Women Are Breaking Biases in STEM

Why Do We Celebrate Women's Day On March 8?

International Women's Day #IWD, a global celebration of the economic, political, and social achievements of women, took place for the first time on March 8, 1911.

Why Should We Pay More Attention To International Women’s Day?

Because it’s too important to ignore! The battle for equality is far from done. One important aspect of that battle is for woman’s equality in every sector of society. This year, the theme is to #ENDviolence against women. We hope that everyone celebrates International Women’s Day in some way and more importantly, strives to end violence against women.

At Imanami, we always choose to recognize women who make a difference in the field of technology and all things STEM. What we like is that things are changing for the better for women in STEM. Though more progress is needed, there is no shortage of impactful women who are leaving their mark on how we live and work.

We’re inspired and everyone else should be as well. That said, there is still so much more to do. It begins at the beginning, and that is making sure girls get the right education to suit their talents. It’s amazing how these women not only do well in their careers, but they also continue to “Share It Forward” through their involvement with STEM-based organizations.

The Powerful Women in STEM

Following are a few Women in STEM we’ve chosen to spotlight who contribute to the growth and progress of technology on this small, blue planet we call home. Follow them on social media, or better yet, get involved yourself in helping to make sure girls and women continue to march forward. The world would be a much better place if we all continue to do our part.

Nicole Perlroth

Cyber Security Expert, Author, @nicoleperlroth

Nicole Perlroth spent a decade as the lead cybersecurity reporter at The New York Times. Her investigations rooted out Russian hacks of nuclear plants, airports, elections, and petrochemical plants; North Korea's cyberattack against Sony Pictures, Bangladesh banks, and crypto exchanges; Iranian attacks on oil companies, banks, and dams; and thousands of Chinese cyberattacks against American businesses, including leading the investigation of the months-long Chinese hack of The Times. Her outing of hacking divisions within China’s PLA compelled the first United States hacking charges against the Chinese military and earned her the prestigious “Best in Business Award” from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. She left the Times in 2021 to join the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity Advisory Committee.

Susan Wojcicki

CEO of YouTube, @susanwojcicki

Susan Wojcicki originally pursued a career in academia. She graduated with honors from Harvard University, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and literature.

Wojcicki developed an interest in technology during her senior year at Harvard. She went on to earn a Master of Science degree in economics from the University of California Santa Cruz and a Master of Business Administration degree from UCLA.

After graduation, she returned to Silicon Valley to work in marketing at Intel. She later moved to Menlo Park, where she rented her garage as office space to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google. She became Google's 16th employee and first marketing manager, helping to develop Google Images and Google Books.

Wojcicki helped develop AdWords and AdSense - Google's advertising and analytics products. From there, she became Google's senior vice president of advertising and commerce, where she led the company's advertising and analytics division, including Google Video.

She then proposed acquiring YouTube -- a direct competitor to Google Video -- rather than attempting to compete with it. In 2006, Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion.

Wojcicki became YouTube's CEO in 2014. She continues to lead the Google subsidiary in its role as one of the most influential and frequently used platforms on the internet.

Kimberly Bryant

Founder, And CEO Of Black Girls Code, @6Gems

Kimberly Bryant excelled at science and mathematics as a child and earned a scholarship to Vanderbilt University. There, she obtained a Bachelor of Engineering degree in electrical engineering with minors in mathematics and computer science. For more than two decades, Bryant took on technical leadership roles in several pharmaceutical and biotech companies, including Novartis and Merck.

It wasn't until her daughter showed an interest in computer science that Bryant realized there was still a lack of Black women in the science, technology, engineering, and math professions. This gap wasn't due to a lack of interest -- it was due to a lack of access and exposure to STEM topics.

