Women Who Helped Shape IT

1. Ada Lovelace: credited with writing the world's first computer program in the mid-1800s.

2. Grace Hopper: invented the first compiler in 1952 and popularized the term "debugging."

3. Jean Jennings Bartik: one of the original programmers for the ENIAC computer in 1945.

4. Karen Sparck Jones: pioneered work in natural language processing and information retrieval in the 1960s.

5. Erna Schneider Hoover: invented a computerized telephone switching system in 1971, revolutionizing the telecommunications industry.

6. Sister Mary Kenneth Keller: the first woman to earn a PhD in computer science in the United States, in 1965.

7. Adele Goldberg: co-invented the Smalltalk programming language and user interface in the 1970s.

8. Radia Perlman: invented the spanning tree protocol (STP) in the 1980s, a crucial component in computer networking.

9. Anita Borg: founded the Institute for Women and Technology (now the Anita Borg Institute) in 1997.

10. Susan Kare: designed many of the original icons and fonts for Apple Macintosh computers in the 1980s.

11. Shafi Goldwasser: made fundamental contributions to the theory of cryptography and computational complexity, including co-inventing the zero-knowledge proof.

12. Carol Shaw: one of the first female video game developers, creating games such as River Raid and Super Breakout in the 1980s.

13. Katherine Johnson: a mathematician and computer scientist at NASA, helped calculate the trajectories for the Apollo missions in the 1960s.

14. Sophie Wilson: co-invented the ARM processor architecture in the 1980s, now used in many mobile devices.

15. Marissa Mayer: one of the first engineers at Google, later becoming CEO of Yahoo! in 2012.

16. Cynthia Breazeal: designed and built the first social robot, Kismet, in the 1990s.

17. Mary Lou Jepsen: co-founded One Laptop per Child, and later founded Openwater, a company developing a non-invasive imaging technology.

18. Fei-Fei Li: co-created ImageNet, a large dataset that spurred the development of deep learning techniques in computer vision.

19. Ayanna Howard: designed robots for space exploration at NASA, and later founded the Human-Automation Systems (HumAnS) Lab.

20. Reshma Saujani: founded Girls Who Code in 2012, a non-profit organization dedicated to closing the gender gap in tech.

Women Chief Technology Officers

1. Megan Smith - Megan Smith is a technology entrepreneur who served as the CTO of the United States under President Barack Obama. She was the first female CTO of the United States and was responsible for driving tech policy and innovation initiatives.

2. Padmasree Warrior - Padmasree Warrior is an accomplished technologist who has served as the CTO of Motorola and Cisco. She is known for her contributions to the development of wireless and cloud technologies and has been recognized as one of the most influential women in tech.

3. Kathy McElligott - Kathy McElligott is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of McKesson Corporation, a Fortune 500 healthcare company. She has been recognized as one of the most influential women in technology and has led the company's efforts to leverage technology to improve patient care and drive innovation in the healthcare industry.

4. Sue Gardner - Sue Gardner is a media and technology executive who served as the CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia. She oversaw the development of the MediaWiki platform and led efforts to improve the reliability and usability of the site.

5. Adriana Gascoigne - Adriana Gascoigne is a technology executive who founded Girls in Tech, a nonprofit organization that promotes gender diversity in the tech industry. She has served as the CTO of several tech startups and is known for her advocacy for women in tech and her work to close the gender gap in the industry.