Earlier this year Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator looked into the demographics of the tech industry.

It revealed that despite the attempts by the industry to bring more diversity into the talent pool, there is still a massive under representation of women, Latinos and blacks in the industry.

The report suggests that even if the industry recruited or funded all of the minority candidates that apply, it will remain primarily white and male simply because the pipeline is not generating enough applications from minority backgrounds.

So it’s pleasing to have gone along to a hackathon event this past weekend that was aimed purely at getting young people involved in computing.

The event was organized by the Stemettes group in partnership with the Everywoman Advancing Women In Tech Forum event in a couple of weeks.

The hackathon saw a gaggle of girls congregate at the Google Campus London to learn how to code mobile applications, before then presenting their creations to the audience, and a panel of judges, at the end of the weekend.

The vast majority of participants, who ranged from 7-8 up to 25 years of age, had not coded before, and they received expert help and assistance from Google developers over the weekend.

The apps, which were developed using AppShed, AppInventor and Ratchett revolved around communication and networking, with a number creating chat facilities or tools to aid networking at the upcoming conference.

There were also apps created for drawing, and even a cyber bullying quiz, and it was great to see the enthusiasm with which the young girls went about their task, and of course the not insignificant challenge of pitching their projects at the end of the weekend.

As the FT piece below suggests, there is a pressing need to shift youngsters away from seeing digital devices as a conduit for consuming content, to one where they are actually creating and producing things themselves.

That remains the challenge for the Stemettes, to take the enthusiasm that percolated through the room this weekend and carry that on so that young girls become coders long after the event has finished.

It’s perhaps a challenge that the schools can help to tackle head on.  At the back end of last year I wrote about a new study highlighting just how lucrative some of those STEM related subjects were in terms of career earnings. When researchers told students how much extra they could earn by studying maths at school, interest in the subject soared amongst pupils.

Industry also needs to play its part, as a report from Catalyst highlights how many women are leaving the tech industry once attracted into it.

It found that over 50% of women who began their career in a tech related industry after graduating from their MBA course left their role to take a job in a different industry entirely. This ratio was some 20% higher than that of their male counterparts, which is a pretty stark finding.

“They are not leaving the workforce,” the report stated. “They are taking their talents elsewhere.”

So it seems that there is still a way to go before the tech industry fully capitalizes on the obvious talents of the female half of society, but hopefully events such as Stemettes will go some way to rectifying that.