Technology is one field you won’t find many female engineers but it is a fascinating career option.
As a female engineers it can be a little horrible working in the tech industry, due to high rate of sexism. But nevertheless, there are so many female Engineers who are currently successful in the tech industry and their stories can serve as an inspiration for young and innovative female students out there.
There has been a huge push these days to encourage more girls to learn coding and to hire more women engineers once they graduate. Because, women are vastly outnumbered by men in technical jobs to about 3:1 and that is why sometimes it is necessary to give a shout-out to these female Engineers.
Like it was mentioned, there are so many but in this list we present to you, 10 Inspirational Female Engineers In The World.
Erica Baker is an advocate for diversity and inclusion in tech and for expanding access to tech education.
Erica started her career in tech doing domain registrations for University of Alaska Statewide System before joining Google in 2006. She joined Slack in 2015 and currently serves as a tech mentor for Black Girls Code.
She was also included in WIRED Magazine’s 2016 Next List. Erica is currently based in Oakland, California.
The inspiring part of Erica’s career is how she landed a top engineering job at Slack. Erica Baker made headlines when she wrote a post on Medium titled “The Other Side of Diversity” in November 2014. She talked about how difficult it was for a black woman to rise up in Silicon Valley.
At that time Erica was an engineer at Google “I know this: I am not my job. I am not my industry or its stereotypes. I am a black woman who happens to work in the tech industry. I don’t need to change to fit within my industry. My industry needs to change to make everyone feel included and accepted,” Baker wrote.
Reports from leading tech firms reveal that, on average, 71% of employees are men, 29% are women, 60% identify as white, 23% Asian, 8% Latino, and 7% black.
After staying at Google a few more months, she landed a job at Slack as a build-and-release engineer in May 2015.
Shah graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a B.Sc in Computer Science, she heads up heads up Chrome development at Google. She was one of the few women to have given a presentation at Google’s Developer conference I/O. Most especially because Google is really trying to close the gap between men and women in tech and it needed to show that by show casing some of its women engineers in top leadership position.
Emily graduated from Vanderbilt University, U.S. She has been a popular name in the tech industry for a while now due to her past work experience, Emily headed Business Operations at Instagram, then worked at Facebook on Mobile Business Development and Partnerships. Even before this she was Director, Sales and Operation at Google in 2009, and was promoted to head Emerging Businesses the following year.
Merline is currently the head of operations for the office of the CTO at Intuit and has distinguished herself as a leader in fast growing sectors of cloud computing, mobile, online payments and commerce.
Her path has taken her from engineering, PMing, to executive roles at Yahoo!, PayPal, Adobe and Sun. Before her role at Intuit, she was the head of global engineering operations for mobile and emerging products at Yahoo, where she was part of their massive platform shift to mobile
Prior to her time at Yahoo, Saintil was writing software and managing systems at Sun Microsystems, Adobe, PayPal, and Joeyent Inc.
Saintil earned a B.S. in computer science from Florida A&M University, Summa Cum Laude, and also attended Stanford University.
Susan is another top name in the tech industry due to her position as the CEO of Youtube. She graduated from Harvard University with an honours in Literature and History.
One great thing that inspires us all about Susan is that, In September 1998, the very same month that Google was incorporated, its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up office in Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park. Before working at Google which started as it’s first marketing manager in 1999, susan worked in the marketing department also with Intel then proceeded to work as a Management Consultant at Bain & Company, R.B. Webber & Company.
She was the brain behind Adsense which is now Google’s second largest source of revenue. It was also reported that she was the one who asked the board to purchase Youtube, which was then a small-startup competing with Google.
Marissa is the current CEO of Yahoo, She started off as a pre-medical student at the prestigious Standford University, but after sometime she changed her major to Symbolic Systems.
Marrissa also completed her M.S. in Computer Science with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence and was awarded an honoris causa doctorate degree by Illinois Institute of Technology in 2009, for her contribution in the field of Search.
In her early days she worked at Google as employee number 20 and was the company’s first female engineer. She oversaw the layout of Google’s well-known, unadorned search homepage.
When we talk about female engineers in the World you can do without mentioning Marissa.
Her LinkedIn profile.
4) Zuhairah Washington
Title: General manager
Company: Uber
Zuhairah Washington is of the most inspirational female engineers in the World, currently she is the general manager for Uber’s D.C. Metro business, which includes Washington, D.C., Maryland and Northern Virginia.
In this capacity, Washington led the regional launches of, uberX uberPOOL, uberWAV and uberFAMILY.
Her LinkedIn profile.
3) Sheryl Sandberg.
Title: Chief Operating Officer.
Company: Facebook.
Sheryl is the COO of Facebook and also the founder of Leanin.org (also known as the Lean In Foundation). In June 2012, she was elected to the board of directors, which made her the first woman to serve on the board of directors of the organization.
Before making her name at Google, where she joined as the Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations, she worked at McKinsey & Company, as the Management Consultant. After 7 years at Google she quitted and was latter recruited by Facebook to oversee their Business Operations.
In 2012, she was named in the Time 100, an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world according to Timemagazine.As of June 2015, Sandberg is reported to be worth over US$1 billion, due to her stock holdings in Facebook and other companies.
Her LinkedIn profile.
2)Mauri Whalen.
Title: Vice president of the software and services group at Intel.
Whalen is another engineer in our list of inspiring female engineers in the world. She is Intel vice president and a software engineering director in the Open Source Technology Center (OTC), a team she helped found.
She is a big contributor to a lot of major Open Source Project the largest been the company’s contribution to Linux. Whalen is a big name in Intel due to her commitment to the company. She has been with Intel for 18years beginning her career as a quality assurance software engineer.
The company has twice honored her with its Intel Achievement Award, most recently in 2014 for leadership of a product called the Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (HAXM), which makes Android apps run faster on Intel devices.
Her LinkedIn profile.
1) Gwynne Shotwell.
Title: President & Chief Operating Officer of Space Explorations Technology Corporation (SpaceX).
Shotwell is a very interesting engineer and is arguably the best of all female engineers in the world. She is responsible for the running of one of the world’s most innovative company called SpaceX.
What does SpaceX do? They design, manufacture and launch rockets to space in a bid to conquer and “enable people to live on other planets,” it says. NASA recently awarded the company a $1.6 billion contract so as to carry supplies to the International Space Station.
Her journey in SpaceX started in 2002, the same year the project was funded. At the time she was vice president of business development and helped the company build the Falcon family of rockets, leading them to over 40 launches, and $3 billion in revenue.
Shotwell has master’s degrees from Northwestern University in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics and has penned dozens of papers on spacecraft design and engineering.
Her LinkedIn profile.
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To the outside world, I'm just an ordinary geek. But in secret, I work to make my world information-safe. In order to succeed, I must become someone else... I must become something else.
