During my routine email check, one particular newsletter caught my
attention highlighting the role of women in technology by Ellinor Mills for
CNet News. If you are a woman passionately in the tech-world, read on and be
inspired.
An extract: :
Three tech leaders, Google's Marissa Mayer, Flickr founder Catarina
Fake, and Padmasree Warrior of Cisco--speak on how woman have broken through
the gender imbalance in the tech world. According to Mills, all three agree
that progress has been made, but that
there's still a long way to go to get more women into the technology field. When Marissa Mayer joined Google in 1999, she was the first female
engineer the search start-up hired. Now, vice president of location and local
services at Google, she has overseen much of the technology and user interface
features on Google Search. Catarine Fake who co-founded Flickr, emphasizes the fact that, although
people may stereotype referring
your ways of doing things, as a very female approach to product design and
technology, your role is to be that person - to be mindful of the humanity in
the technology.
Padmashree who grew up in Viyawada in South India joined Motorola in
1984 following her higher studies at Cornell University, was named chief
technology officer in 2003. Currently, she is CTO at Cisco. She points out the
fact that as women in the tech world, we are
different and noticed, because there are few of us in the tech industry,
this is something we can leverage upon as an advantage.
These women have worked hard and
excelled in a male-dominated field in positions with a handful, if any female
counterparts. Nevertheless, I feel this
era has witnessed a clear boom of women embracing 'techy' jobs, from those in my generation especially which would continue to grow into the following generations. Behold the future! the imbalance
shall soon be wiped out with more and more tech-women currently being molded.
Worthy to mention, Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906 – January 1,
1992), a pioneer in the field, a computer scientist and United States Navy
officer who developed the first compiler for a computer programming language.
Her conceptualization of a machine-independent programming language led to
COBOL.
