Findings of the study show women's transcendence to leadership roles has not occurred, inequality remains entrenched in terms of pay, career advancement, as well as career satisfaction. Shockingly, study respondents weren't just any other Joanne or Joe Schmo in the workforce. The study tracked the smartest and brightest grad students from elite MBA programs, around the world, from 1996 to 2007. These are motivated and talented men and women.

In the words of Harvard Business Review, "Pipeline's Broken Promise, examines the past two decades in which leaders have counted on parity in education, women's accelerated movement into the labor force, and company-implemented diversity and inclusion programs to yield a robust talent pipeline where women are poised to make rapid gains to the top. "

The survey took into account experience, time since MBA, first post-MBA job level, industry and global region of work at the time of survey, and found that:

• Men were twice as likely as women to be at the CEO/senior executive level.
• Men's pay out paced women's.
• Men significantly outpaced women moving up the career ladder when starting out in similar level roles.

These findings are not specific to any industry, including technology. Even I was shocked looking across this Microsoft org chart. For some reason seeing things in list format made the differential of men to women in Microsoft management even more striking. Note this isn't for lack of women candidates as women make up almost half (49.9% in October 2009) of the workforce - no, we aren't leaving work to have babies either!

I am stereotypical myself. I personally have clawed my way all the way to middle management after 20 years working in the tech industry, while men younger than I hold more senior roles. Is this simply because I am a woman? These findings would say, "Well, yes." So what is it about men and women? Will there ever be a time where women aren't looked on as women in the tech industry, but just as smart people with skills that fit a certain role, best?

I personally know a lot of extremely smart women, all of whom that have had to go out on their own to make it above the glass ceiling. So is it just men in management holding us back?

I find this study pertinent, not just to my own work experience, but also as we are a month away from the Mobile Summit in San Francisco on May 7. Looking to encourage a stronger female presence, we felt compelled to get out and ask women and men alike the following questions so please take the survey - it is just three questions.

Your thoughts and comments please.

Also see these related articles on other websites from Clay Shirky, Jeanne of Feministing, danah boyd and Gina Trapani, which have some interesting comments and counterpoints on why the glass ceiling still exists.

Photo by Faakhir Rizvi.

Google Buzz never caught on with mainstream users, even though Google pushed Buzz into every Gmail user's accounts. There are obviously still some major usability issues around Buzz and most Gmail users who see Buzz for the first time aren't likely to even understand the basic ideas behind Buzz.

The concept of Buzz - while immediately clear to anybody who ever used FriendFeed - is relatively novel. Google also never did a good job at explaining Buzz to new users and unless the company starts to make Buzz easier to use and explains its features to new users, Buzz will remain a niche product. Right now, even figuring out how to import content from third-party sites is way to hard.

Are You Still Using Google Buzz?

Popurl's Thomas Marban took a closer look at the content on Buzz today and found that "the most commonly published links [on public Buzz streams] only included the usual suspects such as Facebook, Foursquare and other social media spam."

Marban's experience mirrors our own and that of quite a few of the people we have talked to. What's your experience with Buzz? Are you still using it? Or did you forget about it after the early rush of excitement? Did you turn Buzz off after all the privacy issues became known? Are any of your non-geek friends ever use it? Let us know in the comments.

They might think about networking opportunities or learning experiences, but all too often, these are brushed off as mutual admiration societies and redundant, unoriginal chatter. I've heard every critique imaginable about some of the best-known tech conferences

Aside from the pure serendipity of meeting new people (or meeting online friends in real life), I have found that the main benefits of conferences are those I create for myself.

In other words, when I have complained that the content was boring, I am to be blamed for not seeking out content that was interesting or, in a single-track show, for not participating in the conversation and helping to make it more interesting for me and my fellow attendees. When we say that a given show is good for nothing but parties, well, that's a pretty good sign that partying is more of a priority for us than gaining real value. If we say a conference is populated by "the same old douchebags," as one person recently said to me, then perhaps we're not taking the time to socialize and network outside our zone of comfort and familiarity.

