The technology world isn’t the all-exclusive boys club that it used to be. In celebration of Women of Achievement Month, here are eight of the most powerful women in the field.
Sheryl Sandberg
With a resume that includes past job positions such as chief of staff for the U.S. Treasury Department and a VP for Google, in 2008 Sandbgerg became the Chief Operating Officer for Facebook.
Since then she helped grow the social media giant’s user base from 70 million, to a whopping 750 million users. Currently she is in charge of sales, marketing and business development, among other aspects of the company, and is in large part responsible for its current fortunes and financial success.
Susan Wojcicki
She’s been with google since the beginning, and now as the Senior VP of Google’s advertising branch, Wojcicki is just about single handedly responsible for the development and growth of both Google Adwords and Goodle Adsense.
She is also responsible for Google’s acquisition of Youtube, DoubleClicka and all of its current ad network expansions. She is currently in charge of development for all of Google’s advertising products, with an emphasis on mobile advertising.
Last year, her division brought in revenues of over $28 billion for the search engine giant.
Katie Jacobs Stanton
Stanton left her job with the state department under U.S. Secretary Hillary Clinton in order to join Twitter’s board of executives.
She is currently VP of International Strategy for the social media giant and is happy to report that 70% off all the Tweets in the world are now coming from outside of the USA, and that 20% of the world’s leaders currently have Twitter accounts, including Barack Obama, Stephen Harper and Dmitry Medvedev.
Natalie Massenet
Formerly a journalist for Vanity Fair, Massenet held various positions in the fashion world until she started her own business in 2000. Her online store, Net a Porter, was one of the first online businesses to ever sell luxury goods online, as well as designer clothing.
Initially balked at by investors, who failed to believe that women would ever purchase clothing online, her company doubled its revenues each year it was in business without the help of outside investment.
The site currently receives 3 million unique visitors each month, carries over 300 brands and showed the world that online retail businesses were not only possible, but lucrative.
Cher Wang
Wang is the founder of VIA, the world’s largest independent manufacturer of computer motherboard chipsets, as well as co-founder of HTC, one of the world’s leading smartphone manufacturers.
She is currently the CEO of HTC, with her husband as CEO of VIA. HTC alone reported a revenues of almost $10 billion last year, and roughly one in five smartphone owners across the globe own an HTC manufactured phone.
Marissa Mayer
As the VP of Google Location and Local services, Mayer has spent the better part of the past 11 years with the company tweaking its search engine algorithms and design and turning it into the well oiled machine millions of people use daily.
She was the first female engineer hired by Google, back when the company had under 20 employees in 1999. Currently she continues to work on user interface design for both the search engine and its mail service, Gmail.
Meg Whitman
Whitman worked as a VP for Walt Disney in the 1980s, followed by executif positions at Dreamworks, Procter & Gamble and Hasbro in the 1990s. In 1998 she became president and CEO of eBay.
When she joined eBay, the company had 30 employees and revenues of around $4 million annually. The site was in constant disarray, and was relatively difficult to search and navigate. She build a new executive and began transforming the site as she saw fit.
Now, 10 years later, eBay has been transformed into a 15 000 employee company with annual income exceeding $8 billion.
Florence Devouard
While Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales may have been the face at the fore front of the site’s success, Devouard was the engineer who designed the structure behind it.
She started as a writer for the site 2002, before joining the organization, and holding a variety of positions including Chair of the Board of Trustes. During her tenure at the helm, Wikipedia expanded into a world wide phenomenom and set in place stricter rules for content additions and article submissions.
Editor’s Note: Women are increasingly powerful and influential in the various technological sectors today. What were once considered jobs for men are more and more frequented by intelligent, witty ladies. Unfortunately, there is still a bias that works against females in the tech industry and positions of power, period. That being said, these eight listed women are an amazing influence for all, girl or boy.