Bryant founded Black Girls Code in 2011, a San Francisco nonprofit that exposes girls of color ages 7 to 17 to STEM subjects. Here, girls can learn in-demand skills as they think about what they want to be when they grow up. The organization has the goal of teaching 1 million Black girls to code by 2040. Today, the organization has 16 chapters across the United States and one chapter in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Rinki Sethi

VP and CISO at Twitter @rinkisethi

One of the leaders in Security Management, Rinki Sethi is the VP and CISO at Twitter. She is handling Twitter’s InfoSec team covering areas such as Enterprise Risk, Security Risk, Application Security, and Detection & Response. She has contributed immensely to the field of technical security. She also developed innovative online security systems for Fortune 500 companies like IBM, PG&E, Walmart.com, and eBay. Sethi was also honored with the One to Watch Award in 2010 by CSO Magazine & Executive Women’s Forum. She also serves as an advisor to several startups and cybersecurity organizations, including Women in Cybersecurity.

Sethi started her career at Pacific Gas and Electric Company as an Information Security Specialist from July 2004 to August 2006. From August 2006 to March 2009 she worked at Walmart as a security engineer. Sethi was later appointed by eBay from 2009 to September 2012 where she had different security roles. She worked as VP, Security Operations at Palo Alto Networks from 2015-2018. She worked at IBM from October 2018 to April 2019 as the Vice President of Information Security. She worked at Intuit as a Director of Product Security from 2012-to 2015. Sethi served as chief information security officer at Rubrik from April 2019 to September 2020. Sethi was named to the board of directors of Forge Rock in August 2021.

Elizabeth Churchill

Director Of The User Experience At Google, @xeeliz

Elizabeth Churchill attended Sussex University and obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in research and experimental psychology and a Master of Science degree in knowledge-based systems. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.

Churchill moved to California to join FX Palo Alto Laboratory and later Palo Alto Research Center. From there, she held positions at various tech companies, including Yahoo, eBay, and Google. She is currently Google's director of user experience. In this role, Churchill researches and presents topics related to computer science, psychology, design, analytics, and anthropology to make the user experience more precise and efficient.

Churchill also serves as the vice president of the Association of Computing Machinery. She also has more than 50 patents granted or pending, and more than 100 published articles in multiple fields of psychology and computing.

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Kate Crawford

Co-Founder Of New York University's AI Now Institute, @katecrawford

Kate Crawford embarked on a career exploring the sociopolitical implications and applications of artificial intelligence after earning her Ph.D. from the University of Sydney.

In her research, Crawford seeks to understand the benefits and dangers of AI and machine learning in the broader context of history, politics, labor, the environment, and other sectors. Crawford advocates for mindful and respectful AI development. Her work examines how those technologies could potentially lead to bias, labor and supply chain disruptions, economic impacts due to automation, privacy violations, and curtailment of rights from increased surveillance.

Crawford's work has been featured in Nature, Science, The New York Times, and The Atlantic. Her insight has led to multiple speaking engagements and advisory roles to policymakers at the United Nations and the White House.

Crawford co-founded New York University's AI Now Institute in 2017, the first university institute dedicated to researching the social impact of AI, and the first women-led and founded AI institute. The institute's goal is to change how researchers look at AI and expand their interpretation of it from a technical standpoint to include history, sociology, and law to inform their development decisions.

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Fei-Fei Li

Co-Director Of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute, @drfeifei

Fei-Fei Li was born in Beijing, China, and moved to the U.S. at age 16. She graduated from Princeton with a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics, and from the California Institute of Technology with a Ph.D. in computer science.

After graduating, Li taught engineering and computer science courses at the University of Illinois and Princeton. She then joined the staff at Stanford in 2009, where she still teaches as a fully tenured professor. Li served as the director of Stanford's AI Lab from 2014 to 2018. She currently holds the title of co-director of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute.

Li's research focuses on cognitive and computational neuroscience, and machine learning to improve AI image recognition ability. This research led her to take a sabbatical from Stanford from January 2017 to September 2018, when she served as vice president of Google and chief scientist of AI and machine learning at Google Cloud.

Li also founded AI4ALL along with her Ph.D. student, Olga Russakovsky in 2017. AI4ALL is a nonprofit aimed at increasing diversity in the AI sphere through education, recruitment, mentoring, and training students in historically underserved communities. AI4ALL has partnered with professionals from organizations such as Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Black Girls Code, and Girls Who Code. Today, it operates summer programs in 16 locations across the U.S.

