Jessica Lawrence is the executive director of NY Tech Meetup. Along with helping to showcase some of the city’s most exciting new companies and digital projects every month, Lawrence is also helping to change the culture of the scene she is part of. Tech may not exactly be a boys club, but it does suffer from lopsided numbers when it comes to participation of the sexes. With women-only demo showcases, and a willingness to speak out against sexist remarks, Lawrence’s daily work is helping to make New York’s tech scene more diverse. 

New York City’s Chief Digital Officer Rachel Haot began in the city’s startup world and rose to prominence quickly. Now, she’s a member of Mayor Bloomberg’s administration who is advocating for more private-public collaboration in making New York a tech mecca that rivals Silicon Valley. Marketplace Tech explores Haot’s latest efforts, including finding strong ideas for reinventing the city’s 11,000 payphones, drawing more talent to the city as well as growing it at home. 

Complaints are rampant that the video game industry treats female employees and female players as outsiders or worse. But it wasn’t always that way. And, remember MiniDiscs? Way better than cassettes, right? But as of this month, Sony says the format is no more. Though Minidiscs were engineered to make imperfect copies, some people clung to it deep into the iPod era.

Last November, a guy posted a blunt question: ‘Why are there so few lady game creators?’ This spawned a big response under the Twitter hashtag ‘1reasonwhy.’ Stories are added regularly including stats about women paid less than men in the gaming industry and ugly accounts of workplaces that seem more like fraternities. As part of our focus on women in tech this week, we reached Rhianna Pratchett in London. Pratchett’s just finished an overhaul of the Tomb Raider game where she set out to bring depth to the famous protagonist, Lara Croft. She worried about hashtag horror stories scaring off people who might want to break into her industry. So Pratchett started a supplemental discussion, hashtag ‘1reasontobe,’ that is, reasons for women to be in the video gaming industry.

Our focus this week is women in tech and in recent days some of Silicon Valleys most powerful have been making headlines. The CEO of Hewlett Packard, Meg Whitman, leading her company’s backing of same sex marriage. Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg has her new book on sparking a social movement in tech. And there’s Yahoo’s boss, Marissa Mayer, with a controversial ban on employees working from home. To start the week, Marketplace’s Silicon Valley reporter Queena Kim gives us an overview.

We’ve been covering the new Copyright Alert System that a group of major Internet companies launched this week to patrol for customers doing illegal downloads. The system will generate an escalating series of warnings. In theory, six strikes and a movie, music or software pirate is out. But what exactly happens on strike six? Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain talks about how you might actually need to go to pirating re-education camp.

What online activity is worth the effort and actually leads to sales? Banner ads, Facebook likes, links to the time you were on public radio? Diamond Candle turned to a New York startup called SumAll, which has come up with a way to let clients see the stats on what online action caused what online reaction. SumAll’s founder Dane Atkinson says big Internet companies have a mountain of data on this, but making sense of it is the trick. And, a Carnegie Mellon post-doc student and Japanese researchers have just come up with a way to get smooth video from a thrown, spinning football. 

Facebook is responding to a call from top elected officials to crack down on Newtown school shooting conspiracy theorists. There are people who deny the terrible events in Connecticut in December and have been putting taunts and abuse on social media pages designed to help victims. Senators and a Congresswoman from Connecticut want Facebook to take the pages down; Facebook says no — but points out that it has been dealing with the issue and is in constant contact with families affected by the tragedy. And Yahoo’s new directive telling employees they can’t work from home any more has generated debate…but is it a good idea?

Google Glass: we know the company plans to have them available this year, and have them cost around $1500, but are these lens-less frames really a technological revolution? Joshua Topolsky, editor and chief of The Verge, talks with David Brancaccio about the experience of wearing them. And, a billboard in Peru that does more than catch the eye — it catches condensation and turns it into drinking water.