To be blunt, bad attendees make bad conferences. An engaged, interesting and curious person can go to the exact same show and, in most cases, can derive huge benefits from it though a little effort and a lot of great attitude. There's no show too big, too small, too boring for that person to not be able to learn something from it.

What do you think? Have you ever been to a truly, in-and-of-itself bad conference? Would a shift in your own focus have helped? How would you characterize the best conferences of your career to date? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

They are the attendees of tech parties, the "Twitter consultants," the armchair generals of the Internet, and their numbers grow by the day. Yet most of them couldn't distinguish a line of code from a badly punctuated haiku.

What's to be done with the social media experts? Accept that their blathering may contain some wisdom? Or require technical exams for all Twitter users with more than 1,000 followers? You decide! And make the NMDs among us take our "technical" quiz.

Sometimes, it's not such a bad thing - in fact, there are a great many non-technical social media folks who are doing a great job of creating quality content and helping brands get themselved situated on the Web. But most of the people I can think of who fit this description have been doing their thing for so long that they've had to pick up a few technical tidbits along the way to ensure their continued success and to ensure they weren't sounding like idiots.

However, I hold the strong opinion that if you're working in technology - even as a PR flak or social media consultant - you should be able to understand some of the terms, concepts and people that make your business possible. Otherwise, you risk your own reputation by taking the chance that you're scarily wrong or laughably vague, and you risk gumming up the works for your clients by not knowing how to communicate with their audience, many of whom are very technical folk.

Ultimately, taking the time and effort to understand the technology you use is simply a matter of taking pride in your work, just like the barista who knows all the ins and outs of the perfectly pulled free-trade organic espresso or the skilled sommelier who, though he may not make the wine himself, knows everything about who did and where and how.

Take this quick survey, my social media gurus. (Techies, don't take the survey; you'll skew the results.) If you can't work out the answers, you might be sounding like an idiot - I tell you this because I'm your friend and I care about you. And remember, when you cheat, you're only cheating yourself, so no Wikipedia for you.

Let me know in the comments what you think about the issue. Am I being an elitist prig? Did I not take my rant far enough? How much do you think a social media expert should know about tech? Would you work with someone who couldn't sail through this "technical" survey?

I'm now forced to eat my words as my hetero life mate and I prepare to move into a Burlingame apartment conveniently located a few blocks away from the startup he's now working at;

Still, if I were starting a company, would I move from Omaha or Nashville or Boulder to come to the Valley? Would you?

Back when I started the Never Mind the Valley series, I was fascinated by communities such as Boulder and Los Angeles. The tech scenes are smaller and more easily navigable, and most people are willing and excited to collaborate. When contrasting these areas with the SF Bay Area, NorCal seemed vast, cold, inflated and self-important by comparison.

For months, I railed, "You don't have to be in the Valley to have a successful startup!" Examples of this abound, from Austin's Gowalla to L.A.'s Mahalo to the dozens of incubated and accelerated teams in cities all over the country.

However, on moving to San Francisco, I quickly learned a few of the benefits of being a startup in the Valley. Everything moves much faster. You have more access to more capital. The depth, breadth and strength of the developer pool is unparalleled. Everyone has a fairly public track record. Yes, it can be an insular and self-aggrandizing little echo chamber of Mutual Admiration Society nitwits at times, but I'm no longer saying that the benefits don't outweigh the cost.

Ah, yes - the cost. Living in the Bay Area is, to employ a common NorCalism, hella expensive. Salaries are higher, real estate is more scarce and more spendy, the overall cost of living borders on obscene unless you're used to, say, Tokyo. But again, perhaps for many startups situated here, the benefits outweigh the financial costs, as well.

So, I'm left wondering exactly what alchemy makes the benefits worth all the costs for a startup. I've been asked by a few companies about transitioning from other states and even other countries to the Valley, and my advice has tended to be a mixed bag lately.

I'm interested to hear from startups living in and outside of Silicon Valley: When do you think being in SF is worth it, and when is it wiser to stay put? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Leave a comment telling us - and the rest of the world - about your SXSW Interactive panel. Let us know who's going to be talking and what you're talking about, plus where and when to show up.

