Congratulations to the 11 founding partners of #pledgePL in the USA: Ustwo, Veryday, Made by Many, IDEO, Doberman, Moment, Co: Collective, Betaworks, Dots, Wolff Olins, Smart Design. If you’re in the US, get your company to join! Lots of useful resources on the site. 

Created as a unified voice and proverbial line in the sand, Pledge Parental Leave sets the standard for the minimum parental leave benefits companies in the creative industry (and beyond) should be offering their team.

By adhering to these four criteria, each Pledge Partner has announced (and proved) to the world that they truly do care about the well-being of their employees, and their families.

In the U.S., men earn on average 24.1 percent higher base pay than women in Glassdoor salaries. That amounts to women earning about 76 cents per dollar earned by men. However, once we compare workers with similar age, education and years of experience, that gap shrinks to 19.2 percent. Going further, when we compare workers with the same job title, employer and location, the U.S. gender pay gap is about 5.4 percent.

That amounts to women earning about 94.6 cents per dollar earned by men. At today’s real median earnings for full-time working women of $39,621, that is a pay loss of $2,140 per year or more than $64,100 over a 30-year career. For those who earn more than median wage, they could be losing a lot more each year. For example, if a woman earns $100,000 per year, she loses about $5,400 per year or more than $160,000 over the course of a 30-year career.

The introductory class, which Cornell Tech helped design, teaches computer science not as an abstract discipline but as a subject that can apply to broader issues and concerns.

“If you teach computer science in a different way, you get different results,” said Ann Kirschner, special adviser to the CUNY chancellor, who has been working on the initiative on behalf of the school. “Imagine teaching robotics not for the sake of robotics but to help with disabled-access issues. Imagine teaching data analytics to track the path of refugees moving from Syria to Europe.”

Yesterday, I took the pledge to end all-male panels on behalf of UN Global Compact headquarters in New York during my opening remarks at the Women’s Empowerment Principles Annual Event at the UN. This is the moment to stop making excuses and start challenging the status quo. There is no shortage of qualified women, and we need the voices of women at important events across the world.

When women take the stage and offer their opinions, they become visible as leaders. Their voices are heard. Through ensuring representation, we can change the expectation of what a panel typically looks like.

This action was inspired by the Male Champions of Change work led by Elizabeth Broderick, co-chair of the Women’s Empowerment Principles Leadership Groupand Former Australian Sex Discrimination Commissioner. It is estimated less than 15% of panelists in Australia are women. So Ms. Broderick stepped up and called for change.

Games, virtual assistants and health trackers may seem trivial, but they reflect the dominant model not just for what we build, technically, but how we know and understand the world; how we frame problems and find solutions.

It is a fact that a 12-year-old girl can grasp, while the most creative engineers in Silicon Valley apparently don’t. Last year, frustrated, sixth-grader Madeline Messer analyzed 50 popular video games and found that 98% came with built-in boy characters, compared to only 46% that offered girl characters. The real kicker, however, was that in 90% of the games, the male characters were free. Meanwhile, 85% charged for the ability to select a female character. “Considering that the players of Temple Run, which has been downloaded more than one billion times, are 60 percent female,” Messer wrote in the Washington Post, “this system seems ridiculous.”

So often while planning a conference, brainstorming a list of speakers, or searching for experts to cite or interview, it can be difficult to think of any political science scholars who aren’t male. We’ve all been there… you just know that a woman has got to be studying that topic… but who?

This site is intended to provide an  accessible database of female scholars in political science in a variety of areas.

This site was created and is maintained by political scientists and, as such, focuses on politics, policy, and government, but also on methods in the social sciences. (We’re certain that women know stuff in other fields too, though!)

In future, no-one from GDS will take part in a panel discussion of two or more people unless there is at least one woman on the panel, not including the chair. (Yes, that comes from Owen Barder’s Pledge).

In future, no-one from GDS will speak at an event unless the event’s organisers are clearly working hard to address gender diversity on stage. It’s hard to put a number on this sort of thing, so we will make that decision based on what we see on each event’s draft agenda.

We’ll hold ourselves to the same standards where GDS is the host, for internal events and public ones too.

Ideally, when GDS is invited to supply a guest speaker for an event, we’d like to send women to speak just as often as we send men. That means that sometimes, some of our male staff (especially those on our management team) will be encouraged to step aside and suggest a female colleague to speak instead of them. There are plenty of women at GDS who are excellent speakers and experts in their field – but the opportunities to speak need to be present for them.

GO GDS!!!

New site from an Ada’s Lister and her friends. Well done Suzanne Noble!

This slowdown in women’s representation shows that diversity efforts must be constantly reinforced after initial successes, and that gains can be fleeting in an industry that still retains considerable institutional bias in favor of white and Asian males. “Small improvements are better than no improvements, but even if the growth rate is slowing down, that’s an important signal to us that we need to try even more new things to address it,” said Aubrey Blanche, the global head of diversity and inclusion at Atlassian, a business software firm.

Twitter is to train prosecutors in England and Wales to better fight online abuse, as the internet is increasingly used as a weapon by perpetrators of domestic abuse, rape and sexual violence against women.

To examine how digital fluency impacts equality, Accenture surveyed nearly 5,000 men and women, assigning them scores based on variables like how, and how often, they used the internet and other online collaboration tools.

Men scored better than women in three-quarters of the countries studied. Women in the US were the most digitally fluent overall, but they still scored lower than their male counterparts. And the country didn’t even rank among the top 10 in terms of the smallest digital-fluency gap between the genders.

As part of this continuing effort, we are proud to partner with Women Who Code to provide free passes and 20 percent discounts for their members and subscribers to attend The Linux Foundation’s various events around the world. Women Who Code was created in 2011 and is best known for its weekly publication the CODE Review and free technical study groups, hack nights, career development, and speaking events featuring influential technology industry experts and investors. Their focus on education aligns with our goal to  increase access to Linux and open source learning materials, helping to grow the Linux and open source talent pool, increases diversity in technology and provides the pathway to the most lucrative jobs in IT.

If women don’t get involved in the technology revolution, who will advocate for our preferences and our needs? We’ll either get stuck with the “shrink it and pink it” approach (just Google “Bic for Her”) or we won’t be taken into consideration at all. Either way, the next generation of emerging technologies will have little chance of resonating with us or solving our problems. We need women to design technology for women. Some tech companies have told us that the lack of women on their teams is just the way it is. But that’s not good enough. It’s time to change the rulebook.

Thanks to Ada’s Lister Kate Hodsdon for sharing. 

YouTube announced this morning two programs aimed at funding and highlighting women’s voices across its video network. One sees the company forging a year-long partnership with U.N. to appoint top female creators as the first Change Ambassadors for the organization’s Sustainable Development Action campaign, where they will advocate for gender equality. The second is an investment in over 50 videos funded through YouTube’s new, global YouTube Spaces program, which put women both in front of and behind the camera.