Big name tech companies, Twitter, Google, General Electric, and eBay, announced yesterday that they are joining the Girls Who Code initiative to help level the gender gap in the industry. The New York Times writes that the program hopes to “increase the number of young women who become programmers and engineers. They want to create a mentoring and teaching program.” Gender is becoming a bigger and bigger issue, as evidenced with the ballyhoo made about Facebook appointing Sheryl Sandberg as the first female to its board of director and the high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit against tech venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.
If you haven’t guessed already, the tech industry heavily biased toward men. Glamour Magazine points to the stats:
Whether you know it or not, we are all experiencing a major tech disconnect—women use the Internet 17 percent more than men do, according to research by Intel, and we generate 70 percent of all Facebook content, but yet less than one in four computer science jobs in this country is held by a woman.
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