Two of the biggest players in the social media world are joining together for a common cause: women in technology.

It was announced last week that Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, and Jeffery Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, will be launching a mentoring and support program at multiple colleges for women interested in technology. Sandberg’s hope is that the program will help women to pursue tech-related education and break into the male-dominated industry.

“A lot of our consumers, at least half, sometimes more, are women,” said Sandberg in this Inc. article. “We build a product that gives people a voice. We know we can’t build a product for the world unless our teams reflect the diversity of the people who use the product.”

According to diversity figures released last year, 15 percent of Facebook’s employees working in tech jobs are women (31 percent of all Facebook employees are women). At LinkedIn, women comprise 17 percent of its tech employees and 39 percent of employees overall. Furthermore, the future for women in technology-related fields looks dismal. According to Inc., the percentage of people enrolled in undergraduate computer science programs who are women peaked at 35 percent in 1985 and is now down to about 17 percent.

Fortunately, it seems some technology companies are starting to notice of the lack of diversity in the industry and are making changes. Google’s “Make Google a workplace for everyone” initiative openly shows the search engine giant’s workforce demographics and shares what the company is doing to make the workplace better. According to the site, “the Women@Google network is a group comprised of 4,000-plus female Googlers committed to providing networking and mentoring opportunities, professional development and sense of community across 27 countries.”

However, there’s still a long way to go for diversity in the tech industry. I’m excited to see how Facebook and LinkedIn’s initiative will help influence women to give more consideration to jobs in the technology field.

What do you think of the partnership between Facebook and LinkedIn, and the impact it could have on bringing more women into the technology industry? Let us know in the comments section below.