2010-12-28

The Women (I know) in Tech

Over the last few months there's been a lot of public discussion / accusation / explanation around why there are few women working at technology startups.

Silicon Alley Insider pointed out the lack of women applying to "maker" (engineers, product managers, and designers) positions at small tech companies. TechCrunch asked everyone to stop blamming men (I agree with their argument), but then also published a fairly upsetting post by a guest blogger explaining that women would rather have children than run startups.

All of this discussion around the "mythical" woman in tech confounds me. I know a number of smart, ambitious women in technology. So I wonder, why doesn't tech press doesn't notice them as well?

My opinion is that women in tech (at least the ones I know) focus on Getting Things Done more than talking about Getting Things Done, and therefore don't build as strong of a public reputation as our male counterparts... but that's just one explanation ;)

Anyways, to dispel the myth and prove that we do exist, I thought I'd shine the spotlight on the awesome women engineers, product managers, and designers (aka: "makers") that I've worked with. Not all of them are in startups, but they are all fantastic.

Here we go... 
(Bold indicates they are at a startup, or were early enough at their company that it was a startup when they joined.)
(Also note, these are only the Engineers, Product Managers, and Designers I know... I should likely add women in other fields. But this list is in response to SAI's article which specifically spoke of women "makers", and other fields are generally more gender-balanced). 
  1. Amanda Peyton (Co-Founder, MessageParty)
  2. Amy Chang (Director of Product Management, Google)
  3. Amy Wu (Product Manager, Google)
  4. Andrea Sharfin (Product Manager, Flixster)
  5. Ashley Granata (Co-founder, Fashism)
  6. Avni Shah (Product Manager, Google)
  7. Beth Liebert (Product Manager, Google; Product Manager, Ideo)
  8. Bhanu Narasimhan (Product Manager, Google)
  9. Bindu Reddy (Co-founder, MyLikes, Product Manager, Google)
  10. Brooke Moreland (Co-founder, Fashism)
  11. Daisy Stanton (Software Engineer, Google)
  12. Elaine Montgomery (Head of User Experience Client Access, Deutsche Bank; UX Designer & Manager, Google) 
  13. Ellen Beldner (Principle Designer, LinkedIn; Director of User Experience, ChoiceVendor; Designer, Google) 
  14. Hannah Tang (Software Engineer, Google)
  15. Hayley Barna (Co-founder, Birchbox) 
  16. Heike Schmitz (Former Engineering Manager at Google)
  17. Hilary Mason (Scientist, Bit.ly; Co-Founder, HackNY.org)
  18. Irene Au (Head of User Experience, Google; VP of User Experience, Yahoo) 
  19. Jen Fitzpatrick (VP of Engineering, Google)
  20. Jenna Bilotta (Senior UX Designer, Google)
  21. Jessica Cheng (Co-founder, Color; Software Engineer, Google)
  22. Johanna Wright (Director of Product Management on Search at Google) 
  23. Julie Jalalpour (CRM Project Manager, Twitter) 
  24. Julie Parent (Software Engineer, Google)
  25. Katie Jacobs Stanton (VP, Twitter; Product Manager, Google)
  26. Kerah Cottrell (Web Designer; Senior UI Designer, Google)
  27. Kristina Holst (Engineering Manager, Facebook; Software Engineer, Google)
  28. Laura Granka (User Experience Researcher, Google)
  29. Leslie Yeh Johnson (Product Manager, Google)
  30. Lori Park (Software Engineer & Product Manager, Google) 
  31. Lucy Zhang (Co-founder, Beluga; Software Engineer, Google) 
  32. Mari Sheibley (Lead Visual Designer, foursquare) 
  33. Marisa Bauer (Software Engineer, Google)
  34. Marissa Evans (Founder, Go Try It On)
  35. Marissa Mayer (VP of Location & Local Services, Google; VP of Search Product and User Experience, Google) 
  36. Maryam Kamvar Garrett (Senior Software Engineer, Google)
  37. Maureen Heymans (Senior Staff Software Engineer, Google) 
  38. Mina Radhakrishnan (Product Manager, ModCloth; Product Manager, Google) 
  39. Minnie Ingersoll (Product Manager, Google)
  40. Mira Dontcheva (Research Scientist, Adobe) 
  41. Mizuki McGrath (Engineering Director, Search & Ads)
  42. Natala Menezes (Senior Product Manager, Amazon)
  43. Neha Narula (PhD Candidate MIT, Software Engineer, Google)
  44. Niniane Wang (CTO, Minted; Engineering Manager, Google; Engineering Manager, Microsoft) 
  45. Nori Heikkinen (Software Engineer, Google)
  46. Radha Chandika (Software Engineer, Google) 
  47. Renee Levie Budak (Founder, The Testing Team; Director of Product Management and Quality Assurance, MyLawsuit.com) 
  48. Rose Yao (Product Manager, Facebook; Senior Product Manager, Google) 
  49. Roseanne Marie DeHaven Wincek (Cofounder, ImTheMusic) 
  50. Ruchira S. Datta (Software Engineer, Google)
  51. Sha-Mayn Teh (Staff Software Engineer/Engineering Manager, Google)
  52. Sheridan Kates (Product Manager, Google)
  53. Sheryl Sandberg (COO, Facebook; VP, Global Online Sales & Operations, Google)
  54. Shimrit Ben-Yair (Product Manager, Google; Software Engineer, Actimize & Nice Systems)
  55. Shirin Oskooi (Director of Product Management at DriverSide, Product Manager, Google)
  56. Siobhan Quinn (myself - Product Manager, foursquare; Product Manager & Software Engineer @ Google)
  57. Soraya Darabi (Co-founder, Foodspotting)
  58. Steph Hannon (Product Manager, Google; Software Engineer, Cisco)
  59. Susan Wojcicki (VP of Product, Adwords & AdSense at Google) 
  60. Tammy Camp (CEO at ComCorp, Inc)
  61. Tessa MacDuff (Senior Software Engineer, Google) 
  62. Tina Chen (Designer, Google) 
  63. Tina Huang (Software Engineer, Twitter; Software Engineer, Google) 
  64. Yael Shacham Shazeer (Senior Product Manager, Google)
 ... and these are only the women I know directly. There's tons more of amazing tech women building great, impactful products. I hope this little post helps them get the recognition they deserve!

