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Michigan Technological University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics is one of five mechanical engineering departments nationwide selected by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to participate in a new diversity training program. The others are Purdue, Oregon State, Texas Tech and the University of Oklahoma. The NSF...

IN MAY 2014, the Reverend Jesse Jackson traveled from his home in Chicago to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, to address the search giant's annual shareholder meeting. Technology isn't what you would call a core area for the 73-year-old civil rights leader, who carries an old-school flip phone and oversees a website, Rainbowpush.org, that looks like a relic from the GeoCities era. But Jackson had a bone to pick. Despite Google's mission to make the world's data "universally accessible and useful," it had been fighting for years to stop the release of federal data on diversity in its workforce. "There should be nothing to hide, and much to be proud of and promote," Jackson told the company's executives after politely requesting its diversity stats. "I ask you, in the name of all you represent, to pursue this mission."

New data from the 2015 STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) Index, the second-annual study of growth in STEM jobs, careers and educational pathways carried out by U.S. News/Raytheon, shows Silicon Valley's lack of diversity is still rooted in education. The gender and racial gaps in STEM fields have widened since last year. The 2015 STEM Index was created as a way to track the growth of STEM degrees and jobs against baseline statistics pulled from the year 2000.