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In popular and the most stereotypical perception women and technology share an unusual, if not contradictory, relationship. Thus, women are not supposed to be 'comfortable' with the nitty-gritty of technology, leave alone the question of them being at the helm of affairs in tech firms or being empowering women leaders. It is also a fact that this perception also rules the corporate tech domain. At best, women are expected to occupy the lower strata of the job hierarchy and they are kept far away from the orbit of the vital decision-making process as prominent women leaders. To be more specific, women have a minimal role in ensuring efficiency and effectiveness of companies in which they work. But things may no longer be the same. Here they come and for good.
In the fast-changing world, facts also change and in some cases for the better. In recent times a number of women are becoming real game changers in the tech world. Making a highly effective blend of impeccable academic background and intensive on-the-job experience they are displaying extraordinary ability to guide their respective companies to high peaks of success. What is to be flagged here is the point that the performance of women leadership is not confined to maintaining the status quo in companies. Their zest leads them to aggressively take up huge complex challenges that have to be negotiated to move forward in an extremely competitive tech world. Thus, making each of them one of the empowering women leaders to follow in the 21st century.
Such development reveals what has been hidden from us so far: that gender bias, with women at the receiving end, is a mental construct of the patriarchal forces. It shows that the argument that the 'weaker sex' is not up to the mark in performing in the high-tech world is a myth to put women in subordinate positions. The following profiles of some of the most successful and empowering women leaders also tell us in no fewer revealing terms that gender equality results in much greater spread and depth in the ever-dynamic tech world.
Company: Aleada Consulting
Designation: Partner and Co-Founder
Alya J. Franklin is responsible for leading a variety of advisory projects in privacy compliance and information security governance. Alya also serves as an external Privacy Lead and as a Data Protection Officer for global organizations. Along with all this, she also manages company finance and supporting operations, human resources; performance management and business development.
Company: Cleanbox Technology Inc.
Designation: Co-Founder and CEO
Amy Hedrick is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Cleanbox Technology. Her strategy for building a thriving business by solving a real-world problem, and her vision of creating an impact brand reaching multiple industries, has grown the company from an idea to a multi-million-dollar global business in just two years. Amy's execution of the company's vision has established Cleanbox as a brand trusted by many of its Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 clients.
Company: Adaptive US Inc.
Designation: Director and Co-Founder
Ananya, Director and Co-Founder at Adaptive US Inc. has always believed in empowering professionals to excel by leveraging their potential in the best possible manner and by pushing themselves beyond their comfort zones. With this idea of empowering professionals to achieve more, the team established the Adaptive US, an Ed-Tech firm that is focused on professional education, in the year 2017.
Company: Women in Tech forum
Designation: Founder
Beginning her 13-year stint with SAP at its UK Headquarters, before relocating to Asia for more than a decade, Angie was selected for SAP's Top Talent program. This gave Angie the opportunity to work on stretch projects in addition to her core role, enabling her to develop her skills set in many areas across the business and build a strong network of peers and executives around the world. This led to her becoming one of youngest P&L holders in the company and guiding that business unit to becoming the best performing business unit globally in revenue and margin growth for two consecutive years.
Company: Avo Automation
Designation: Chief Marketing Officer
Annalisa is an agile and transformative leader, who sees change as an opportunity to advance the bold new world. Annalisa is a firm believer that teamwork makes the dream work and she has accomplished many company-wide initiatives with this mindset. Her passion for customer success and growth has led to top results in new branding ideas, modern content approaches, and scalable demand generation programs for high-growth software companies and start-up organizations.
Company: Zemplee
Designation: Founder and CEO
Aparna belongs to a technology background and began her career as a programmer. Her experience spans building internet and mobile technology products and platforms for the media, internet, e-commerce, healthcare and retail industries for global markets. Having worked for some of the iconic Silicon Valley companies like Yahoo! and eBay, Aparna brought that experience and insight into creating Zemplee. She asserts that eldercare is very much an overlooked sector – and very few people have an appreciation for this industry.
