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Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

imagiLabs raises $300k pre-seed to further bridge the gender gap in coding

imagiLabs (www.imagilabs.com), the all-female founded startup that makes coding more accessible to young girls, has raised $300k (€250k) in pre-seed funding, allowing it to further equip the next generation of working women with critical coding skills.

Angel investors participating in the round include Eros Resmini, Founder & Managing Partner at The Mini Fund and the former CMO of messaging platform Discord; David Baszucki, CEO of gaming giant Roblox; members of Atomico’s Angel Program; and Propel Capital, the investment arm of Stockholm’s leading tech incubator Sting. 

A number of high profile proponents of gender equality in technology participated in the round. The financing will be used to maintain imagiLabs’ significant international growth and to continue to foster an engaged community of young girl coders, who use the imagiLabs apps to learn from each other, share coding tips and designs, and build relationships.…Read More

Rise of the next digital divide: Women and the web

Experts believe 600 million new female internet users can be added within the next 3 years.

A first-of-its-kind report gathered data from thousands of women in developing countries to shed light on the lack of women on the web. On average, 25 percent fewer women than men are online today; yet, if action is taken now, 600 million women could have access to the internet in the next three years.

“Women and the Web: Bridging the internet gap and creating new global opportunities in low and middle-income countries,” commissioned by Intel Corp. in consultation with the U.S. State Department’s Office of Global Women’s issues, UN Women, and World Pulse, aims to answer questions such as “What is the size of the internet gender gap?” and “What prevents women from accessing the internet?”…Read More

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Define gender gap? Look up Wikipedia’s contributor list

In 10 short years, Wikipedia has accomplished some remarkable goals. More than 3.5 million articles in English? Done. More than 250 languages? Sure. But another number has proved to be an intractable obstacle for the online encyclopedia: surveys suggest that less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are women, reports the New York Times. About a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s, according to the study by a joint center of the United Nations University and Maastricht University. Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation, has set a goal to raise the share of female contributors to 25 percent by 2015, but she is running up against the traditions of the computer world and an obsessive fact-loving realm that is dominated by men and, some say, uncomfortable for women…

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…Read More

University web site addresses gender gap in STEM fields

ASU's new web site will include videos of women with successful careers in the STEM fields.

Arizona State University officials aren’t just adding to the reams of research showing a gender gap in the science, technology, education, and math (STEM) fields. They’re confronting the persistent issue with a web site that encourages women to identify and rectify the “benevolent sexism” prevalent in these male-dominated fields.

The university will launch CareerWISE.com Nov. 4 after receiving a $3.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2006.…Read More