6 Most Influential Women in Technology Today
As technology evolves and improves, it permeates every facet of modern life, just like what happens on online gaming sites like betshah. Despite the optimistic connotations of "technology," employment data still shows a gap between the sexes, especially for women.
By analyzing the companies' self-reported data, Statista determined that women made up between 28% and 42% of the overall workforce at the five major internet companies in February 2020.
Those same organizations only have 25% to 33% female executives and even fewer women (20-23% on average) working in technology-related fields.
Here are six of today's most influential women in technology; several are influential advocates pushing for gender parity in computing.
Kimberly Bryant was awarded a full scholarship to Vanderbilt University because of her outstanding performance in math and science while still in high school. While there, she majored in electrical engineering and minored in mathematics and computer science.
Bryant spent over two decades in various technical leadership capacities at pharmaceutical and biotech firms like Novartis and Merck.
Bryant didn't understand there was still a dearth of Black women in STEM fields until her kid expressed an interest in the field. Lack of exposure and availability to STEM topics was the root cause of this disparity, not a lack of desire.
Bryant launched Black Girls Code in 2011, an organization in San Francisco that introduces young girls of color to computer science and other STEM fields. This is a great place for girls to get marketable skills when deciding on a future career path.
One million Black girls are expected to have been taught to code by the organization by 2040. This group now has 16 separate chapters in the United States and a single chapter in Johannesburg, South Africa.
At six, Safra Catz left Israel for the United States. She attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania for her undergraduate studies and the University of Pennsylvania School of Law for her J.D.
During her career in banking, Catz rose through the ranks at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette to become the firm's managing director and later its senior vice president. Catz became a senior vice president at Oracle in 1999. She began serving on the company's board of directors in 2001 and was promoted to the president the following year.
Over the next decade, Oracle would initiate over 130 mergers and acquisitions under Catz's leadership. One of Oracle's most well-known purchases was the direct competitor PeopleSoft, which Oracle purchased for $10.3 billion in 2004.
Catz joined Mark Hurd as Oracle's co-CEO in 2014. After Hurd's passing in 2019, she took over as sole CEO. She was elected to the Walt Disney Co. board of directors in 2017 and taught accounting at Stanford's Graduate School of Business.
Elizabeth Churchill attended Sussex University, earning a B.S. in research and experimental psychology and an M.S. in knowledge-based systems. The University of Cambridge is where she earned her doctoral degree.
Churchill eventually settled in California, working at the FX Palo Alto Laboratory and the Palo Alto Research Center. She then worked for other tech giants like Yahoo, eBay, and Google. Now she oversees user experience at Google.
Churchill conducts research and gives talks about improving the accuracy and efficiency of user experience using the fields of computer science, psychology, design, analytics, and ethnography.
Churchill is also an executive for the ACM. She has over a hundred articles published in various psychological and computer science journals and over fifty patents either granted or pending.
After finishing her doctorate at the University of Sydney, Kate Crawford began a career investigating the social and political effects of A.I. and its many potential uses.
In her studies, Crawford attempts to contextualize the potential advantages and disadvantages of A.I. and machine learning across fields such as history, politics, labor, the environment, and more. Crawford promotes ethical and considerate A.I.
research and development. In her research, she looks at the potential negative consequences of new technologies, including discrimination, disruptions in the workplace and the supply chain, economic effects from automation, and privacy violations and rights reductions due to increasing surveillance.
Her wisdom has earned her several speaking engagements and positions as an advisor to U.N. and White House officials.
In 2017, Crawford established the A.I. Now Institute at New York Academic. It is the first university institute devoted to studying the societal effect of A.I. and the first A.I. institute headed and formed by women. The institute aims to alter how researchers understand A.I. by introducing non-technical perspectives such as history, society, and law.
Fei-Fei, Chinese-born Li, first came to the United States when he was 16.
Li spent his time between Princeton and the University of Illinois instructing engineering and computer, science students. Following that, she became a tenured professor at Stanford in 2009.
Presently, she is serving as co-director of Stanford's Human-Centered A.I. Institute.
Li's work in this area aims to enhance the capacity of artificial intelligence for picture recognition by combining cognitive and computational neuroscience with machine learning.
From January 2017 until September 2018, she worked as vice president of Google and head scientist of A.I. and machine learning at Google Cloud. During that time, she was on a sabbatical from Stanford to focus on her research.
In 2017, Li co-founded AI4ALL with Olga Russakovsky, a student in Li's Ph.D. program. Intending to expand representation from underrepresented groups in the A.I. industry, AI4ALL is a nonprofit organization that provides educational opportunities, recruitment, mentoring, and training to students from those groups.
AI4ALL has collaborated with experts from institutions including Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, as well as groups like Black Girls Code and Girls Who Code. It currently runs summer camps in 16 different cities across the United States.
Ellen Pao's mother is a computer engineer at the University of Pennsylvania, and she taught her daughter how to code when she was ten years old.
Pao attended Princeton University, earning a BSEE in electrical engineering and a diploma in public administration. In addition to her MBA, she has a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Pao joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a San Francisco venture capital firm, after working for several Silicon Valley startups, including WebTV and BEA Systems. She filed a lawsuit against the organization, claiming that she had been the victim of discrimination because of her gender.
By 2014, he had been promoted to temporary CEO. Pao, an activist for women's rights and the transformation of corporate culture, has banned "revenge porn" and unauthorized nude photographs from the website Reddit. Many competing social media sites quickly followed suit.
Pao later left Reddit to create Project Include with other tech sector women. The organization aims to combat prejudice against women in the I.T. industry by fostering a more welcoming and diverse work environment.
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