Company: Rebar Kelly
Designation: Founder and Managing Partner
Cathleen Kelly Rebar is the Founder and Managing Partner of Rebar Kelly. She is a dynamic leader and always sets high standards for herself and the team. As a former college athlete, she learned the value of sacrifice and hard work as a means to success. Cathleen believes if someone wants something, they have to earn it.
Company: Infogain
Designation: Chief Marketing Officer
Cathy Chandhok, the Chief Marketing Officer at Infogain is the one who is leading the company with top marketing practices. Since the completion of her MBA from the University of Michigan, Cathy has focused on brand management, digital marketing, and marketing tech. At Infogain, she leads the development and execution of the company's marketing by focusing on customer trust and thought leadership. As the CMO, her role is to focus on improving customer experiences, anticipating market trends, and delivering on Infogain's value proposition as a human-centered digital platform and a software engineering company.
Company: serendipID
Designation: CEO
Cindy Nicholson believes that Digital Transformation encompasses Technology, Operational and Human transformations and as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of serendipID and CEO of Braintree, Cindy brings together the key elements of success for organizations including emerging technology and human transformation. Moving to Australia from London where she worked for ten years in investment banking, Cindy has been instrumental in transforming businesses through technology.
Company: Humio
Designation: Vice President of Marketing
Cinthia Portugal is the Vice President of Marketing at Humio. She drives the overall marketing strategy and execution of the company. Humio's approach is to lead with the customer and make them a hero in their organization by helping them solve observability problems and understand the value of logging everything. Cinthia's work at Humio is the culmination of 20 years of experience driving strategies to connect customers to global products and brands.
Company: Centili
Designation: Senior Vice President of Marketing
Dina Janevski Farcic is the Senior Vice President of Marketing in Centili. Dina focuses on building the company image and repositioning it from transactional to platform-as-a-service brand and business model. Dina says that this transformation and the recent launch of some ground-breaking products are helping the company make a shift in the revenue structure, implement new ways of thinking and attract fresh talent globally.
Company: IBM GBS
Designation: Chief Data Scientist and AI & Advanced Analytics practice leader
As the Chief Data Scientist and AI & Advanced Analytics practice leader for Middle East and Africa, Dr. Eva Marie Muller-Stuler has had the opportunity to spearhead some of the most transformative solutions for their clients and observe these innovations change and shape industries across the globe. She has implemented Centres of Excellence, created value-based AI delivery in oil and gas, the financial sector and governments, and architected real-world-value using data science for tangible outputs.
Company: Globe Forwarding Agencies
Designation: Chairperson and Member Board
Dr. Sharmila H. Amin was born and brought up in a meritocratic family of professionals. She completed her college education in the field of commerce and economics at Bombay University and embarked on the professional journey that has brought her here today. She started handling large accounts at Airfreight Limited, one of the leading providers of logistics in the country and globally. Sharmila handled air freight, sea freight, packaged courier services as a partner of DHL, customs clearance, travel and tourism, oversized cargo handling, along with complex supply chain management and logistics for various companies and gained experience in all the departments at work.
Company: Aleada Consulting
Designation: Partner and Co-Founder
Elena Elkina is one of the 3 partners/co-founders of Aleada and comes from a legal background. Elena used to practice law, but she left legal practice more than 15 years ago. During her 20-year legal career, she has worked with financial and healthcare institutions, the Internet of Things, logistics management and software companies, major law firms and the government sector on both international and domestic levels.
Company: Hepsiburada
Designation: Chief People and Culture Officer
Before joining the Hepsiburada, Esra was Executive Vice President-CIO-COO responsible for IT, digital banking, CRM and operations of a full-segment serving commercial bank in Turkey for three years. Before joining the bank in 2018, she worked nearly seven years as Senior Vice President of Information Technologies for one of the Turkey's largest banks and nearly six years as System Integration and Management Consultant in Accenture Consulting, multinational management, and technology consulting company, leading the management consulting and system integration projects for various local and international clients in Turkey.