Can the Real-Time Web Be Realized?

"The emergence of the real-time web enables an unprecedented level of user engagement and dynamic content online. However, the rapidly growing audience puts new, complex demands on the architecture of the web as we know it. This panel will discuss what is needed to make the real-time web achievable."

When: Saturday, March 13, 11:00 am
Where: Hilton H

And I, Jolie O'Dell, will be moderating a panel of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and startup incubator-types on whether or not startups need traditional, Sand Hill Road VC in the first place. Sure to be contentious, this panel is something I've been looking forward to for a while, and I hope you'll make it out! I'll be talking with Mike Trotzke of SproutBox, Mitch Lasky of Benchmark Capital and Dave McClure of the Founders' Fund.

Who Needs Venture Capital?

"Only a fraction of business financing comes from Sand Hill Road. Yet entrepreneurs still obsess over traditional big meeting/big money Silicon Valley venture capital. This heated panel debates what types of companies actually benefit from VC and reviews concrete examples of alternatives to traditional venture capital."

When: Monday, March 15, 12:30 pm
Where: Hilton D

Also, for those of you who read along last year during my cross-country travels through the tech scenes in Nashville, Omaha, Chicago, New York and beyond, there's the RoadTwip core conversation with our brothers-in-tech Dave Delaney and Kurt Daradics (also a co-founder of CitySourced).

RoadTwip

"Last Spring, three kids set out in one car for two weeks. Their mission was to discover the emerging future for a new America, one town at a time. While they captured and produced plenty of content along their roadtwip.' The most valuable thing was the relationships they established. This panel is about getting out of dodge, it's about going offline - where true friendships are solidified. In the flesh."

When: Friday, March 12, 5:00 pm
Where: Austin Convention Center 8A

Those are our panels! What do you think so far? And please do share the details about your - or your friends' - panels in the comments.

We polled some of our friends on Google Buzz and asked whether ageism is something they've seen at work or that has effected their lives. And the responses were interesting - although some say they try to be as even-handed as possible, others said that age discrimination exists at both ends of the spectrum, especially when it comes to landing a job.

A 2001 article from CIO started a conversation about ageism in IT. The response was dramatic. "Within days of being asked 'Do CIOs Discriminate Against Older Workers?' about 200 readers had posted answers; a majority of them gave a resounding yes... workers age 55 and older make up only 6.8 percent of the IT workforce."

A couple years later, a 2003 study from the International Journal of Selection and Assessment explored how older and middle-aged programmers fared in the tech workforce. Results showed "that age was negatively associated with both annual salary and job benefits levels."

But in 2009, another study showed what could have been seen as a turning tide. "The study, 'The Coming Entrepreneurship Boom,' found that... the United States might be on the cusp of an entrepreneurship boom - not in spite of an aging population but because of it... The average age of U.S.-born technology founders when they started their companies was 39."

What People on the Ground Say

Perhaps the graying set are doing well as entrepreneurs, but what about when they apply to be programmers, information architects, web designers or other traditionally "young" jobs?

In a lively conversation on our Buzz account, Aaron Hayes told us that ageism is alive and well, saying, "I turned 40 this year, and even though I can write Python circles around some... [and] have run several of my own small businesses - somehow, because the metabolic process of my cells has been occurring for several solar rotations beyond a subset of unspoken rules, I can be dismissed by some as a viable candidate for a startup.

"And this apparently because people that have experience clearly can't have youthful enthusiasm, or passion."

Even though, as Ruggero Domenichini said in the same thread, older employees might have "less ego, nothing to prove, been through failure [and] lived more."

And person after person said that they had either hired older programmers and been totally pleased with their fit and performance or - in one case - not hired someone because of age and regretted it ever since.

What Do You Say?

We're interested to know what your experience has been, either as a younger startup exec faced with hiring decisions or as an older programmer working in IT.

On a personal level, I have a great deal of respect and admiration for the older techies in my life - especially as I begin to earn a few gray hairs of my own. My old-as-dirt dad is a fabulous network engineer, and a lot of the best developers and entrepreneurs I know have lived long enough to have a mature, realistic and stable view of their abilities, the ecosystem and their colleagues.

