This article is brought to you by Usersnap, your solution for building great digital projects. Get a 15-day free trial here.
It’s a sad fact that the tech industry is still vastly dominated by men. Currently, women hold only around 25% of all tech jobs. The number is even smaller for management roles. Only 14% of all CTO positions in tech companies belong to women. You’d think with all the innovative products, ideas and technologies launched every day, the tech industry would have figured out gender equality. Well, it hasn’t. As technology keeps advancing into every aspect of our lives, this is something that has to change. It is more important than ever to make women seen and female voices heard.
Today, we want to present you 7 outstanding female CTOs. These women are leading the way for women in tech in 2017 and beyond.
Gerri Martin-Flickinger is not just the first female CTO of coffee giant Starbucks, but their first CTO ever. She joined the company in November 2015. In the past, Gerri worked as CIO and VP at Adobe Systems. She played a key role in Adobe’s move towards becoming a cloud-based service. In the past, she served as CIO of VeriSign and CIO at McAfee Associates, Inc.
As VP and CTO of Cisco’s DevNet Innovations, Susie Wee was integral to the platform’s launch. Today, she continues to run its operation. DevNet is an online community for developers and network engineers. They have over 80,000 active members.
Jane is CTO for one of the largest beverage companies of the world. She has lots of insights to share about what life as a female professional is like in a male-dominated area like IT.
Rebecca Parsons is CTO for software development and IT consulting company ThoughtWorks. She is trying to change the face of the tech industry by bringing more women into the business:
With two women in leading technology roles, Cisco seems to be a very progressive company in terms of gender equality. CTO Padmasree Warrior is a big advocate of addressing gender issues in technology (and other industries as well for that matter).
Susanne Kaiser is CTO of the German next-generation collaboration software JUST SOCIAL. She has a background in computer science and over 15 years of experience in software development.
In 2013, Hannah Wolfe co-founded Ghost, an open-source publishing platform. After an incredibly successful kickstarter campaign, the platform kept growing at a fast pace. Despite the early success, Hannah stresses that the platform is inherently open source: “We’re not here to make a million dollars, we’re not here to implement an exit strategy. We’re here to build something and give it to the world.”
I hope you enjoyed reading our article on female CTOs. Clearly, a lot of work is necessary to achieve gender equality in the tech industry. It is very important to make more women in tech seen and female voices heard.
We know that there are more female CTOs out there. I hope you were able to meet someone new! 🙂
At Usersnap, we want to build software that reflects diversity and is build and tested by people from different backgrounds.
Usersnap is used by developer teams worldwide. Companies such as Google, Microsoft or Facebook use our solution to build better products, communicate visually, and work together.
All of our solutions are based on visual communication. By allowing our users, who are working on web projects, to draw on the screen and express themselves visually, we are bridging a verbal gap that can otherwise easily create misunderstandings.
You can start your free 15-Day-Trial today! Just sign up here. We’d love to have you on board.
Customer feedback isn’t just a checkbox—it’s the fuel that drives great products forward. 🚀 We’re…
The key isn’t just understanding users but unlocking insights that lead to solutions they can’t…
Release notes aren't just a list of changes—they’re a key touchpoint in the customer journey,…
Product updates aren’t just a box to check—they’re your chance to connect. And a changelog?…
What’s the point of launching a great feature if no one notices? The real magic…
Ever wonder how some companies make product updates feel like the highlight of your day? …