People are still responding to last September’s Shalala report on Women in the academic sciences. The National Institutes of Health just appointed a new working group on Women in Biomedical Careers to help redress the gender imbalance in the sciences. NIH Director Elias Zerhouni “and Dr. Vivian Pinn, Associate Director for Research on Women’s Health and Director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health, will co-chair the Working Group, which will carefully consider the recommendations in the National Academies report.”

Meanwhile, one article suggests, more women technologists are getting involved with mentoring younger girls. “Many industry leaders and experts believe the long-term solution to the gender imbalance in IT lies in women technologists going back to school — way back, to high schools and even elementary schools to mentor young girls, who too often give up on math and science at an early age.” The article cites programs sponsored by IBM and Cisco, among others.

The low representation of women in IT isn’t just a women’s problem, it’s everyone’s problem, suggests another piece by the same author, Carmen Nobel at InfoWorld. “More than a matter of stemming the tide of the ongoing skills shortage, encouraging women to get involved in technology is fast becoming an imperative for establishing the kinds of adaptive, collaborative, and versatile enterprises that will thrive in a fast-paced global economy,” she writes. That last part only holds true if you believe that women are naturally more “adaptive” and “collaborative” than men, of course…

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