Company: Axiad
Designation: Vice President, Marketing and Talent Management
Harpreet Mangat leads branding, marketing and talent management at Axiad. She has over 10 years of international marketing experience in developing and directing strategic marketing initiatives in highly charged environments. Harpreet's background includes a blend of internal and external marketing communication, public relations, advertising and unleashing high-energy marketing strategies that swiftly advance aggressive objectives.
Company: Gilytics
Designation:Co-Founder
Heather Pace Clark completed her MA in International Technology Policy from Harvard. She went on to study MBA from Trium Global Executive MBA and possesses more than 15 years of international experience in technology. She worked as a senior leader at GE Power working in strategic marketing. Heather also worked as head of marketing for the solar company REC Solar driving global expansion, and as a project manager at the WEF, building public-private partnerships with leading software companies like Intel, Cisco, and Microsoft. Working as the head of the sustainability strategy at Orange France Telecom, Heather launched mobile banking and other products building partnerships with Google and telecoms as part of industry associations. Heather began her career by working with the UN and humanitarian organizations.
Heidi Lorenzen currently serves as the Senior Vice President of Marketing for Accela. Heidi joined Accela to help state and local governments work better for their citizens. She believes that by improving everyday interactions between communities and their governments, we can improve society as a whole and produce better outcomes for all participants. Prior to Accela, Heidi's appreciation for good governance was sparked. She ran marketing at Singularity University, where the team educated and empowered leaders to apply exponentially growing technologies like biotechnology, artificial intelligence and neuroscience, to create a more abundant future and address humanity's biggest challenges, one of which was governance.
Company: ABBYY Emerging Markets
Designation: Senior Vice President
Helen Pospelova is the Senior Vice President of ABBYY Emerging Markets. She believes that her aptitude for building strong cross-cultural connections, finding a unique approach to people from different countries and developing effective networks across borders, shaped her professional ability to form successful international partnerships and alliances. Along with these qualities, Helen also considers her agility to recognize untapped opportunities is a key factor that determined her future career path in the promising IT sector. With an experience spanning over 20 years in the field, Helen reveals that the industry is still on the verge of reaching its full potential.
Company: Empirical Data Strategies
Designation: CEO
Prior to starting Empirical, Jami Goodwin Medina, CEO of Empirical Data, has held numerous leadership roles within financial and healthcare institutions in strategy and business development. She has been an early adopter of data visualization and specialized in using market data within healthcare CRMs to help understand patient and provider decisions and patterns. Jami holds a master's degree from the University of Kansas School of Medicine and from Washington University in St. Louis's McKelvey School of Engineering. In addition to her role with Empirical, Jami serves as the Director of Data and Analytics for Lewis Communications.
Company: Dailypay
Designation: Chief Innovation and Marketing Office
Jeanniey Walden builds companies from start-up to global success. Her skill in recognizing and capitalizing on new markets in a way that results in driving consumer adoption of new products in those markets is unparalleled. She is the Chief Innovation and Marketing Office for DailyPay, was previously the Global Chief Marketing Officer for Mercer, the co-founder of ringblingz™, a line of fun and fashionable connected devices (part of the R/GA Accelerator powered by TechStars). Mullen also advises select early-stage companies including IndieFlix and Vivastream and sits on the International Executive Council for the Internet Marketing Association. She is a regular columnist for ClickZ, a periodic blogger for Huffington Post and a frequent keynote speaker. She was most recently featured as Mover and Shaker by the Professional Woman's Magazine, and a featured Woman in Technology by The Legacy Series Magazine.
Company: Sandstone Technology
Designation: Head of Marketing and Business Intelligence
Passionate about marketing, communications and business operations within the financial services industry, Jennifer is highly regarded for combining proven sales and marketing strategies with best of breed operational processes to achieve results across Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. She has amassed close to 20 years of experience in all facets of marketing and communications with a focus in strategic marketing, brand building, content strategy, management and leadership. She has exceptional interpersonal skills, with the ability to examine and understand business needs and deliver innovative strategic solutions for the organisations she works with, on time and budget while exceeding stringent expectations. Accustomed to managing teams, she consistently meets deadlines while actively pushing creative limits. She is known as an outside-the-box thinker who looks at alternative ways of delivering on objectives that revolutionize company sales and performance.
