50 Top Women in Tech
from March/April 2008
by Bonnie Azab Powell and Kara Platoni
A few of the women portrayed below—eBay chairman and CEO Meg Whitman and her counterpart at Xerox, Anne Mulcahy, among them—bestride the business world, leading major corporations and sharing their talent and experience with other companies too, as outside directors. Others, like the Estrin sisters, are Silicon Valley legends whose board memberships are rare; Judith Estrin sits on public boards and Deborah doesn’t. The majority are relatively unknown beyond their immediate fields but still dominate them, in academe, the space program, medical research, software, or video games. Few have board seats.
Corporate Board Member has put together this list to help boards redress two common shortfalls: an overall lack of technology experience among directors and a shortage of female directors in general. The women we’re portraying speak about their own adventures in the technology industry, the effects their gender may have had on their careers, and the extent to which things might be different for those who come after them. The ones who have already made their mark are selective about which boards they’ll even consider (for more, see “Stalled Gains for Women in Technology”). Whitman says the growing number of women who earn engineering degrees will push the needed change. Maybe. But compared with 25 years ago, fewer women are graduating in tech-related fields. Recruiters and board members, particularly those serving on the governance committee, should move fast.
Lougie Anderson, 58
Vice President of Product Development and Chief Technology Officer, Fireapps
Scottsdale, Arizona
Talk about credentials. The chief technologist at software and tech-services provider Fireapps has 20-plus years in the computer industry, as well as a master’s and doctorate in computer science and dual bachelor’s degrees in physics and mathematics. She oversees product development, IT, and overall technology strategy for the company, which helps corporations minimize their foreign-exchange currency risks. —Bonnie Azab Powell
Wanda Austin, 53
President and CEO, Aerospace Corp.
El Segundo, California
Here’s a twin triumph. After serving as a senior vice president since 2004, Austin moved into the top slot this year, becoming the first woman and the first African American to head a major aerospace company. With its space-related research-and-development and consulting services, the federally funded research center has been the midwife for almost every major U.S. military space program, including classified projects such as spy satellites and ballistic missiles. Its new CEO has a Ph.D. in systems engineering and is a member of the NASA Advisory Council. —BAP
Ruzena Bajcsy, 74
Director Emeritus of CITRIS, University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, California
Busy, busy, busy. Renowned for her pioneering work in robotics and artificial intelligence, Bajcsy now teaches electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley and sits on Argonne National Laboratory’s board of governors and the editorial boards of numerous technical journals. She’s director emeritus of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), a groundbreaking collaboration among four University of California campuses that works to harness emerging technologies for the public good. Bajcsy stepped down as the presiding director of CITRIS in 2005, following three vigorous years at the helm. Before that, she managed a $500 million budget as the first female head of the National Science Foundation’s Computer Information Science and Engineering Directorate, and earned the rare honor of admission to both the National Academy of Engineering and
the Institute of Medicine. —Kara Platoni
Carol Bartz, 59
Executive Chairman, Autodesk Inc.
San Rafael, California
“It would be nice if there were more women CEOs, but it’s not my role to hang around until I’m 80 and drooling,” Bartz said in January 2006 when she handed over the Autodesk CEO job to Carl Bass. During her 14 years as chairman, president, and CEO, Bartz stripped the publicly traded company down to its core businesses (providing modeling software for the construction and manufacturing industries), made a number of savvy acquisitions, spun off several Internet properties, and saw sales rise from $285 million the year she started to $1.5 billion when she left. Today, in addition to serving on Autodesk’s board and three others, she is a member of President Bush’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and the National Science and Technology Medals Foundation. —BAP
Public-company directorships: Cisco Systems, Intel, Network Appliance
Charlene Begley, 41
President and CEO, GE Enterprise Solutions
Fairfield, Connecticut
With a nod to Frank Sinatra, it was a very good year: 2007 provided Begley with a pair of rich rewards. She helped complete the sale of her former division, GE Plastics, to Saudi Basic Industries Corp. for $11.6 billion, then was picked to lead newly launched GE Enterprise Solutions, a group specializing in information management and automation. A 20-year GE veteran, Begley has held leadership roles throughout the company, including its transportation and mortgage-services arms and its robot and factory-automation business; she became the CEO of that unit, GE Fanuc, at 34. She still serves on the Fanuc board, as well as the Business Advisory Council at her alma mater, the University of Vermont. —KP
Nina Bhatti, 46
Principal Scientist, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
Palo Alto, California
How about this for an invention—a color-matching technology that lets a woman shopping for makeup take a cell-phone photograph of her face and receive a text message recommending a shade of foundation? It’s in the works now, thanks to Bhatti, who has filed for 25 patents. Hers is one of the most innovative minds at HP Labs, the research and design powerhouse that hatches the company’s next-generation printing, imaging, and computing technologies. Except for a two-year stint with Nokia Ventures Organization, for which she developed wireless mobile devices, Bhatti has been with HP since 1996. She is the creator and leader of the company’s customer business innovation team, which dreams up new technologies for HP’s biggest clients, and she serves on the advisory board of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. —KP
Lucy Bradshaw, 43
Executive Producer,
Electronic Arts Inc.
Redwood City, California
When people say “Get a life” these days, they may be talking about a virtual version—most notably the video games that enable you to simulate your own societies and your own virtual persons to populate them. Charged with developing a sequel to the most popular digital dollhouse for adults, Bradshaw knocked the pixelated ball out of the park: The Sims 2, on which she was executive producer, was one of the top-selling PC games of 2005 and 2006. She has also watched over the releases of SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4. The series continues to be among the industry’s most lucrative franchises, with the Sim titles alone accounting for more than $1 billion in sales. Bradshaw worked for Activision and LucasArts before joining Maxis after it was acquired by Electronic Arts in 1997. These days she’s teamed up with Sims creator Will Wright on Spore, an epic game modeled on the evolution of life. —BAP
Safra Catz, 46
President, CFO, and Director, Oracle Corp.
Redwood City, California
In this case, silence may indeed be golden. Catz, who rarely talks to the press—or, reportedly, even to Oracle’s biggest shareholders— is viewed by many as first in line to become CEO Larry Ellison’s successor. A former investment banker, she has shared the title of president with Charles Phillips Jr. since January 2004 and has served as CFO since November 2005. Catz is responsible for the software giant’s global operations and was instrumental in several of its string of acquisitions, including the controversial $10.3 billion purchase of PeopleSoft in 2004 and the $3.3 billion acquisition of Hyperion Solutions last year. She serves on Oracle’s executive management committee. —BAP
Susan Decker, 45
President, Yahoo! Inc.
Sunnyvale, California
It’s not an easy time to be a leader at Yahoo. The company faces struggling stock prices and stiff competition from Google, not to mention fallout from the 2007 shake-up that saw the ouster of CEO Terry Semel and his replacement by company co-founder Jerry Yang. Industry-watchers wonder if the company can recover the prosperity of its dot-com heyday. Decker, who became president in 2007 after rising from CFO to head the Advertiser and Publisher Group, has her eye on a new path for the search-engine pioneer. She has pushed the company toward providing ad content for websites other than its own search portal, and she’s created partnerships with online auction house eBay and more than 200 newspapers that will share classified ads and news stories with Yahoo. An executive at the company since 2000, she previously spent 14 years as an equity research analyst with Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette. —KP
Directorships: Berkshire Hathaway, Costco Wholesale, Intel
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Cooking with Cisco |
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Rebecca Jacoby, 47 Cisco’s primary business, selling switches and routers, has made it the first name in Internet networking. With her promotion to chief information officer in 2006, Jacoby was charged with integrating the San Jose, California, company’s newest technologies into its own operations as a real-world demonstration of the business applications. A 12-year Cisco veteran, she earlier held positions at UB Networks Inc. and Amdahl Corp. —KP |
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In an early-December move that Information Week compared to jumping “from a sinking ship to the deck of a passing cruise liner,” Warrior left struggling Motorola for networking giant Cisco Systems after the high-profile departure of Motorola CEO Ed Zander. She had been with Motorola for 23 years and had served in 2003 as executive vice president and CTO of the wireless-technology provider, heading a global team of 26,000 engineers and overseeing the $3.7 billion R&D investment budget. Cisco CEO John Chambers chose Warrior as his company’s CTO, a position vacant for two years, to help Cisco extend its reach from networking and communications into more collaborative Web 2.0-type approaches. The same day the press release announcing her appointment came out, Warrior wrote her first post for the Platform Paradigm, Cisco’s official blog. At Motorola she’d had her own blog, Bits at the Edge, where she shared her thoughts about world events, the future of technology, and her hectic daily life. —BAP |
Padmasree Warrior, 47 Susan Desmond-Hellmann, 50
President of Product Development, Genentech
South San Francisco, California
Desmond-Hellmann has said that she left clinical practice for medical research because “I felt very under the watermark for what I was able to do for patients. I knew we needed more and better medicines, and I wanted to be a part of that.” She went on to lead development of the breast-cancer drug Taxol for Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Pharmaceutical Research Institute and spent two years at the Uganda Cancer Institute, studying AIDS and cancer, before joining biotech behemoth Genentech in 1995. There she has worked her way up from clinical scientist to second-in-command of the company. On her watch, Genentech has rolled out several innovative cancer therapies, including Avastin and Herceptin, both of which broke the $1 billion sales mark. The company hopes to bring 15 new products or indications (FDA-approved new ways to use or prescribe already existing drugs) to market by 2010. Desmond-Hellmann serves on the boards of the American Association for Cancer Research and the Biotechnology Industry Organization. —KP
Stephanie DiMarco, 50
President and CEO, Advent Software
San Francisco
Well, yes, that’s what friends are for. When DiMarco was a 25-year-old financial analyst at a small firm in Marin County, California, she persuaded her bosses to hire a college friend, Steve Strand, to automate its portfolio management. About a year later the two started their own company, Advent Software. Strand became chief software architect while DiMarco became CEO. Advent grew into a top provider of software and services to the investment management industry. “I was at a trade show when I overheard a competitor talking about Advent,” DiMarco wrote in the New York Times last year. “He said, ‘It’s that little company in California run by that little girl.’ I wasn’t going to let it get me down. I turned it into an advantage. As the public face of the business, one that people didn’t expect, I was able to surprise a lot of customers.” Advent went public in 1995, and four years after that DiMarco stepped down as CEO. This turned out to be bad for the company, which started losing money. In 2003 DiMarco accepted a board invitation to come back as CEO and return the company to profitability. She did both: Advent earned $82.6 million on $184.1 million in sales for 2006. —BAP
Esther Dyson, 56
Commentator and Investor, Edventure Holdings
New York City
She likes to call herself the Internet’s court jester, but she’s more like its sorceress—a woman who has managed to catch and capitalize on wave after wave of new technologies and hot start-ups. A former Forbes fact-checker, Dyson launched the pioneering software newsletter Release 1.0 in the ’80s, founded ICANN, the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, in the ’90s, and has financially backed such Web success stories as Del.icio.us and Flickr (which allow Web users to share bookmarked sites and photos, respectively, and were both acquired by Yahoo) and travel site Orbitz (which was bought by Cendant), among others. These days the indefatigable Dyson invests in and advises a bevy of early-stage technology companies—including the much-hyped 23andMe, a Google-backed biotech concern that lets people search their DNA—and sits on 10 of their boards, in addition to those of multiple nonprofits. She’s also financing and promoting aviation and commercial space start-ups. —BAP
Directorship: WPP Group
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Sister Act |
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Judith L. Estrin, 53 Estrin has helped raise the Internet since it was a toddler. One of Silicon Valley’s most respected entrepreneurs, she and her former husband Bill Carrico founded four successful technology companies together after meeting in 1979: Bridge Communications, which went public in 1985 and then merged with 3Com Corp.; Network Computing Devices, a 1992 IPO; and Precept Software, acquired in 1998 by Cisco Systems, which made Estrin, then Precept’s CEO, its own CTO. In 2000 she and Carrico left Cisco to found Packet Design LLC, a developer of networking software and products that get spun off into new companies, such as Packet Design Inc., which specializes in IP routing and traffic analysis. —BAP |
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Guess which color on the palette best describes Estrin, who directs the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), a multi-campus initiative designed to explore the potential uses of large-scale systems of tiny, wirelessly connected sensors, actuators, or cameras. The answer: green. CENS researchers see a time when such networks will be used to keep an eye on the health of the natural world, monitoring pollution levels, bacterial contamination, climate change, or the structural integrity of buildings and bridges. A recipient of many research grants from the likes of the National Science Foundation, which is funding her center with $40 million, Estrin holds joint UCLA professorships in electrical engineering and computer science and is on the boards of two technology advisory organizations. “It’s hard to think of anything more motivating or important than the state of our water, the impact of climate change, and the health of the environment in general, and perhaps some of the diversity and worthiness of these emerging applications will serve to attract more women to the field,” Estrin said while accepting the Anita Borg Institute’s 2007 Women of Vision Award for Innovation. —KP |
Diane Greene, 52
President, CEO, and Director, VMware Inc.
Palo Alto, California
They sure showed Greene the green: In August VMware Inc. went public with a bang, raising $957 million. One of five co-founders, Greene has been the company’s top executive since it first hung out its shingle in 1998 as a provider of software that allows one computer or server to run multiple operating systems and applications simultaneously, saving time and money. Greene previously held positions at Silicon Graphics, Sybase, and Tandem Computers and was co-founder and CEO of VXtreme, a streaming-media company later acquired by Microsoft. —KP
Directorship: Intuit
Helen Greiner, 40
Chairman, iRobot Corp.
Burlington, Massachusetts
No unrequited love here. At age 11, Greiner fell for R2D2 and began an unending—and prosperous—relationship with robotics. The company she and two colleagues from MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory co-founded in 1990 develops robots for both the home (more than two million Roomba Vacuuming Robots have been sold) and government and military applications, such as defusing bombs and searching the rubble of the World Trade Center after 9/11. iRobot revenues have grown by more than 30% a year since 2004, to $189 million in 2006. The company made a $103 million public debut in 2005. Greiner’s nonprofit boards include the Museum of Science, Boston, and the National Defense Industrial Association. —BAP
Ellen M. Hancock, 64
Former President, Jazz Technologies Inc.
Los Altos, California
Hancock is currently on a take-five break between companies, if you can call three demanding board seats and a couple of university advisory positions a rest. Just don’t say another “R” word: retirement. “I do not intend to stay home,” she says. After 28 years at IBM, Hancock joined the chip company National Semiconductor in 1995 as executive vice president and COO, signed on with Apple Computer in 1996 as CTO, and in 1998 jumped into the president’s seat at Web-hosting company Exodus Communications; she became its CEO a few months later. Her latest venture, Acquicor Technology, started with former Apple CEO Gilbert Amelio and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, was a “blank check” company created to acquire technology businesses. Last February Acquicor snapped up Jazz Semiconductor Inc., a wafer manufacturer, for about $253 million in cash and put it under the umbrella of a new parent company, Jazz Technologies. A few months later Hancock left her president’s post at the parent company for a brief pause in her brisk career. —BAP
Directorships: Aetna, Colgate-Palmolive, Electronic Data Systems
Susan Hockfield, 56
President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts
“We need to help America fall in love all over again with the marvelous possibilities and promise of engineering, and science, and technology.” So said Hochfield in her inaugural address when she became MIT’s president in 2004, the first woman and the first life scientist to hold that title. A neuroscientist, she specialized in brain development and the brain tumors called gliomas during nearly two decades at Yale University, where she served as a professor, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and ultimately provost. At MIT, she has pushed to harness the institution’s collective brainpower on behalf of public service, notably in the fields of energy, the environment, and cancer research. Besides being a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Hockfield is involved with several nonprofits, including Carnegie Corp. of New York. —KP
Directorship: General Electric
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Mapping Google Talent |
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Marissa Mayer, 32 Its name may be the verb that means search on the Internet, but Google, based in Mountain View, California, long ago pushed past its identity as just a search engine. It is now known for snapping up promising companies and maximizing their market potential, plus (with special thanks to Mayer) developing innovative new Web-based software applications in-house. The first female engineer at what was then a 20-employee company, Mayer joined Google in 1999 right out of Stanford’s graduate school. She headed the user-interface and Web-server teams, and today—having launched Google Earth, Google Local, and Google Maps—is managing the high-profile products Google Book Search and Google Health. Without her green light, new projects like these will never make it to the Google home page. —BAP |
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Sheryl Sandberg, 38 Proof that you can do good while doing well, Sandberg was the brains behind Google Grants, which donates advertising to nonprofit organizations, and conceived the company’s philanthropic wing, Google.org, which contributes 1% of profits and equity to causes like polio eradication and plug-in hybrid vehicles. She also oversees Gmail, Google Earth, and Google Print and is in charge of online sales and operations for AdWords and AdSense, which let website owners link up with the Google search engine to earn advertising dollars. Before joining the company in 2001, Sandberg was chief of staff at the U.S. Treasury, where she promoted debt forgiveness for developing nations; previously she’d worked to wipe out leprosy in India as an economist with the World Bank. She volunteers on several nonprofit boards, including the Advertising Council, Leadership Public Schools, and One Campaign. —KP |
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Megan Smith, 39 Smith is Google’s coolhunter, prowling for innovative technology from promising start-ups that Silicon Valley’s most powerful company can acquire, improve, and launch as its latest must-use Web app or initiative. Since she joined Google in 2003, Smith-led acquisitions have included Where2Tech (mapping software used in Google Maps), Keyhole (mapping software used by Google Earth), and the Web-based photo-management software Picasa. Before signing on at Google, Smith was CEO of the gay-and-lesbian portal PlanetOut and held product-development jobs at General Magic and Apple Japan. She has two mechanical-engineering degrees from MIT, where, among other projects, she helped design, build, and race a solar car 2,000 miles across the Australian outback. MIT is her only board commitment. —BAP |
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Wojcicki’s first relationship with Google was as its landlord—in 1998 its headquarters were in her garage. A year later she left her job at Intel and joined Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to work in marketing and product licensing; she helped birth Google’s early specialized search niches for images, books, and video. These days Wojcicki manages the AdSense (content-based advertising) and AdWords (search-based advertising) products that generate almost all of Google’s tsunami-like revenue streams and also oversees Google Analytics, a website data-tracking program. In the third quarter of 2007, AdWords sales were $2.7 billion (65% of total revenues, up 68% from the comparable quarter in 2006), while AdSense programs generated $1.5 billion (34% of total revenues, up 40%). Wojcicki’s younger sister, Anne, 33, who heads a Google-backed genetic-data start-up she co-founded, married Brin in 2007, and most of the rest of the family either works or has worked at the Googleplex. —BAP |
Renee J. James
Vice President and General Manager of the Software and Solutions Group, Intel
Santa Clara, California
“Development is no longer the purview of one company with one idea. It’s a community of people collaborating,” said James in her talk at the 2007 Intel Developer Forum. She manages the developer-relations, engineering, and product teams that interact with Intel’s business partners around the globe. She also oversees software strategy and R&D operations for the world’s leading semiconductor maker. James has been a pivotal player in the development of some of Intel’s key innovations, including Indeo, the first software video codec, a method of video compression. She joined the company more than 20 years ago, straight out of college. —KP
Directorship: VMware Inc.