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Ellen Pao

Co-Founder, And CEO Of Project Include, @ekp

Ellen Pao learned how to code at age 10 from her mother -- a computer engineer at the University of Pennsylvania. Pao went on to graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in electrical engineering and a certificate in public policy from Princeton University. She also earned a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

After working for several Silicon Valley companies -- including WebTV and BEA Systems -- Pao became the technical chief of staff at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a San Francisco venture capital firm. She ended up suing the company for bias and gender discrimination.

In 2013, Pao became Reddit's head of business development and strategic partnerships, then interim CEO in 2014. Pao is an advocate for women's rights and transforming corporate culture, and she banned the use of "revenge porn" and unauthorized nude photos on Reddit. This move inspired other social media platforms to institute similar policies.

Pao later resigned from Reddit and founded Project Include with several other women in the tech industry. The group's mission is to address and prevent sexism and gender discrimination in Silicon Valley and to improve diversity and inclusion within tech companies.

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Reshma Saujani

Founder And CEO Of Girls Who Code, @reshmasaujani

Reshma Saujani graduated from the University of Illinois with a bachelor's degree in political science and speech communication. From there, she received her Master of Public Policy degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and her Juris Doctor from Yale Law School.

Saujani became the first Indian-American woman to run for U.S. Congress in 2010 when she campaigned for a New York House seat. During the race, she ran the first political campaign using tools such as Square to receive donations. And while visiting area schools during the race, she saw firsthand the gender gap in computer classes.

In 2012, Saujani founded Girls Who Code to address that gender gap in the tech workforce, with programs for grades 3 through college. The organization offers summer immersion and campus programs, online resources, books, after-school clubs, and college alumni programs. To date, the organization has served more than 450,000 girls, approximately half of whom are from underserved communities made up of Black, Latina, and low-income girls.

In 2017, Saujani published her book, Girls Who Code: Learn to Code and Change the World, promoting the tenets of her organization.

Gwynne Shotwell

President and COO of SpaceX @Gwynne_Shotwell

Shotwell has been an innovator in aerospace and made significant technical contributions to the design of reusable rockets at SpaceX, propelling the company to new heights in space commercialization. She achieved her first major success at SpaceX in December 2008 when she helped get its first big customer, NASA. Under her technical guidance, SpaceX has completed many successful missions and plans to send astronauts to ISS and then to Mars in the 2020s.

Shotwell gives back: Shotwell gave a TEDx Talk at TEDxChapmanU in June 2013 on the importance of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. She speaks regularly to business audiences and gave a talk for the "Captains of Industry" series at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security in June 2014 on private entrepreneurial accomplishments in advancing spaceflight technology. At the 2018 TED conference, Shotwell was interviewed by Chris Anderson about the future plans of SpaceX.

At the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing on September 28, 2018, Shotwell's talk was titled "Launching Our Future" and she discussed her vision and advancements for aerospace technology, as well as why diversity and inclusion of women are necessary to advance as a society.

Kelly Steckelberg

CFO at Zoom, @ksteckel

Kelly has extensive leadership and finance experience holding various roles including CFO of Zoom Video Communications, CEO, COO, and CFO of Zoosk, divisional CFO positions for the Consumer Segment and WebEx. Steckelberg brings two guiding principles to her role as CFO: Employees should think of the company's finances as their own, and they should understand how their role contributes to the company's success. Her leadership, knowledge, and experience helped Zoom to handle meteoric growth.

"If you give employees the opportunity to understand how they fit in, most will rise to the occasion and do everything they can to help,"

she said.

"Everybody wants to participate in the company's financial success."

What Do The Stats Say

While progress has been made, the fight for gender equality and representation in STEM is still at the beginning.

Women should remember what Barbara McClintock, winner of the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has to say:

?"If you know you are on the right track, if you have this inner knowledge, then nobody can turn you off... no matter what they say."

We at Imanami hope that everyone takes time to celebrate the women in their life every day, not just on International Women’s Day.

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