And if you know any great female Product Managers, Engineers, or Designers, please add them in the comments. Would love this list to grow!

21 comments:

  1. Very true. Another great example is Susie Hale, President of Frog Pond in Houston. She developed one of the fastest growing REALTOR lead generation tech products (1 Minute Housing Market Report)in the industry and paid little mind to promoting herself. It has always been about the product and attracting consumer eyeballs for her clients.

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  2. Nice! Good post, Siobhan! And actually, thanks to Bart who re-posted to Facebook. I had no idea you had a blog since I haven't seen you since March. And furthermore, had no idea you are now at Foursquare. Congrats!

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  3. Siobhan, Thanks so much for writing this post and putting this list together. It's fabulous. Not quite yet at the level of some of the women mentioned above, but would love to add myself to the list as CEO of WhichBox Media, an award winning digital publishing technology start-up in Dallas, TX

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  4. The IT industry as a whole is very much niche oriented. For example, while I've not heard of ONE of the the ladies listed above, you've probably never heard of (unless you're into SAP, like me):
    Ann Rosenberg,
    Anne Kathrine Petterøe
    Gretchen lindquist
    Karin Tillotson,
    Marilyn Pratt,
    Mico Yuk,
    Michelle Crapo,
    Sandy Kemsly,
    Susan Keohan,
    Tammy Powlas

    See http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/SAPMentors/SAP+Mentor+Initiative+FAQs

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  5. Absolutely! This is only the folks I know. Would love everyone to create lists of their own so we can bring more exposure to all of us. Thanks for the additions!

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  6. Great start, Siobhan. The same could be said for female bloggers in tech. They are out there, even if the boys make all the noise.

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  7. Awesome! Thanks so much for posting this list. I have so many positions open at Bay Area startups and this list of women at Google will be a great place for me to start recruiting. Can you link the facebook profile for each of these also?

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  8. Thank you, Siobhan, for including me in your list of very impressive and accomplished women in tech. I am honored.
    As one of the older women on your list, I have had to deal with discrimination against girls and women in math and technology all of my life. Even so, I am thankful to have been able to accomplish a lot including working at Google with a distinguished group of women Engineers and technology experts, starting my own tech business and now working for MyLawsuit.com, which is a company that is led by women. Very exciting.
    -Renee Levie Budak

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  9. @Suzy Q. Sorry this post is not at all meant to be a recruiting tool. All these people are easily discoverable on LinkedIn

    And thanks for the additions. Again this list is only the folks I have worked directly with and by no means complete. Keep them coming!

