A startling statistic about the people working as CEO’s, founders, salespeople, communications professionals and general service workers in the tech industry: only 29%, on average, are women. At Facebook, it is 16% and at Twitter, it’s only 10%! With such staggering gender discrepancies, it is important to recognize and honor the women who are leading the pack as leaders, inventors, and coders. Meet Marissa Mayer, Tracy Chou, Sarah Allen, and Avid Larizadeh, four queens of the tech world:
- Marissa Mayer Originally known for being the first female engineer at Google, Marissa Mayer got to be the president and CEO of Yahoo!. A coder, leader, consultant, teacher, business executive and computer scientist, Mayer is the complete package for female role models. It was her original team of engineers who are responsible for the Google Search we know and love today!
- Tracy Chou In addition to being a lead software engineer for social network giant Pinterest, a “cover girl” for Wired, and a judge for the Tech Crunch Disrupt start-up funding competition, 27-year-old Tracey Chou is also an advocate for women at tech companies. Thanks to Chou’s efforts to obtain reports from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other well-known companies, the lack of diversity has become public in the past two years.
- Sarah Allen Allen is famous for co-founding Adobe After Effects, and leading the development of Flash video, Adobe Shockwave Multiuser Server, and the Flash Media Server. Mightyverse, the mobile startup she is currently the CTO of, is improving the ability of people to communicate across languages and cultures. She is also the president of RailsBridge which improves the representation of women in the tech industry.
- Avid Larizadeh Coder, developer, product manager, investor, advisor, and founder, Avid Larizadeh is best known as the United Kingdom leader of Code.org. Thanks to her, student minorities are getting more and better computer science education.
Although that 29% is still low, it is still an improvement. With women like Mayer, Chou, Allen, and Larizadeh making a difference in the tech world, soon the representation will be 50/50: 50% men, 50% women.
