurial men, to be tougher, more aggressive, more invincible — more like them — when I fundraise. And it’s been a great help, because it’s not natural to me. So I have been pushed and pep talked and encouraged by these men so I can be half as good as they are at it.

But no man gives me that same advice when I’m building partnerships that create revenue and marketing opportunities for my company or when I think about product and market fit. The traits I have are more “feminine” qualities of leadership: teambuilding, partnership building, thoughtful management, market savvy.

So, like many female entrepreneurs and CEOs, I’m amazing at my job until it’s time to raise money.

Women’s disadvantage in emotionally connecting with VCs

Much of business involves emotionally connecting with your audience. That’s why women build companies that emotionally connect with consumers: Much of consumerism is driven by women.

But the “audience” when you’re raising a round of VC funding is, well, men. Women can’t possibly emotionally connect with men as well as other men can. That’s probably why female VCs fund women-led companies more.

If the VC and angel communities could achieve more gender balance, I think you’d see more female-led companies being VC funded.

Women and risk

The financial drivers that make for a great VC-backed company are very different from the financial drivers for non-VC backed companies. VCs need to look for companies that swing for the fences and make it or break it in four years, creating a bias favoring companies that have a binary end result: go big or go home.

Based on my own experience, I do think women are more risk averse, so I’m not surprised that there are fewer women founding VC-backed companies. In a sense, that’s ok. We don’t necessarily need an exactly equal number of male- and female-led VC backed companies. But…

Bridging the gender gap

Society can and should do a better job of encouraging women who want to be risk-takers to follow their dreams.

It’s a Silicon Valley societal norm for a 22-year old guy coder to want to be like Zuckerberg. It’s a Silicon Valley societal norm to have amazing male VCs.

But there’s no such norm yet for women. And until there is, I applaud organizations like Women 2.0 and Golden Seeds and female heav(ier) VC firms like Kleiner Perkins in promoting an ecosystem dedicated for, and built by, women… and men.

Julia Hu is the founder of Lark, the makers of the silent alarm clock, sleep tracker, and personal sleep coach. Prior to co- founding LARK, Julia ran global startup incubator Clean Tech Open, marketing for d.Light in China, and green real estate development for Mogavero Notestine. She received her Master and Bachelor degrees at Stanford in Engineering and design thinking, and half an MBA from MIT Sloan.

Women in science have a rough go of it, especially as they enter the post-doctoral phase that coincide with many ladies’ late 20s.

In this video, we chat with Elizabeth Iorns, a co-founder of Science Exchange, a Y Combinator startup focused on optimizing research and the use of high-dollar scientific equipment through technology.

In this interview, Iorns talks about women dropping out of science work as they enter the baby-makin’ phase of life, about being a minority (both in age and gender) in her Y Combinator incubator class, and about what it’s really like to work with Paul Graham.

Enjoy the vid, and stay tuned for more.

VentureBeat recently debunked the myths about women at the helm of technology companies and conducted a roundtable about the issue.

A new generation of chief executives of giant technology companies illustrates the point amply: Virginia Rometty at IBM, Meg Whitman at HP, Carol Bartz at Yahoo, Heather Bresch at Mylan and Ursula Burns at Xerox.  Their successes alone should inspire the rising generation to believe the glass ceiling has been broken.

Yet at the same time, research from the Level Playing Field Institute suggests the persistence of hostile work environments in high tech companies for women and people of color.

Two weeks ago, allegations arose about the suppression of damaging corporate diversity stats by Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook. And this past Sunday night a CNN Special Report focused on the efforts of young black entrepreneurs to crack the venture code and the alleged color barriers of Silicon Valley, revealing some very deep chasms in perception, if not reality.

In 1957, Russia shocked America by launching Sputnik, crushing America’s assumption of superiority and unleashing a national reinvestment in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education from grade school through universities. The U.S. quickly created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA; later DARPA), which ultimately gave us our space program, led to advances in supercomputing and birthed the Internet.

America finds itself again chasing progress made by other nations, especially those in Asia, while fretting that we’ve lost our global equity and edge. The Department of Education and the National Academies of Science and Engineering declare that the U.S. needs hundreds of thousands of university-trained STEM graduates to enter the workforce in the next decade alone just to keep pace with new global challenges.

This is our second Sputnik moment. At a time when women hold only 24 percent of STEM jobs and blacks and Hispanics also fare poorly in these fields, we better get this argument about diversity of talent right or else it’s going to be a very expensive moment, indeed.

At the risk of oversimplifying this complex debate, we can see two ideological camps.

One holds that Silicon Valley is a purely race- and gender-blind Darwinian market for talent, where the best and brightest people are rewarded. Anything that tampers with this free-market meritocracy, such as a kind of venture capital or high-tech corporate affirmative action, is expensive and inefficient.

The other believes that biases in the culture and active discrimination prevent qualified women and minorities from entering the field and rising — the only way to explain the terribly low numbers from those groups among professionals in STEM generally and in Silicon Valley in particular.

Let me suggest a third way, based on my own ideology: The most expensive thing of all is ideology, and the cure for ideology is personal relationships.

This third way comes with no broad assumptions or prejudices, it cuts through political attachments and it bears costs only in personal time and attention. It unleashes the most powerful and subversive force of all, a one-on-one relationship with another human being across boundaries of age, gender, race and culture. And developing relationships is almost completely free.

At the very moment I’m writing this, there are 327 science and engineering students from more than 78 universities who have created a profile on my company’s mentorship network and are waiting for us to match them with mentors in industry. That’s on top of the 1,491 already matched with mentors right now.

A large majority of these applicants are women or Hispanic or African-American or some combination. Our goal was to help find the half a million additional engineers and scientists that America will need in the next decade, and we figured that building personal relationships would increase our country’s odds.

Across major tech, science and engineering firms, the demand for women and minorities has been huge — just as large as the desire of underrepresented groups to succeed in changing the world through STEM careers.

At last count, I saw hundreds of talented future engineers and scientists waiting for a hand to reach out and guide them across the bridge to their careers. I see thousands more standing in line behind them.

If you’re a working engineer or scientist, I personally call you to an “all hands on deck” to solve our mutual STEM talent crisis. See for yourself where merit or talent may lie. Building a personal relationship involving deep communication and even mentorship across a wide, out-of-your-comfort-zone group of individuals is the first step in breaking down the lack of diversity in technology and other STEM fields.

No commitment is necessary. You don’t have to promise someone a job. All you need to do is share your experience and wisdom with someone who wants to walk the path you’re already traveling.

Together, we need to overcome movements that reject science and those that divide our collective will in the face of collective adversity. We need to re-orient our education system to embrace the rigors of science and math and encourage students to seek the beauty that lies within its challenges.

But while pursuing long-arc strategies, business largely lives and dies on short-term action, where the goal is never to leave value on the table. For the U.S. right now, the most costly move is to leave talent on the table.

David Porush is president and CEO of MentorNet, a non-profit devoted to matching engineering and science students with mentors in the professions, with a special focus on leveling the playing field for underrepresented groups. Porush came to MentorNet after co-founding and serving as Chairman of SpongeFish, a social network for global knowledge exchange.