Prior to founding Girls in Tech, Adriana Gascoigne was one of very few women working at a startup. "I'd look around the room every day and see that there was a huge problem of representation. I knew we needed to change the culture of the company to recruit more women and benefit more women, but we also needed diversity in product development ... to make a better product," she recalled.

Beena Ammanath is VP for data and analytics at GE Digital. She has worked in the data analytics field for more than 20 years and serves as board director at ChickTech, a nonprofit dedicated to recruiting girls and women into the tech workforce and retaining them once they're there. Ammanath also serves on the Cal Poly Computer Engineering Program Industrial Advisory Board.

I think there's a legitimate argument for removing one category of folks from the gene pool, because they spend the little time they are given on Earth making other folks' lives miserable. Back when I was playing MMOs, some twisted folks -- known as "griefers," would lie in wait to mug lower level characters and find creative ways to destroy the fun in a game, often eventually killing it.

Salesforce VP Lynne Zaledonis drives product marketing and sales enablement for Sales Cloud. In order to succeed in the age of the customer, companies need to understand that the new cloud, mobile and social world we find ourselves in "has produced trillions of pieces of customer data, and it's totally changed how we engage with our customers, and how they engage with us," Zaledonis said.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's 2016 resolution to challenge himself outside his work is to build a simple artificial intelligence assistant to run his home and help him do a better job juggling his business responsibilities. "You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in 'Iron Man,'" he suggested. Zuckerberg first will explore the available technology, then train it to understand his voice to control everything in his home.

SXSW Interactive reportedly might include a daylong event on combating online harassment. The news followed SXSW's cancellation of two planned panels that were expected to focus on opposite ends of the Gamergate debate. Threats of on-site violence spurred the decision to cancel both panels, according to SXSW officials. However, that decision immediately drew fire.

The haters have won at Reddit, forcing the ouster of interim CEO Ellen Pao and her replacement by cofounder Steve Huffman. Board member Sam Altman, who led a $50 million investment round in the firm, on Saturday announced Pao's resignation and Huffman's appointment, lashing out at the campaign against Pao. It was "sickening" to see some of the things Redditors wrote about Pao, he said.

Ellen Pao on Monday testified in a San Franciso courtroom that she was passed up for promotions and sexually harassed by a partner during her employment at prestigious venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. Pao said that after she broke off a relationship with former Kleiner Perkins partner Ajit Nazre, he made it difficult for her to do her job.

Intel will invest $300 million over the next five years to promote gender and racial diversity, CEO Brian Krzanich announced Tuesday at CES 2015. The company plans to have full representation at all levels in its workforce by 2020. That's close to 100,000 people. "This is a highly relevant issue, and one that we all need to address," Krzanich said.

Backlash against the #Gamergate movement escalated several notches this week, thanks to high-profile newspaper reports and a public statement from the Entertainment Software Association. "Threats of violence and harassment are wrong," the ESA said. "They have to stop. There is no place in the video game community -- or our society -- for personal attacks and threats."

Intel confirmed that it pulled its advertising from a gaming website and community hub after it received feedback from its customers. Intel takes customer feedback very seriously when it relates to contextually relevant content and placements, the company reportedly said. However, the fact that Intel pulled its ads from Gamasutra is just one part of a story that involved a coordinated campaign.

Hang around for any length of time in the seedy bars and watering holes of the Linux blogosphere, and you'll soon realize that certain topics tend to recur with surprising frequency. The most obvious example, of course, is the Year of Linux on the Desktop -- a topic scientists have determined will surely outlive us all. The latest example to rear its head? FOSS documentation.

Like many other tech companies, Twitter is largely made up of white, male employees, pointing to a lack of diversity in the industry. The company revealed statistics about its organizational demographics, noting that almost 60 percent of Twitter's U.S. employees self-identify as white. Of Twitter's global workforce of around 3,000, 70 percent are male, and only a tenth of tech workers are women.

It seems there's always some kind of conflict at work in the FOSS community lately, whether it's based on race, on gender or something else. Most recently, it's the gender issue that has been felt most keenly. Not only have we seen the whole GitHub debacle unfold and explode, but then a certain post appeared online that got the Linux community upset all over again.

GitHub cofounder Tom Preston-Werner has resigned following an investigation into harassment charges made by developer Julie Ann Horvath, who departed the company last month. "The investigation found no evidence to support the claims against Tom and his wife of sexual or gender-based harassment or retaliation," said Chris Wanstrath, GitHub cofounder and CEO.

Adding fuel to the debate over the treatment of women in tech, Julie Ann Horvath, a developer at GitHub, has stormed out of her job, accusing the company of ignoring harassment in the workplace. One of the company's three cofounders and his wife had persistently intimidated her, and an engineer had repeatedly ripped out her code after she turned down his advances, Horvath claimed.

FOSS fans are no strangers to difficult topics, and for proof one need look no further than the ongoing sexism controversy that has been debated so many times in every bar and watering hole of the Linux blogosphere. Recently, however, one came up that's enjoyed far less prominence -- at least since Linux Girl began keeping track lo these many years ago.

There's no denying that the FOSS community has many virtues, but gender equality doesn't seem to be one of them. Gender-related issues and tensions have plagued the FOSS world for as long as many of us can remember, and the problem has already been picked apart on these pages time, time and time again. Well guess what? It's still a problem.

I was idly scanning a press release in my inbox the other day stating that the National Academy of Sciences planned to honor 17 individuals in 2010 for their "extraordinary scientific achievements in the areas of biology, chemistry, geology, astronomy and psychology." Five of the recipients were women.

The Linux Blog Safari "Tech Turkeys" column may have come and gone, but there's one more story to share that could almost have been included. What else can you call it, after all, when a Linux professional is apparently fired for using Linux? Sound too strange to be true? Better read on.

The Pink Ghetto is a largely invisible, often unmentioned and unacknowledged place littered with impediments to womens' upward mobility in the workplace. Women in the Pink Ghetto do not get equal pay for equal work, are not offered the same opportunities as their male coworkers, are not promoted as quickly as men -- or promoted at all.

If the success of a conference can be judged by the duration of the conversations that follow from it, LinuxCon was a hit beyond measure. Here it is, two weeks later, and the repercussions are still being felt. What we might call "The Great Sexism Debate" gained considerable fuel there and, in fact, is now raging out of control. Put those safety glasses on!

Sex is a sensitive subject in virtually any industry or profession, and FOSS, it appears, is no exception. Indeed, a recent article by Datamation's Bruce Byfield, "Sexism: Open Source Software's Dirty Little Secret," has set off a conflagration on the Linux blogs.

Well it's been a contentious few days on the Linux blogs, what with Ada Lovelace day happening last week and the subsequent emergence of several incendiary topics. Most fiery of all, perhaps, were comments made separately by a few different people suggesting that Linux will never rule the desktop. Of those, the most notable was undoubtedly Red Hat's CEO Jim Whitehurst.

Given the heavy proportion of males in the Linux world, we here at LinuxInsider have trouble resisting any topic that brings females back into the picture. Imagine our glee, then, when we spotted mention of a recent Newsweek article titled "Revenge of the Nerdette"! Indeed, some of us fairly fell off of our pink leatherette chairs.

Harvard President Larry Summer's comments that "innate differences" account for some of the reason women don't succeed as often as men in science careers shines a light on a problem that most in the world of science and technology are keenly aware of. The university president, dutifully repentant, on Thursday appointed two task forces to try to rectify the problem.