TGIF FEATURE: "Today Show" looks into the gender gap in Silicon Valley

NBC's Today Show launched a special series this week titled "The Women of Silicon Valley." To start the series hosted by Natalie Morales, the Today Show interviewed two Asian/American women whose actions were instrumental to bringing high-tech's gender gap issue to the forefront, Tracy Chou and Isis Anchalee.

For Tracy Chou's Today Show video, click here.

Despite the few highly visible women executives past and present, such as presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, who at one time headed up Hewlett Packard, and Marissa Mayer, who is Yahoo's CEO, women have been highly underrepresented in the industry as a whole.

It wasn't until Chou asked for the hiring data from her own company, Pinterest, did the industry begin talking about the inequality within Silicon Valley. Since then, the industry giants such as Yahoo, Google, Facebook and others conduct their own surveys. Lo and behold, their data confirmed the gender gap and also the lack of diversity.

Isis Anchalee, founded #ILookLikeAnEngineer. Click here for her video.

Back in August, Isis Anchalee Wenger suddenly became the face — quite literally — of female engineers working in Silicon Valley.

RELATED: Asians hit a bamboo ceiling 

The 23-year-old started #ILookLikeAnEngineer on Twitter after an ad featuring her as a platform engineer at tech consulting firm OneLogin sparked a backlash, with people on social media expressing doubts about her profession.

The response to the disbelieving response was overwhelming with engineers around the world sending photos of themselves to #ILookLikeAnEngineer. A crowd-funding drive raised money to place billboards and other paraphanalia around the San Francisco Bay Area with the now famous hashtag trying to break the stereotype of who can be an engineer.

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