And in an amendment of the famous "Never trust anyone over 30" quotation, I'd have to say I'd gladly take the word of a 50-year-old who knew his stuff over a 25-year-old entrepreneur starting his first company. And the hypothetical 25-year-old would do well to take his older colleague's advice seriously, as well.

As always, let us know what you think in the comments.

Tonight's report on TechCrunch outlines a few minor details of the overall plan to stop the site's hemorrhaging users and stem its financial decline. As we've known (and as we predicted last year), the site will shift its emphasis from pure social networking to content discovery and recommendation. The site's tagline is expected to change to "Discover and Be Discovered."

With the abrupt firing of CEO Owen Van Natta two weeks ago, we are reminded of his initial duties when he was hired less than a year ago. In addition to dealing with internal politics and negotiating the end of MySpace's ad deal with Google, Van Natta was expected to give MySpace much-needed boost in the areas of technology, branding and features.

While it's unknown exactly how much of the forthcoming "new" MySpace will represent Van Natta's vision, we do wonder if anything is enough to save that sinking ship. Of course, the site still has a large userbase, particularly in the international market. But what do techies want to see before they start using the site again?

The outlook isn't good, to say the least. We conducted an informal poll on Twitter, asking what folks would need to call themselves MySpace users. While a slew of respondents said bribes - from money to puppies to MacBooks - would do the trick, the noble @EricBurgess replied "They couldn't even pay me." @_Tycho_ wrote that the site would have to "be easier to use than Facebook, and then convince my friends to all go back on." A tall order, indeed, and one echoed by several others.

But usability and attrition/retention aside, many users gave a common ultimatum: MySpace would have to do anything they try - from social networking to content and beyond - better than Pandora, Facebook or Twitter do the same things.

Granted, in terms of content discovery, Facebook's not particularly kind on musicians or filmmakers; as evidence, you can check out some of the remaining MySpace users. If you've visited the site lately, your list of active friends might look like a wasteland of struggling bands. But is a new content recommendation engine packed with multimedia goodies and intuitive discovery tools enough to regain the public's love and trust?

What do you think - is a site redesign enough to make you want to use MySpace again? Can the site succeed as a content platform rather than a social network? Or is MySpace doomed to sink like the Titanic, regardless of the products or features they roll out?

Let us know your opinions in the comments.

The trouble was, it wasn't because of the post's content. Due to some interesting SEO magic, the post was one of the first search results for the term "Facebook login." As a result, hundreds of confused readers bombed us with angry comments about how much they hated the "new Facebook," a.k.a. our Facebook Connect comment login.

How can we balance making the Web simple enough for all users while still creating tech cool enough to satisfy geeks like us? And who says either group - nerds or users - is "normal," anyway?

1. Users don't care about what you care about.

This quote from another RWW post pretty much sums it up:

"Especially in Silicon Valley, where it's easy for entrepreneurs to isolate themselves in circles with like-minded techies and fellow entrepreneurs, I feel that a huge amount of startup CEOs and designers... make product decisions that appeal to their own interaction behaviour with such applications or what they think their friends will find cool.

"Building for geeks makes for great customer immersion if you're building something like (the wonderfully useful) GitHub, but that same process doesn't work so hot if you're building a site for middle-aged moms."

You and your geek friends != middle aged moms. And your users are often statistically more likely to be middle-aged moms.

2. Users don't read your copy or look at your branding.

Banners, logos, carefully crafted wordsmithery - this is all filler, we've found out. Users have been calloused by 15 or so years of surfing through bad ads and marketing babble, and they are unconsciously tuning out everything but the one thing they came to find.

For example, none of the 200 or so confused Facebook users who commented on our earlier post read the post itself, the huge logo at the top of the page, the many links to non-Facebook-related content or the huge, all-bold paragraph about how ReadWriteWeb is not, in fact, some ill-conceived redesign of Facebook. They simply searched for "Facebook login" and, upon navigating to our site, scrolled until they found the one button they wanted to click. Which brings us to our third assertion.