Company: Racol Technology
Designation: CEO
Jennifer has over 23 years in telecommunications experience, specializing in global voice and data networks for medium and large businesses. Her specialties include customized network solutions, fiber network design, vendor management, hosting and managed services, contract negotiations, and deal assessments. By analyzing a company's needs and listening to a company's goals, she is able to effectively design a comprehensive solution for the client. She has been a trusted account manager for over $13M/year in telecommunication services.
Company: Intradiem
Designation: COO
Jennifer has 20 years of experience in the contact centre industry with more than 15 years as a people leader. Throughout her career, Jennifer has served in a variety of roles in the contact canter space, including operations, quality, workforce management, and client services. For the last four years, Jennifer led the Customer Success organization at Intradiem, where her team was pivotal in achieving the historic milestone of one billion automation actions. As Chief Strategy Officer, Jennifer now leads the teams that include Intradiem's product management, product marketing and marketing functions.
Company: TM Forum
Designation: Vice President
Joann is a digital transformation leader with over 30+ years leading large scale change initiatives. Joann was founder and lead of the TM Forum's Industry Open APIs and bringing it from concept to global adoption, transforming interoperability across multiple industries. Today, Joann leads the Beyond Connectivity initiative which develops the industry strategy and blueprints for growing telecommunications business beyond connectivity. This includes the definition of common scalable components for IoT, network as a service, connectivity as a service and zero touch partnering, enabling CSPs to grow their business into new enterprise markets and marketplaces leveraging new business and revenue models. Joann also leads the 'Business Architecture' initiative including the capture of the key capabilities of Telco to enable transformative growth.
Company: The Learner First
Designation: Founder and CEO
Joanne McEachen (Waitaha, Ngāti Māmoe, and Ngāi Tahu) is CEO and Founder of The Learner First. A celebrated author, speaker, change leader, and executive coach, Joanne's 30 years of experience span time as a teacher, principal, Ministry of Education leader in New Zealand, and now a globally recognized pioneer in the fields of educational assessment and well-being. Joanne is on the Executive Committee for Karanga: The Global Alliance for Social-Emotional Learning and Life Skills, on the Education New Zealand: North America Advisory Board, an Edmund Hillary Fellow, a Fellow of Salzburg Global Seminar, and co-founder of New Pedagogies for Deep Learning (NPDL). She creates opportunities for students, educators, and communities to learn who they are, how they fit into the world, and how they can contribute their gifts to humanity.
Company: Vizbii
Designation: CEO
Julie is a seasoned entrepreneur who loves to find those pivotal moments within a market, assemble the perfect team, and get to work! After spending formative years at IBM and Georgia Pacific, Julie dedicated most of the next 25 building SaaS-based companies on both coasts. Engaging her unique experience within the HR Technology market – she continues to fuse behavioral science, technology and predictive analytics to develop and deliver products that simplify problem-solving and inform decisions.
Company: Accenture
Designation: Data and AI lead
Laetitia is the Data and Artificial Intelligence Lead for Accenture in Europe. She has 20+ years of experience in management and technology consulting, operating at C-Suite level for Fortune 500 companies. She is commercially aware with a proven track record of delivering robust and innovative solutions for her clients. She is able to communicate well at all levels of an organisation and has good understanding of differing business cultures. She had a progressive cross industry career and specialised in the last 5 to 6 years on digital transformation, data led reinvention and artificial intelligence.
Company: e-bate
Designation: Founder and CEO
e-Bate is the UK's first end-to-end highly configurable SaaS, price and margin management solution and launched in 2018. It is a price and margin management platform targeting the B2B market and the way businesses manage complex rebates. It is designed to digitise the entire rebate process – from creating agreements, through to the calculation of accruals and payments, plus scenario planning using vast amounts of data for reporting and AI.
Designation: Director, Education Sector
Linda Visnick, Director, Education Sector of CherryRoad has 30 years of experience in the business of education and technology. She has led school districts at the executive level in various roles such as Assistant Superintendent of Business Administration, prior to transitioning to the technology arena as the Executive Director, in a modernization, improvement, and transformation initiative where she implemented ERP solutions to replace legacy systems. She was asked to transition from the business side of the organization to the technology side of her knowledge of the business and leadership skills to lead such a complex implementation. With her experience on the business side of the organization, Linda brings a unique perspective to the technology realm that transitions to other public sector entities.
Company: EyeMail Inc.
Designation: Founder, CEO, and Technology Officer
As the Leader of EyeMail, Lisa s responsible for the strategic vision, technology innovation, and facilitates the expansion of EyeMail to Canada, India, the UK and Africa. She also oversees the marketing and sales division to ensure that the quality of the brand messaging is consistent and remains relevant according to changing working environments.
Company: Western Digital
Designation: Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer
Lori Sundberg is responsible for leading the key global human resources initiatives and people strategies at Western Digital. She has a bachelor's in science degree in business management, and has 30 years of experience in developing and aligning HR strategy with business needs, which includes leadership development, organization efficiency, integrated talent management and more.
Company: Drest
Designation: Creator, Co-Founder, Co-CEO
Lucy's career history is vast. As a newspaper and then magazine editor, her focus has always been to prioritize the needs and desires of the readers. She has witnessed the rise of gaming against women and was to create a platform and experiences that are fun and entertaining and that also connect with her to bring value.
Company: Lynne Peyton Consultancy
Designation: Leadership and Change Management Consultant
Lynne is an independent consultant for the health and social care sector. She possesses specified expertise in risk assessment at both organizational and at practice levels and in identifying the strategies and actions needed for safe practice. After years of being a senior manager at the sector, Lynne established her own consultancy in 2001.
Company: Nerdy Industry
Designation: Founder, CEO, and Operations Leader
As the Founder and CEO, Maria manages the company's operations and initial consultancy for each client. It is extremely important to her to meet all the company's potential clients in the beginning so that they can build a trusted relationship with the company's leadership team, and feel acknowledged and supported simultaneously.
Company: Blue Lotus System
Designation: CEO
Marla Blaylock leads the digital transformation efforts for Fortune 500 companies around the world. She is a passionate thought leader, providing strategic innovation of organization-wide business initiatives that enhance productivity, quality, digitally-enabled product system, management, technology and more. She possesses an impressive record and impressive success rates in fearlessly delivering transformational change.
Company: Hair4Good
Designation: Owner
She is started her career at Conair in 1986 as a secretary where she worked for almost 27 years and held several executive positions. For the last 15 years, Mary has served as the Vice President of Sales, and has been the youngest corporate officer ever appointed and the first female VP of sales. And now, she owns her own philanthropic hair care company, Hair4Good.
Company: Connected Systems Institute, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Designation: Executive Director
Mary is a visionary with a keen interest in learning. She has spent most of her career working in the manufacturing sector with a technological perspective. Earlier, when she started working, she was responsible for understanding the language of maintenance and operations and translating it into technology solutions that produced outcomes. She went on to learning from the industry experts to provide the best to her company.
Company: SAP SuccessFactors
Designation: SVP, Engineering and Operations
Meg and her team are responsible for delivering market-leading products for its customers. She has been in the enterprise applications market for more than 20 years, with over a decade focused on HR technology. Meg's experience and passion revolves around building and scaling technology platforms, applying technology to solve problems and defining market-winning products and services.
Company: NSI-MI Technologies
Designation: Director of Marketing
Michelle is responsible for all marketing programs and brand management. She joined NSI-MI Technologies in 2010 with an extensive set of business skills, which include 20 years of business administration and marketing experience in an engineering environment. Additional to this, she is also a member of the American Marketing Association (AMA).
Company: Ericsson
Designation: Global Head AI Technology and Innovation
Rani Yadav-Ranjan is the Head of Technology and Innovation within Ericsson Global AI Accelerator. She works across the whole company, supporting teams in developing industry-leading solutions that the customers expect. A key part of Rani's role is driving the innovation strategy for the GAIA artificial intelligence functions, including global operations. Moreover, she works to advocate for AI as something that underlines design elements, product components, and infrastructure at Ericsson.
Company: tiko Energy
Designation: Co-Founder and CSO
Sandra Trittin studied business administration and holds an MBA from the Business Schools of Mannheim, Copenhagen, and Warwick. She began her career at a management consultancy by working in the areas of process optimization/restructuring and supply chain management for different companies in the automotive, food processing, and telecommunications industries. She later joined the strategy team at Swisscom and since 2012 Sandra is the Co-Founder and Chief of Business Development at tiko Energy Solutions.
Company: APAC BCT
Designation: Executive Vice President, APAC
Shanthi Chandrasekar is the Executive VP and Head of the Strategic Business Operations for BCT APAC. She's a Director, Board of Directors in Comquest and BCT entities across Singapore, Qatar, and Taiwan. Over the past 23+ years, her repertoire of skills has centered on strategy, data analytics, artificial intelligence, governance, program management and digital transformation. Shanthi works closely with the Group CEO on corporate strategy acquisitions, new business lines, and quality assurance of large business transformation programs.
Company: Strata Results
Designation: Vice President
Shiana Siruma, Vice President -Customer Solutions APAC, Strata Results has been a people's leader for 14 years. She is motivated by the passion for a people-focused environment and flourishes in meeting with global leaders and engaging for impact. She manages strategies for brand awareness and promotes company offerings through various platforms such as social media, TV, radio and live web streaming.
Company: Freyr
Designation: Managing Director
With 19+ years of experience in Pharma services, consulting, IT and ITES industry, at various leadership positions, Sunitha Anumula, Managing Director at Freyr, has successfully managed organizations from both strategic and tactical perspectives. She is deeply rooted in technology, sales and marketing, operations, human resources and administrative functions of Freyr and has successfully led the same in other companies as well.
Company: Kata.ai
Designation: Chief Marketing Officer
Tika Sylvia is the Vice President of marketing and communication at Kata.ai. She is mission-oriented and a technically sophisticated professional with over 10 years of background in various industries which include prop-tech, logistics, hospitality, and food delivery in start-up companies. She has excellent communication skills, a strong background in data-driven marketing, analytical and detail-oriented mindset, with a proven track record in productivity and efficiency.
Company: Walkabout Workplace
Designation: Co-Founder & CEO
Toni Portmann is the Co-founder and CEO of Walkabout Workplace. With over 35 years of leadership experience in board and executive management, Toni has spent her career in technology-centric companies, ranging from SaaS, PaaS, Cyber, GDPR, software and hardware to support and services. Her corporate leadership includes building six companies as their CEO. Tony has held executive positions in Fortune 100 companies, including IBM Corporation and Diebold, Inc.
Company: Agora
Designation: Senior Vice President of Marketing & Ecosystems
Virginia Liu is the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Ecosystems at Agora. She met Tony Zhao, Agora's founder, and CEO, in 2017 while working at Microsoft and quickly learned that Agora was building APIs to enable developers to easily add real-time voice and video to their apps. Later, Tony would describe the company to her as a provider of real-time internet, since the public internet is not designed and built for real-time. Extremely impressed by the product and Tony's vision, she decided to join the company with a mandate to grow the Agora developer community and build a partner ecosystem.
Company: V-Origin Technology
Designation: CEO
Yong Hua Lin is the Founder and CEO of V-Origin Technology, founded in 2019. Before V-Origin, Yong was the Director of IBM Research, China, working with the company for 16 years. She was appointed as IBM Distinguished Engineer to lead global AI system innovation. In 2019, Yong was elected in the list of the top 50 science and technology women leaders in China. To drive diversity in the field of science and technology, she founded IEEE Women in Engineering Beijing affinity group.
Company: Meta Bytes
Designation: Head of Disruptive Technologies
Zara works as the Head of Disruptive Technologies at Meta Bytes. She is a blockchain solution architect and has been working on several blockchain projects since 2015. Zara has multiple years of experience in entrepreneurship in the fintech and travel-tech industry, which built the foundation of her interest and passion for emerging technologies and specifically blockchain.
