Sabeen Mahmud (above, in blue), who says she fell in love with technology the first time she ever saw a Mac, just organized Pakistan’s first ever Hackathon last month, aimed specifically at finding ways to use technology to fix or at least alleviate Pakistan’s political problems. According to a piece by Wired, the gathering was pretty amazing for everyone involved.

A browser extension or other feature that can blank out or choose not to display tweets that contain certain words is not a new invention. It’s already a basic feature on many Twitter desktop applications and browser extensions to alter Twitter’s native site abound. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t have to know your stuff in order to make one from scratch, which is how seventeen-year-old Jennie Lamere won the Boston Hackathon last month.

Borderhouse has a revelatory post up containing a number of graphs from Game Developer Magazine detailing salary breakdowns over experience in the industry and gender, revealing some extreme disparities between the compensation men and women receive for working the same kinds of jobs in the video games industry. According to these statistics, women generally paid between 20% and 30% less than their male counterparts, with a few outliers of 8.3% and a whopping 65%. Only in one field, programming, do women make slightly more than men: programmers, at 4.5% more.

Borderhouse makes the good point that some of these numbers may result from the lack of women in the industry: many of those who are in may have come to it recently, and therefore have less seniority and commensurately less compensation, a relationship not highlighted by GDM. I’ve highlighted QA testers here because the job’s notorious reputation for having high turnover and poor working conditions make it more likely to be exempt from such an explanation, but this is definitely a pattern that’s worth more research. You can see all the numbers here.

Previously in Gender

You’ll often hear from officials in male-dominated industries like the sciences (not to mention the entertainment industry) that they’d really like to hire more women, and in fact are actively trying to do so, but find the process very difficult. Everybody (okay, most people) wants to solve the problem, but nobody, least of all female candidates, wants to feel like they’ve gotten a job based on something other than their level of expertise. Etsy, a company whose user base is 80% female, has found a way to tackle the hurdles between them and greater gender parity on their engineering team (although they still only have 20 women on a team of 110), as CTO Kellan Elliott-McCrea explained at a recent conference.

Last year, the BBC delved into the great Booth Babe debate at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and decided to do a follow-up to see if anything had changed. It hadn’t. While Booth Babes, attractive women hired to promote a product at a convention, are always a hot topic, some consider their inclusion at CES to be especially problematic considering it’s a professional trade convention. What do you think? Should these models be removed from the equation, should men be added to even things out, or do you not see their inclusion as an issue at all?

(via Bonnie Burton)

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Catherine Wong is a 17-year-old high school student from New Jersey but she’s already making a name for herself in both the science and technology communities. Wong was a finalist in second annual Google Science Fair for creating a bluetooth-enabled device that allows for remote cardiac examination. Yup, she made a cellphone that will test your heart. 

For even the most casual of internet-dwellers, Google is the king of the internet. Or, perhaps more accurately, the sherpa that helps us navigate its treacherous waters. It gives us directions, answers our crucial questions (“is my cat gay?”), and points us towards the how-tos we most desperately need. So what does the behemoth company do when it most needs its own how-to? Well, it pretty much googles it. And this time it’s in need of advice on how to incorporate more women into the company.

We’re just saying, NBC, you should really step your game up. (via The High Definite.)

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In an effort to bolster girls’ interest in science and technology, Girl Scouts of America has invited the Geek Squad summer academy to New Orleans this August, where 200 girls aged 10 to 14 will pull apart and rebuild computers and learn about the technology behind digital photography and music.

For many people, communication has become so instantaneous and accessible via smart phones and computers that they have all but abandoned land lines, fax machines, and most of all, snail mail. Hell, I know 20-somethings that don’t even know how to address a letter. I don’t blame them, 3 days is a long time to wait for a message to be delivered across the United States when an e-mail takes seconds to appear in the recipient’s inbox. But imagine if letters had taken up to 9 years to arrive – that is a glimpse of how painfully slow data exchange could be between countries of Africa until Nancy Hafkin made a dent in the lack of interconnectivity by launching the Pan African Development Information System.