3. Users gravitate toward the simple and the familiar.

A ton of the confused commenters scrolled down far enough to find the Facebook Connect button for logging into the comments section - as evinced by the fact that their Facebook profiles were then linked to their comments.

I've often criticized the ripped-off look of social media UIs, but once a UI becomes familiar, is it not a service to certain types of end users to continue in that vein? Two hackneyed expressions will back me up, one about reinventing wheels and the other about not needing to fix things that aren't broken.

As a tech geek of the 12-hours-a-day-online variety, I appreciate innovative and intuitive web interfaces. But a lot of users don't. Even if it's simple, it needs to be familiar. Why do you suppose some of our current, deeply entrenched web design elements - from buttons to text blocks - even exist?

4. Users rule the Internet.

Finally, this is the reason we've stopped mocking the poor folks who left those comments long enough to write this post.

400 million people now use Facebook, and they don't all have CS Master's degrees from Stanford. But if you work in the IT/tech/Internet/online media industries, they do manage to pay your bills. They're the ones who open emails, click ads, make purchases, sign up for subscriptions and generally take the majority of actions that make our whole ecosystem work.

And most of them have no idea what a web browser is or how it differs from a search engine or a social network. They've chosen to be smart about other things, like building cars or making art or raising families. I'll bet some of them are terrific dancers. We have to build the Web for them, too.

As a user, a developer, a designer, a marketer, a startup dude or lady, whatever you happen to be, how do you balance the need to find or create cool tech and apps with the need to build with these kinds of users in mind? Do you get frustrated? Do you get feedback? Do you kill features and make buttons bigger?

What have been your successes and failures, or where have you learned lessons? We'd love to know, so please tell us in the comments.

If that sentence confused you, then you're not the target audience for this post. We want to know what our developer friends think of HipHop, the latest open-source code project to emerge from the deep, dark dungeons of Facebook's Palo Alto headquarters (ok, the HQ's actually quite pretty, but we like a good turn of phrase). Read these expert opinions (and by "expert," we mean Rasmus Lerdorf), and let us know in the comments what you think of the new PHP runtime.

Facebook engineer David Recordon told us this morning, "HipHop isn't actually a just-in-time compiler. Rather it transforms your PHP source code into C++ and uses a well established compiler (g++) to produce the resulting binary."

The Facebook engineer who was responsible for concepting and developing HipHop, Haiping Zhao, wrote this morning, "With HipHop we've reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page."

So, with HipHop, Facebook (and by extension other PHP-based sites and apps) becomes faster and more scalable, since rewriting the runtime probably cost a lot less than trying to scale horizontally with more servers.

Late last night, we pinged PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf on Twitter, asking for his opinions on the new PHP runtime. This morning, he wrote, "I think HipHop is cool and will certainly help the poor people stuck in framework soup." However, he also noted, "HipHop on simpler template-style PHP pages probably isn't going to help you too much. It's not going to make your SQL queries any faster."

Our friend and a PHP dev himself, Warren Benedetto, wrote to us with a wealth of interesting implications, saying, "[Facebook] get to have their cake and eat it, too. Keep the site in PHP, keep their large staff of PHP developers, rapidly iterate existing features while developing new ones, AND get all the performance benefits of a compiled language on the back end."

He also notes that the improved speed and performance might cause more enterprises to consider using PHP for sites, features and applications rather than Java or .NET.

But one of our biggest concerns with HipHop was the delay in open-sourcing the project. Former Digg lead architect and current SimpleGeo co-founder Joe Stump wrote this morning on Twitter, "Thanks, Facebook, for open sourcing HipHop. We, the FOSS [free and open-source] community, look forward to maintaining this fork separately from you going forward." Take that!

So, that's what a few of our friends and acquaintances think of Facebook's HipHop and the rewritten PHP runtime. What's your take on it? Let us know in the comments!