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  10. Alice Hill - former head of C|Net and currently running tech job site Dice.com

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  11. Proud to be part of this list, Siobhan. Go tech barbies!

    I had no idea what "engineering" was until college- all I knew is that you needed math and science. If I had known it was being a builder, being an inventor, and being creative and solving interesting problems, it would have been a much more obvious dream in my young life. I hope that we can share that with other young women so they can connect those dots as well. Being tech barbie is lots of fun!

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  12. What a lot of awesome women on here! Thanks very much for including me on the list, I'm honored. One addition: from being a software engineer at Google I moved on to become a research specialist in computational biology at UC Berkeley. But I'm definitely still in tech. Our research group, the Berkeley Phylogenomics Group http://phylogenomics.berkeley.edu is led by Prof. Kimmen Sjölander--another woman in tech. I know of quite a few other women in computational biology who are even further off the radar than the other women in tech on your list. "It has often been said that being a prof is like running your own startup..." http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/05/secret-lives-of-professors.html We could compare and contrast research vs. startups (one difference w/ Matt Welsh's previous point-of-view as a CS professor is that, as computational biologists, we do make real applications with real loads from real customers, namely, biologists, so the scalability of our systems infrastructure is continually being challenged). But anyway, that would be a topic for a different discussion.

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  13. Great idea, Siobhan!

    Laurel Fan - Robot Co-op (43 Things)
    Quincy Hunt - Amazon
    Wendy Knox - Amazon
    Kate Leroux - Urbanspoon
    Kerri Miller - VholdR
    Jigna Patel - La Morisyenne
    Joanna Power - Cozi
    Roxanne Skelly - Linden Lab
    Meg Solley - ??? (I think she's a stay-at-home mom now)
    Rachel Su - Wired Pixels


    Hope I didn't forget anybody. I've worked with so many awesome people over the years!

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  14. hi....dude ...This is good job ......

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  15. I'm listing the awesome women in tech I've worked with, with a compromise: if they have a fully public profile on LinkedIn or similar service I've listed their full name and company. Otherwise I'm redacting a bit.

    Anna B, Staff Software Engineer
    Linda Cheng, ASIC designer and Tech Lead at Cisco.
    Minxi G, Hardware engineer, ASIC designer, and tech lead
    Surekha G, Software engineer
    Diane Lee, technical manager at Sun Microsystems. Sadly passed away in 2009.
    Elaine M, Software Engineer
    Jo Beth Metzger Dow, Founder and CEO at Dominet Systems
    Rama M, Founder and CEO of a defense-related engineering firm
    Subrasree M, Software engineer
    Sunita N, Software engineer
    Leesa N, Hardware engineer
    Renee D (now S), Software engineer
    Louise Y, Asic engineer and tech lead
    Junlan Z, Software engineer
    Min Z, Software engineer

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  16. Jess Lee, former Googler and PM on Google Maps, is now the head of Product Management at Polyvore: http://www.polyvore.com/cgi/about.team

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  17. I just noticed this from http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management-tools-are-top-priority.html

    'Well past the time when we had hundreds of database machines (and tens of thousands of database instances spread across them), instead of hiring DBAs, we had a single database engineer who administered all of those machines by writing ever more effective tools. Today Facebook continues to manage thousands of databases with only a handful of database-oriented personnel. The original "second DBA" was even only hired because eventually our first database engineer decided she wanted someone else to cover the night shift.'

    I don't know who that is (perhaps she's already listed) but she sounds amazing.

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  18. Isn't your sister a PM at google? Good genes must run in the family!

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  19. Leah Culver, iPhone & Django developer
    Amanda Wixted, iPhone dev lead (Zynga)
    Karen Nguyen, Founder (Snappy TV)
    Timoni West, Designer (Flickr)
    Cyan Banister, Founder (Zivity)
    Cameo Wood, Product Manager (Stealth startup)

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  20. Good list of successful women. But most of these are employees...not entrepreneurs. There's a difference. How about a list of the "starters", women who've created and built companies. That would be more concentrated and inspirational. - Greg Tapper

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