Melinda Gates has a new mission. The co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently launched a new initiative aimed at getting more women into technology. "Every company needs technology, and yet we're graduating fewer women technologists. That is not good for society. We have to change it," she said to a publication recently.
A key focus, of course, will be education. When Melinda Gates graduated and went into the tech industry in 1987, women made up about a third of computer science graduates. Today, less than 20 per cent of these degrees go to women - a shift Gates attributes to the rise of male-centric gamification.
But education is only the first step. Melinda Gates says programs are needed to keep women in the workplace. A recent Glassdoor report of 534,000 employees found the gender wage gap among programmers was the highest.
Men make, on average, 28.3 per cent more than female programmers. "There are all these hidden inequities, these biases, that men and women have bias about women working, what women should do," she said.
"But if we don't look at those root inequities and we don't talk about them and make them transparent, we won't move forward as a society. We'll make these same intelligent capabilities that are infused in our own apps - the cognitive capabilities - available to every application developer in the world," she added.
Right now, Gates says she is focused on learning more about the problem before making investments. And while Gates figures out her next step, here's a look at some powerful women already making a difference in the tech sector.
For the fifth consecutive year, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has been named the most powerful woman in technology on the Forbes’ 100 Most Powerful Women list, placing at No. 7 on the list overall. With a personal fortune of $1.4 billion, Sandberg is powerful not only as a billionaire and top executive at the world’s fifth most valuable brand, but also as a voice for female empowerment in the workplace and shared responsibilities at home.
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is the queen of the very small screen. She has run YouTube since 2014, after urging Google GOOGL +0.14% to acquire it eight years earlier for $1.65 billion while she was consigliere for Google’s ads and commerce. The site now has 1 billion users, and analysts estimate that YouTube is worth $70 billion or more.
Meg Whitman has been reorganizing business tech firm Hewlett Packard Enterprise, where she became CEO when the company made its historic split from HP Inc. in November 2015. A former Hasbro and Walt Disney executive, Whitman is still best known for leading online auction site eBay from $5.7 million in revenues in 1997 to $8 billion at the time of her departure in 2008; eBay shares are also the biggest source of her fortune.
Ginni Rometty began her career with IBM in 1981 in Detroit. Since then she has held a series of leadership positions, most recently as senior vice president and group executive, IBM sales, marketing, and strategy. Now, IBM's first female CEO, Ginni Rometty continues to drive efforts to transform IBM into a viable model for the digital age.
Apple retail boss Angela Ahrendts oversees online retail and Apple's 478 high-earning brick-and-mortar stores. She was recruited in 2014 from Burberry's, where as CEO she is credited with righting the sinking fashion house. Collecting an annual compensation package of $25 million, Ahrendts is the first woman on Apple CEO Tim Cook's executive team;
A former econ teacher who shuns the spotlight, Peng has two high-profile roles with China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba. She is Chief People Officer”overseeing the 35,000 people working for the company”and CEO of Ant Financial, Alibaba’s financial arm, which was reportedly valued at $50 billion in June and is expected to go public in China within the next two years. Among Ant Financial’s six divisions is Alipay, an online payment business with 300 million users that handles more than 80 million transactions per day.