One of the greatest concerns folks in the audience had is how to deal with negativity - bad-review-type blog posts, angry tweets, disparaging comments, etc. - in an environment that's instant, viral, noisy and difficult to control. While each of the panelists had their own answers, I'd like to ask our readers: How do you handle being smacked down, called out or criticized in a real-time web environment?

But knee-jerk reactions aren't always the best way to deal with negativity.

Toeman's comment about the real-time web is interesting and insightful. "Where there's smoke, there's sometimes fire," he said. "And sometimes, it's just smoke." Responding to every negative comment can sometimes create a legitimate "fire" in a situation where not responding would allow the (non)event to blow over.

Two fellows in the audience today asked how to deal with negative blog comments, either on one's own (or one's company's) blog or on a third-party site. Since I've been spending more time reading our own comment threads - and interacting with readers that way - my immediate response is that one of the best ways to deal with negative comments is to leave them there and let them go without comment. Almost without fail, friends or fans will come to the defense of the product or idea being discussed without the brand or author having to do anything about it. That's just the nature of community.

We all on the panel seemed to agree that often, learning to ignore unwarranted negativity can be a blessing, but it's a learned skill that takes time and patience. The virtue of not reacting is one that most of us have had to learn the hard way after being tormented by the big, mean Internet, spinning our wheels and expending our social capital to fight battles we cannot win. Communicating this learned patience to clients and less experienced users is an important part of what true social media experts ought to be doing; in addition to encouraging dialog, we have to let others know that it's sometimes ok to ignore negativity and remain respectfully silent.

The old adage "don't feed the trolls" was admirably updated by Zisk, who said, "Don't feed the trolls, unless you're feeding them tranquilizers." He said that often, angry people simply want to be heard and acknowledged; any attempt at self-defense or debate on the part of the brand or post author will simply escalate the negativity.

Another point where the three of us saw eye-to-eye is that age, experience and patience are great virtues, even in a fast-paced, real-time environment. Being able to predict which negative signals will dissolve into the ether and knowing which real issues need to be address, understanding different real-time community's audiences and attitudes and knowing how to use each channel or platform - these are things that almost no 22-year-old "social media expert" will be able to do.

What's your take on it? How do you personally deal with snipes, snarks or blatant attacks in real-time media channels? If you represent or advise brands, how do corporate communications change when real-time negative comments enter the conversation? Let us know in the comments.

In that comments thread, you joined us in collective head-scratching and fist-shaking over the price point and the lack of certain key features. It's clear that many of us won't be flocking to the nearest Apple store to pick up one of these gadgets. But there may be alternatives. In the event that a competitor releases a tablet device, what features would you want it to have? Give us your wish list in the comments; hopefully, manufactures are listening.

A Better Price

The iPad starts at $500, but with just 16 gigabytes of storage, it's not the music-, video-, photo-carrying device most of us will need or want. That price point is essentially a phantom. And when we start to add up all the costs for the iPad we'd actually want to have, it makes more sense to scrape together another couple hundred dollars and spring for a top-of-the-line PC laptop - something a bit more functional, not just a big, expensive geek toy.

A Camera

For a device that promises to make picture- and video-sharing simple and fun, the lack of a camera is a great disappointment. Without a camera, it's true that there's no ability to snap pics and vids for Facebook or DailyBooth or talk to others via Skype video or TinyChat, but users are also missing out on one of RWW's favorite tech trends: augmented reality! We wrote a whole post lamenting the fact that this long-awaited device can't play nicely with some of our favorite AR toys.

A Stylus

Our awesome cartoonist, Rob Cottingham, just wrote this morning that as one who draws and doodles, he'd appreciate a way to interact with the iPad's multitouch screen. Bridging that gap between the screen and the stylus might even be the graphics tablet-killer. For a company that's traditionally held sway over the design and arts communities, Apple should've thought more about this part of its core audience.

A Slide-Out Keyboard

This is one of the reasons I'm so glad I held out for my Droid when the Apple fanboys and fangirls were mocking my iPhone-free lifestyle for years. Having a physical keyboard simply can't be beat, particularly for content creators and enterprise users.

