This past week was all about payment gaps between men and women. And wonderful news of a movie about some very smart ladies. And a professor puts in her two cents on why diversity in engineering matters.

• This Jordan woman just finished an education unheard of for women in that country: she has become a plumber. Groundbreaking and inspirational news for many women all area’s of the world.
• Prof Dame Ann Dowling is on a mission: we need to change our thinking about engineering, to promote diversity in her field. “Engineers develop solutions all the time and are developing new products, new services that we all use,” said Dowling. “To have a sector of the population not represented in what, say, our new cars are like means that we are not getting the best business decisions.” Read more on why she feels that way (and we do agree, mind you!).
• Wonderful news in Mathematics: a movie is due to be released in several countries in December! It’s about three women who helped conquer space. One of the producers, Mimi Valdès, hopes that ‘Hidden Figures‘ will inspire lots of women to choose a career in STEM. IMDB tells us the film will be released in February 2017 in the Netherlands.
• Ng Tian Beng, managing director for South Asia and Korea at Dell, wrote an article on how the loss of tech talent should be stemmed: with women! Educators and Government should bring out the best in girls, is the message. Beng has got some interesting tips.
• All kinds of women in tech gathered together in Austin, Texas, for the The Grace Hopper Celebration last week. Well, it was more of a conference rather than a celebration, but you get the idea on why that name was chosen. Sisterhood is key to keep women interested in STEM-jobs, one regular attendee said. I have a dream that we could do this for our local Women in STEM too!
• Although not really a STEM article, I thought this was fun to share. Iceland seems to be the place to be as a woman, The Guardian says. The gender gap is growing slim year by year. However, there’s still an 18% gap in paid salaries, so these Icelandic women put down their work at 2.38 p.m. You do the math on why they chose that particular time. It seems to be somewhat of a tradition too!
• Something else in the pay gap area: an American study revealed that religiousness has a huge impact on differences in salaries between men and women.

Until next week, for some more news! If you have something newsworthy we should mention here, mention us in a tweet or contact us through this site.