Never mind "Emerging Tech" - emerge far more women in technology generally

The stats on women in technology, as of 2017, are still preposterously low. This article from the New York Observer runs a pretty stunning set of statistics: 

1.  Women own only 5 percent of startups.

2. They earn only 28 percent of computer science degrees.

3. Only 7 percent of partners at top 100 venture capital firms are women.

4. After peaking in 1991 at 36 percent, the rate of women in computing roles has been in steady decline.

5. Now, they hold only 25 percent of computing jobs.

6. Women hold only 11 percent of executive positions at Silicon Valley companies.

7. In the high tech industry, the quit rate is more than twice as high for women (41 percent) than it is for men (17 percent).

8. Last year, venture capitalists invested just $1.46 billion in women-led companies. Male-led companies earned $58.2 billion in investments.

9. While 82 percent of men in startups believed their companies spent the “right amount of time” addressing diversity, nearly half of women—40 percent—disagreed, saying “not enough time was devoted.”

10. For women in the tech industry under age 25, earnings on average are 29 percentless than their male counterparts.

11. Women receive lower salary offers than men for the same job at the same company 63 percent of the time.

12. About 74 percent of young girls express interest in STEM fields and computer science. Looking at the above statistics, it’s obvious these girls are deterred.

How can this fail to shape the design and outcome of our technologies? As the British computer pioneer Karen Spärck Jones once said in an interview, "computing is too important to be left to men". 

In that light, we point you to a pitching opportunity from Women Who Tech, the Women Startup Challenge: Emerging Tech (cohosted by Google, Office of London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan, Mozilla, General Assembly, IBM, Microsoft and several others).

The pitch page is here, the prize is $50,000 (though with mentoring for all the finalists), and the focus is on these technologies: 

Agriculture Tech, Augmented Reality, Biotech, Blockchain, Energy, IoT, Robotics, Space, Transportation, and/or Virtual Reality.