Thursday, 25 August 2011
The number of women at the top has been slow to change. But this year's FORBES annual list of the World's 100 Most Powerful Women highlights five Silicon Valley women who have dared to take on the status quo.
Both Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg and Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz returned to this year's list, while Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina both dropped off. Several impactful newcomers emerged in their place: Google ad wizard Susan Wojcicki is now responsible for 96% of the search giant's revenues, some $28 billion last year alone. The search giant's first female engineer Marissa Mayer spent her first 11 years on the job perfecting Web search. Now she oversees Google's next key growth driver-- local products-- while moonlighting as Google's trusted public face. This year's list also includes Katie Jacobs Stanton, Twitter's VP of International Strategy. Stanton logged 130,000 miles last year convincing the world to Tweet.
Now, half the leaders of the G20 have Twitter accounts and 70% of all Tweets hail from outside the U.S. In the wake of Japan's natural disasters, those 140 characters became a lifeline. In the Arab Spring, they were a bullhorn.
The list admittedly left off several women shifting the power dynamic around Silicon Valley. In no particular order, here are four Silicon Valley-based women to watch.