More Options for OSes and Carriers

No multitasking? AT&T? Those conditions are deal-breakers for me and quite a few others, I'm sure. I'd love to see a device that could run Jolicloud, Chrome OS or a lightweight Linux distro. And as a happy Verizon customer, I'd like to stick with my current carrier and perhaps even work the data charges into my current plan. Overall, we just want more openness and more options.

So, what do YOU want in a tablet? USB or other ports? A built-in WAN card for instant Internet connectivity? More storage? A faster processor? Flash? In the comments, give us your list of must-haves and what you expect to pay for them. Who knows - perhaps a manufacturer will be able to produce something for non-iPad fans sooner than we think.

Check out ReadWriteWeb's full iPad Archives.

Still, there are organizations such as Kiva, The Extraordinaires or SocialVibe and many others that do turn user microactions and technology to affect change and do good in very tangible ways. Those are just three of the tech nonprofit or philanthropic organizations I can think of at the moment, but we at RWW would love to know more. Tell us in the comment what your favorite tech nonprofit is and why.

SocialVibe is a company that helps brands and users create positive social change. In a typical SocialVibe setup, a brand "sponsors" users, who take small actions and engagements to raise money for the charity of their choice. In some ways, it's kind of like a broader-in-scope version of The Hunger Site, which gets advertisers to shell out cash to feed hungry people when users click around the site.

And The Extraordinaires is a program we just recently discovered while finding out how to help our readers use their personal time and online actions to help folks in Haiti. This site allows organizations to create missions. Users can complete micro-tasks from their mobile devices or computers toward those missions. Currently, the site has around 50 participating organizations and about 6,000 members who have completed in excess of 35,000 micro-tasks. Missions range from mapping safe places for children to play to helping first-aid responders reduce fatalities.

But there are many ways tech can be used to help others, not just the social media-focused, crowdsources companies we've mentioned here. For example, Inveneo helps to give access to information and communications technologies, including phones, computers and Internet access, to people in remote parts of developing countries. And there are many organizations focusing on getting tech hardware into the hands of those who need it, including students and injured veterans.

We'd love to know more about similar projects and organizations, whether large or small, new or longstanding. In this open thread of comments, please tell us your favorite nonprofit or philanthropic tech organization and let us know what they do. And please spread the good word and invite others to share, as well!

I'm a woman, and I'm in technology, and I demand here and now that you stop catering to me. That's right, I'm talking to YOU: brands, marketers, PR flaks, hardware manufacturers, advocacy groups and the women and men in my industry. And while we're at it, stop referring to me and my female colleagues as "girls."

How do you feel about women in tech? Let us know in the comments.

For some time, I've been courted by a few organizations purporting to address the issues of women in technology. And issues there are, I'm sure. Certainly, many women have a hard time being taken seriously in what's traditionally a male-dominated industry.

For example, those of us who are fortunate enough to have good hair days and decent posture get flaunted as sex symbols, and those who have better things to think about than what shade of lipgloss to wear get criticized, overlooked, underpaid, or even - gasp! - taken seriously.

I've been fortunate enough to (usually) be on the former end of that equation, and I can tell you it ain't all roses for cute women, either, especially when you cross the line into "too cute" territory and are accused of being brainless, opportunistic, shallow and far, far worse.

It's true that our male colleagues often undergo the same process of judgement and criticism, but to a much lesser degree. Still, we as a culture have come a long way from the days of Cosmopolitan's 1967 article "The Computer Girls," which vacillated between praising the intelligence of its female programmer subjects and talking about their marriage prospects and hair color.

Or have we?

Google's still listing 8 million results for the search terms "sexy girls in tech" and around 4.5 million for "sexy girls in tech 2009," in case you were wondering whether the sexism of the past was skewing the results. This is compared to a mere 1 million results for "sexy girls in tech 2008." I have thus very unscientifically proven that tech is becoming more sexist, not less, by continuing to marginalize and objectify "sexy girls" in our industry.

