Women in tech may be underrepresented in management positions across the globe, but they are moving mountains with applying tech to future solutions and innovations.
From using AI in classrooms to solving issues related to waste and carbon emissions, and most importantly supporting other women in tech and decreasing the gender gap in access to technological skills.
Here are 10 women changing the future of tech, and the world, with their innovative companies and ideas that are pushing boundaries like never before.
10 Reshma Saujani
Reshma Saujani founded the Girls Who Code, an international nonprofit to help girls have access to coding skills from third grade through college and close the gender gap for opportunities in tech. By 2019 Girls Who Code reached more than 185,000 girls in North America. She is not your average woman in tech, she began her career as an attorney and in 2010 was the first Indian-American woman to run for congress.
Check out her book Girls Who Code: Learn To Code And Change The World, or her TEDtalk Teach Girls Bravery Not Perfection to learn more about her wor k in closing the gender gap in tech.
9 Gwen Shotwell
Gwen Shotwell has been leading SpaceX for 16 years starting off as Vice President of Business Development and now as the COO. Her massive success and influence in tech and science earned her a spot in the Women In Technology International Hall Of Fame.
This engineer is currently ranked as Forbes 49th more powerful woman in the world with her work growing SpaceX and the influence she has had thus far in the company. Since she joined the company in 2002, SpaceX has grown from an ambitious idea to a company with 10,000 employees, launching almost 2,000 satellites and with a corporate value of $74 million.
8 Whitney Wolfe Herd
Whitney Wolfe Herd is the CEO of bumble and the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world. She started developing Tinder, but after a sexual harassment case within the company she left and started her own dating app, Bumble.
She created Bumble with women in mind, aiming to create safe spaces for dating and forming meaningful relationships. She is now one of the most powerful people in the dating app industry and influential women in tech.
7 Kimberly Bryant
Kimberly Byrant started off as an electrical engineer in lead roles in biotech for companies such as Genentech and Novartis. Her daughter's interest in tech sparked and inspired Byrant to find a way to bridge the gap for Black women's representation in tech. In 2011 she founded Black Girls Code which aims to promote coding and computer skills to girls of color and help leverage their careers in tech.
After founding Black Girls Code, Byrant was named Top 25 Most Influential African Americans In Tech by Business Insider.
6 Dr. Elizabeth Churchill
Elizabeth Churchill is currently the Director Of User Experience at Google, but her track record goes way beyond with her rebound work in research and as a speaker. In addition to working for Google, she is the Executive Vice President of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), and she writes a regular column for ACM in addition to being a visiting administrator for university admissions.
Essentially, her work and research have been in social psychology, in terms of technology use. Her goals include making technology more humanized, and innovation for social interaction in technology and user-friendly development.
5 Maria Fujihara
Maria Fujihara is the CEO and founder of Sinai Technologies, for 10 years she has been developing new ways to measure carbon emission and use science to create better understandings and scenarios about the future of the planet.
She immigrated from Brazil four years ago, starting her business all while navigating life as a young immigrant in the U.S. While she has faced hardship overcoming these obstacles, she has never doubted her work which has been recognized by NASA and climate scientists alike.
4 Priya Lakhani
Priya Lakhani is the founder and CEO of Century Tech, she is a leader in AI development for learning. Her company brings together teachers, neuroscientists and techies to develop tools for learning from elementary school through university.
Lakhami also began her career as a lawyer but launched into tech to start businesses for the future of education. She has been named on numerous lists of influential women, including the award Young Achiever Of The Year in the Asian Women's Awards.
3 Mikela Druckman
Mikela Druckman is the CEO and founder of GreyParrot, the companies goal is to use AI technologies to find innovative solutions to waste management. She started off her career working in various tech projects that helped her gain traction within the field and led her to be appointed to the World Economic Forums Global Future Council, and a spot on the UK's top female leaders in tech.
She continues to fight for sustainable practices and solutions with technology through her company and various global projects.
2 Ellen K Pao
Ellen K Pao's mother taught her how to code at the age of 10, sparking what would become a long and successful kick-off to her lifelong passion. She has recently become an advocate for the tech community regarding sexism, racism and discrimmination. She sued her former employer Kleiner Perkins, a capital venture firm in Silicon Valley for workplace discrimination regarding failure to promote her while promoting males in the same roles.
She went on to become the CEO of Reddit, before founding a nonprofit called Project Include, using data to make the tech industry more inclusive.
1 Susan Wojcicki
Susan Wojcicki is currently the CEO of Youtube, but she came a long way from helping launch Google in 1999. She was one of the original employees at Google and made a jump into tech from a background in literature and history from Harvard.
She oversaw projects including AdSense and the creation of youtube. It goes to show you that anyone can work in tech if they are determined to learn and make a change.
