The gender gap in the technology industry is growing, and no one is quite sure what to do about it. The National Center for Education Statistics has reported that U.S. women earned only 18 percent of computer science degrees in 2015, and that number drops even lower when women of color are factored in.

These low numbers are likely to get worse before they get better. Last year’s U.S. News/Raytheon STEM Index reported that interest in science, technology, engineering and math among women actually decreased from the previous year.

Yet, there are still a number of female engineers who have founded technology companies or are working on important advances, which is why providing them a weekly platform to discuss their work may not solve the gender gap by itself, but it is still an important step in the right direction. That platform, a podcast, hosted by a Microsoft engineer, sends an important message because the guests know technology, and they are highly experienced at what they do.

“The motivation of the show is to have technical women talk about what they are working on, the products they’re building or business strategy, instead of what it feels like to be the only woman in tech or the only one in a meeting room,” said Edaena Salinas (pictured), host of “The Women In Tech Show” and a software engineer at Microsoft Corp. “The community can benefit if they just listen to what they are working on.”

Salinas spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of  theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Matt Broberg (@mbbroberg), during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Austin, Texas. They discussed the origin of the program and previous guests, concerns surrounding data bias, the gender gap in the technology industry, and potential for change. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE features Edaena Salinas as our Guest of the Week.

Podcast idea sprang from Microsoft speaker series

The genesis of the podcast came from a “Meet Our Leaders” series that Microsoft started several years ago as a way for employees to learn more about the company’s business plan and strategic approach. What was noticeable about the events were the large number of women who attended, according to Salinas.

“Women want to know about these things,” she said.

The weekly podcast has featured a number of female leaders who discussed a wide range of technology subjects, such as the use of artificial intelligence in voice forensics, serverless computing, virtual reality animation, and data bias in machine learning. This latter subject, which featured an appearance by Rachel Thomas, co-founder of fast.ai, touched on a subject that is drawing increasing scrutiny in the tech world.

As technology has evolved to a place where machine learning algorithms are now making millions of decisions about people in seconds, the results can affect real human beings in important ways. Job interviews, loan applications, and even parole decisions are now being impacted by applied intelligence tools.

Yet, there is also a growing chorus of voices inside the tech industry beginning to sound the alarm around a critical concern: If the data being fed into algorithms is biased toward minorities or women, how is that problem going to be fixed?

“If I’m a minority, I’m a minority in the data,” said Salinas, echoing a view expressed by one speaker she heard at a recent conference. “Consider the bias that’s in that data, and make sure your data is better.”

Even if concerns about biased data can be fully addressed, gender bias remains an ongoing issue inside the technology industry. In 2016, venture capitalists funded all-male founder companies to the tune of $58 billion. Women received $1.4 billion.

Gender issues in tech go

But the problem goes beyond funding. A survey two years ago of 200 senior-level female executives in Silicon Valley reported that 60 percent had experienced unwanted sexual advances, 66 percent had been excluded from major events, and 84 percent had been told they were too aggressive.

For her part, Salinas has not experienced the level of bias felt by others in the industry. “I certainly haven’t experienced anything like that,” she said. “I learn from my co-workers, and they learn from me.”

There are signs that some tech companies are willing to change the culture. One of the most egregious examples of sexism for many years could be found in the marketing campaigns of GoDaddy Inc., the web hosting service. The company’s early years were defined by advertisements of scantily clad females, and the 2005 Super Bowl featured a GoDaddy commercial where a woman’s bikini top kept loosening as others described her plastic surgery.

Since then, under the leadership of a new chief executive officer, the firm’s culture has changed. GoDaddy now has equal pay policies, a track record for promoting women, and has been recognized for being a top place of employment for women in tech.

Podcast as a learning experience

Being a software engineer at Microsoft and running a regular podcast featuring women talking tech has been a learning experience for Salinas, who never produced a show before. After the podcast was up and running, Salinas noticed aspects of her own demeanor while interviewing guests, such as lowering her voice when offering an idea of her own.

“A big part of software engineering is about talking with your team, going to meetings, and talking about solutions,” Salinas said. “I was probably doing this at work.”

By bringing women on the show to talk about their work, the hope is that the time will come when the gender of the guests really no longer matters. “Sheryl Sandberg [Facebook’s COO] has said that we will reach a point someday when we won’t be called a female CEO or a woman engineer; it will just be engineer,” Salinas said. “That’s our goal, to lose that label.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE