Search for Female Internet Heroes
In April, we visited London Open Coffee Meet-up, where the issue of female speakers at the Next Web Conference and the lack thereof came up. To finally tackle the issue, we promised to come up with a list of 100 international female tech and web heroes. Indeed, I myself had some practice at restaurant review site Iens, where I once put together a top 20 of female chefs.
Sheryl Sandberg from Facebook
Let’s first state that we have been able to track down a number of amazing web women. Right now we have a database of 400 international internet women. Our focus is on web entrepreneurs, investors and CEO’s in the Internet world. But we also came across highly regarded female cross media consultants, power bloggers and other independent professionals, as well a talented mid level managers.
Our first place for research was LinkedIn. Yet ‘internet’, ‘ceo’ and ‘entrepreneur’ resulted in many men, but few women. Maybe they can add as search option ‘female’. When we googled a bit on the same terms, many initiatives focusing on women leadership sprung forward.
Websites like Women Enterprise empower women to start their own (internet) business, while other organizations stimulate women to be represented in the information technology and computing world.
To enhance visibility of women there are several awards, such as the new Harpers Bazaar’s Women of the Year or the Cartier Women’s Initiative, focusing on female entrepreneurs in general (where Dutch Annemarie van Gaal is member of the jury) and the Blackberry Women Technology Awards, which honors the achievements of women leaders in the technology sector.
Also, articles in business magazines make an effort to portrait female leaders, as do various journalism blogs. Further, women networking groups take a stand on the issue and connect career women. The trend is that women are entering the boardroom and are knocking on the doors of investors as not seen before. Most governments have committed themselves to stimulate gender equality, also in the technology area, and organizations as Catalyst assist in this task.
Among the Fortune 500 tech companies, 5 are led by female CEO’s, such as Patricia Russo of Alcatel-Lucent. Google is breeding female technical leaders, such as Sheryl Sandberg, which are then bought by others, in this case Facebook, in the industry. At this blog we will publish about these female internet heroes regularly; feel free to put suggestions forward.
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