From Ada Lovelace to Anita Borg, the history of STEM is a history of women. Yet the historical narrative predominantly focuses on men. When the modern news cycle turns its attention to women, more often than not, it’s to note the paucity of females in the increasingly vital fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).
Women have nowhere near the majority of jobs in the tech sector, the way they dominate the administration, healthcare and education fields. And their numbers don't show the same growth as business and finance, where women now make up more than 50% of the field. But this list isn't about the MBAs - even the ones sitting in the C-Suites of Silicon Valley - it's about the women who have mad STEM skills and are shaping the world of tech.
To find America’s top 50 women in tech, Forbes identified a pool of more than 300 candidates working in Artificial Intelligence, consumer and enterprise technology, biotech, video games and the U.S. government. We found women who work in labs, know their way around Raspberry Pi or hold tech-adjacent jobs shaping digital policy and helping underrepresented founders start up their startups.
Click here for more on the methodology.
Some are familiar, like Ginni Rometty, who joined IBM as an engineer in 1981 and as CEO, reversed the company’s flagging fortunes with cloud computing and analytics. Some, you may not know that well, like Lisa Su, who developed more efficient silicon chips while vice president of IBM’s semiconductor research and development center. As CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Su is now credited with the company's big move into custom chips for video game systems. There’s also Tal Rabin, head of cryptography research at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, whose groundbreaking work makes our digital devices more secure.
IBM runs through the resumes of several women on the list, while 20% are veterans of at least one of the big five tech companies, Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft or Facebook, and 15% who worked for at two or more. Almost half the women on the list founded their own companies, and 14% founded more than one.
Click here for full coverage of America's Top 50 Women In Tech.
Among these accomplished women, Mary Lou Jepsen may have the career with the most twists and turns. As founder and CEO of her fourth startup, Openwater, she’s working to disrupt the medical imaging industry with wearable devices with higher resolution at a much lower cost than MRI machines. She launched the One Laptop Per Child non-profit while a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and led display teams at Google X and Facebook’s Oculus team. She's also one of 16 women on the list with a PhD.
Education is the biggest commonality among America's top women in tech. MIT and Stanford University have the highest percentage of matriculation. Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley tie for second place.
More than 60% have master’s degrees, most all in specific schools of computer science or engineering. Similar majors are found in their bachelor’s degrees. One exception is Slack’s director of engineering and growth, Arquay Harris, whose MFA becomes obvious in her work on the collaboration tool’s responsive design. Two of the tech-adjacent list members have law degrees. This includes Electronic Frontier Foundation director Cindy Cohn and sextortion prosecutor Mona Sedky, who is also one of five women on the list who work for or with the U.S. government.
Together, list members are inventors or co-inventors on more than a hundred patents, are authors of hundreds of research papers and are members of hundreds of boards and trade organizations. Six women on the list have launched nonprofits. Nearly all are active in efforts to support women in STEM. And three have pink hair.*
*Which we mention not as a comment on their appearance, but because it’s interesting and cool.