Moving on from Google and sexy girls, how are brands treating women? Just last year, Dell tried to foist off a horrendously sexist site aimed at women; the content suggested that their pastel-hued laptops could help us count calories, plan meals and listen to Sarah McLachlan clones to our heart's content. The site was ripped to shreds (rather brilliantly) by The Register and promptly removed from the tubes. In other hardware news, Sony's just issued a Barbie pink Vaio (with a floral pattern!) that's well out of the price range of the Barbie-buying market, and others just can't stop pitching us on "fashionable" laptop cases to match our handbags.

So who's responsible for putting women in a pink, perfumed corner? Is it the women-run groups, who segregate us from the rest of our colleagues and still insist on calling us "girls?" Is it the men who slaver shamelessly over "sexy geeky girl" posts with more regard for cup size than intellectual caliber? Is it the computer manufacturers who cater to women by slapping flowery shells onto devices and gadgets? Or is it women themselves, who sometimes rely too much on their gender and looks, counting on the fact that the "male-dominated" industry will more likely be charmed by those factors than impressed by their intelligence or talent?

Technologists don't have to treat women like men, but perhaps we should all make an attempt to treat one another with a little more neutrality. And for goodness sake, can we all agree on a moratorium for script fonts, sparkles, the word "girl" and the color pink? We might be females, but we're not 4-year-olds.

I'm fully aware that this point of view will tick off quite a few readers, so be sure to tell me exactly why in the comments. We welcome all opinions in these open threads, whether you disagree, concur or simply have a different point of view.

Read more ReadWriteWeb articles from the Gender & Tech archives. Also see these related articles on other websites from Clay Shirky, Jeanne of Feministing, danah boyd and Gina Trapani.

Let me explain: Someone, somewhere ends up putting out money for everything you do online, every piece of news you read, every Web app you use. It takes professionals and hardware across a gigantic industry to make these things work. In terms of overhead alone, content costs a lot. So why do some users always kick and scream at the first suggestion of paid content? Do you think content is worth paying for, and if so, what are you personally willing to pay?

As a journalist who came of age career-wise during the print era, and as a musician who first recorded songs on these things called "tapes," I understand the cultural value of great content, and I admire the men and women who make it. I also love being able to support the creators and publications that bring me the content I love.

On the other hand, as a typical NMD and one who lives almost entirely online, I have done my share of content scalping, whether it's lifting a copyrighted photo for a design project, illegally downloading a single or two from a multiplatinum artist, or diving deep into the world of torrents where all the films are gloriously free and inconveniently subtitled in Hungarian.

Like any petty thief, I tried to justify my actions to myself by saying that I'm only taking from those who can afford it. But let us speak frankly: The creative and publishing industries are all at a crisis point because of hundreds of millions of people like me who say the exact same thing. I've lately started to come to grips with my hypocrisy and started paying for content, whether that's a legitimate iTunes purchase or a Netflix subscription. I tell you, it feels like I'm giving money to a feed-the-children charity when I'm really just paying for something that should have never been free in the first place.

Today, YouTube has announced its plan to help indie filmmakers (and increase its own revenues) by asking users for a $5 fee to watch a selection of Sundance Film Festival movies. I'm wondering how many users will balk at the fee, and what will go through their heads when they do so.

Will they be thinking about the months or years each filmmaker spent creating the movie? Or the time the actors spent preparing for and performing their roles? Will they think about filming equipment rentals? Will they consider the cost of hosting online videos at a scale that accommodates huge volumes of traffic around the globe and around the clock? Will they think about the developers who work tirelessly to make the magic of online video possible?

Or will they simply knee-jerk and proclaim a loud "How dare they!" at the thought of paid content?

(As a side note, I'm also curious to see a Venn diagram showing the overlap of people who object to paying for online content while vigorously complaining about "distracting" online advertising.)

So, what's the difference between the analog days, when creators charged for their creations and theft was theft, and these digital times, when anything that's been transformed into ones and zeroes is fair game for free consumption, piracy, remixing and redistribution?

I'm curious: What kinds of online content, if any, are you willing to pay for? And how much will you pay for them?

Would you pay for news? Special, in-depth reports? Entertainment and multimedia? How about a blog subscription? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Photo credit: SFDenverLV.]