Skip to main content

Breaking the glass ceiling: 6 women in tech you should know

Image used with permission by copyright holder

With only 11 percent of executive positions at Silicon Valley companies held by women and fewer than one-in-five technology startups are female-led, working in the tech industry as a woman can often be isolating and disheartening. The National Center for Women and Information Technology estimates that women only held 25 percent of all professional computing jobs in 2015, despite making up 57 percent of the workforce. For women of color, that number is even lower, with only 5 percent of those women identifying as Asian, 3 percent as black, and 1 percent as Hispanic.

Women With Byte looks at the many contributions women have made to technology past and present, the hurdles they faced (and overcame), and the foundations for the future they’ve laid for the next generations.
Women With Byte Keyart 2021

At companies like Twitter, only 15 percent of its tech jobs are held by women, while women made up more than 50 percent of non-technical jobs (human resources, marketing, etc.). Fewer women pursuing degrees in computer science does not bode well for the industry either, which is often seen as unwelcoming and hostile toward its female employees. But despite the fact the industry landscape is less than ideal for women, it doesn’t mean there aren’t some badass ladies out there making their mark.

Here are just a few of the top women in tech you should be aware of.

Angela Ahrendts, Senior VP of Retail, Apple

Angela Ahrendts is an American businesswoman and senior vice president of Retail at Apple. Before joining Apple’s executive team in 2014 — where she remains the company’s sole female senior executive — Ahrendts was the CEO of Burberry, a luxury fashion house based in London. Prior to that, she was the executive vice president at Liz Claiborne. With more than three decades of experience in the fashion industry, Ahrendts is not only revolutionizing Apple’s products by making them more fashionable, but also more profitable. She ranked 15 on Forbes’ 2016 list of the world’s most powerful women in tech, and earned more $70 million in 2014, making her the highest-paid Apple executive.

Twitter

Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook and founder of the Lean In Foundation, has been named the most powerful women in tech by Forbes six years in a row. She is also the author of the 2013 bestseller Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which is about women in business leadership. She is the first woman to serve on Facebook’s board of directors, and before joining Facebook, she was the VP of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google and the chief of staff for United States Secretary of the Treasury, Lawrence Summers, during the Clinton administration. She has been involved in a variety of campaigns to encourage women to pursue roles in leadership, too. In a recent interview, Sandberg says she “will not rest” until women run half the world’s countries and corporations.

Facebook

Liu Qing, President, Didi Chuxing

Liu Qing, also know as Jean Liu, is a Chinese business executive and the president of Didi Chuxing, a Chinese ride-sharing company. A graduate of Harvard University, Liu was instrumental in the end of a years-long battle with Uber CEO Travis Kalanick for the future of ride-sharing in China. The two companies eventually reached an agreement where Uber took a partial stock in Didi and ultimately backed out of China. Liu has been named among some of the most influential people in the world and has spoken out about creating a better work-family balance for women. She also helped start the Didi Women’s Network to help women with families succeed in tech, which she believes “opens a new phase of enhanced motivation and broadened thinking.”

Kimberly Bryant, Founder, Black Girls Code

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Electrical engineer and founder of Black Girls Code, Kimberly Bryant wants to see more women of color in the tech industry. With more than 20 years of experience in biotech and a degree in electrical engineering from Vanderbilt University, Bryant founded the non-profit in 2011 with the goal of teaching young black girls the skills needed to code, program computers, and build websites and robots. Black Girls Code hopes to teach one million girls by 2040, which will in turn help fill the expected 1.4 million job openings in computing in 2020. Unsurprisingly, Bryant has even been recognized as a White House Champion of Change for Tech Inclusion.

Twitter

Erica Baker, Senior Engineering Manager, Patreon

Erica Baker is an engineer from San Francisco who has worked with many well-known tech companies, including Google, Slack, and most recently, Patreon. She has been an advocate for diversity and inclusion in technology for many years. In 2015, after leaving Google for Slack, Baker revealed that she started an internal spreadsheet at Google for employees to disclose their salaries, which Baker said led to several colleagues being able to negotiate pay raises. She is also one of the founding members of Project Include, a non-profit organization that offers assessments to tech companies and address a lack of diversity. Currently, Baker is the senior engineering managing at Patreon and has written about the difficulties of being a woman of color in the workplace.

Twitter

Gwynne Shotwell, President/COO, SpaceX

David Elrich/Digital Trends

President and chief operating officer of SpaceX — the aerospace manufacturer best known for recently shooting a Tesla into space — Gwynne Shotwell handles the daily operations of Elon Musk’s closely watched company. Shotwell is a graduate of Northwestern University with degrees in both mechanical engineering and applied mathematics. She originally intended to work in the automotive industry and enrolled in Chrysler’s management training program, but did not remain in that industry. She joined SpaceX in 2002, the same year the company was founded. She was hired as the vice president of Business Development and worked her way up to her current role as president.

Brie Barbee
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Brie is a writer from Portland, Oregon. She received a bachelor's degree from Portland State University in 2016, where she…
How to make a GIF from a YouTube video
woman sitting and using laptop

Sometimes, whether you're chatting with friends or posting on social media, words just aren't enough -- you need a GIF to fully convey your feelings. If there's a moment from a YouTube video that you want to snip into a GIF, the good news is that you don't need complex software to so it. There are now a bunch of ways to make a GIF from a YouTube video right in your browser.

If you want to use desktop software like Photoshop to make a GIF, then you'll need to download the YouTube video first before you can start making a GIF. However, if you don't want to go through that bother then there are several ways you can make a GIF right in your browser, without the need to download anything. That's ideal if you're working with a low-specced laptop or on a phone, as all the processing to make the GIF is done in the cloud rather than on your machine. With these options you can make quick and fun GIFs from YouTube videos in just a few minutes.
Use GIFs.com for great customization
Step 1: Find the YouTube video that you want to turn into a GIF (perhaps a NASA archive?) and copy its URL.

Read more
I paid Meta to ‘verify’ me — here’s what actually happened
An Instagram profile on an iPhone.

In the fall of 2023 I decided to do a little experiment in the height of the “blue check” hysteria. Twitter had shifted from verifying accounts based (more or less) on merit or importance and instead would let users pay for a blue checkmark. That obviously went (and still goes) badly. Meanwhile, Meta opened its own verification service earlier in the year, called Meta Verified.

Mostly aimed at “creators,” Meta Verified costs $15 a month and helps you “establish your account authenticity and help[s] your community know it’s the real us with a verified badge." It also gives you “proactive account protection” to help fight impersonation by (in part) requiring you to use two-factor authentication. You’ll also get direct account support “from a real person,” and exclusive features like stickers and stars.

Read more
Here’s how to delete your YouTube account on any device
How to delete your YouTube account

Wanting to get out of the YouTube business? If you want to delete your YouTube account, all you need to do is go to your YouTube Studio page, go to the Advanced Settings, and follow the section that will guide you to permanently delete your account. If you need help with these steps, or want to do so on a platform that isn't your computer, you can follow the steps below.

Note that the following steps will delete your YouTube channel, not your associated Google account.

Read more