Top 10 women of technology

To celebrate International Women's Day Shaun and I decided to devote the Top 10 to women who have been pivotal in the development of the computing world.

Technology is still largely dominated by men, both in implementation and management.

The reasons for this are complicated and still not fully understood. Some say that male brains are better adapted to the concentrated focus that many computing tasks require, while others point to the male-dominated engineering culture that much of computing is taken from.

Another theory is that the problem starts in schools, where girls are steered away from computing, either by social pressure or by poor teachers.

But, as this list will show, none of these reasons provides the answer. Women, given the opportunity, outperform men time after time, which suggests that the chief factor holding women back in the industry is men.

One note about the list. As we explained yesterday, you won't find the likes of Carly Fiorina or Carol Bartz on this list (with one small exception). Running a technology company isn't too difficult; you simply need to be a good business manager.

This list is composed of women who've been involved in the guts of technology, the engineers and visionaries who have changed not only how we used computers but, in some cases, the very cornerstones of computing itself.

Honourable mention: Meg Whitman
Shaun Nichols: While we've tried to focus on engineers and researchers for our list, a few business types were able to sneak in. Among them is eBay's Meg Whitman.

Whitman was able to seal her place in technology history by leading eBay through the dotcom boom, the market crash, and the eventual recovery as a market leader. That she did so at a time when the industry was largely a boys' club earns Meg Whitman a spot on our list.

At a time when many companies did themselves in with overly ambitious agendas and foolish purchases, Whitman turned eBay into an internet icon by focusing on what worked and by building a proven business model.

Now she has reincarnated herself as a moderate conservative political candidate and is tempting many left-leaning voters, myself included, to elect her as the next governor of financially-strapped California.

Iain Thomson: Well don't get your hopes up, Shaun. I've got my doubts about her ability to be a moderate state governor given the rabid state of the Republican Party at the moment. But it can't be denied that she did a good job at eBay.

Whitman was a very successful manager. At a time when the rest of the industry crashed, Whitman kept eBay profitable, well-organised, and in the perfect position to capitalise on the wreckage of the dotcom boom. But that's not the key reason in my mind that she deserves to be on the list, rather it's that she broke the glass ceiling for women in the management of tech companies.

There had been women running small technology companies before Whitman, but eBay was synonymous with the internet revolution and accustomed many consumers to the idea of buying online with confidence. To head up such an organisation was an important step in getting senior figures in the notoriously male dominated technology industry to accept having a woman as boss.

However, it hasn't all been a bed of roses. The Skype acquisition was a mistake but one that Whitman has acknowledged. Nevertheless she enabled a new generation of women to rise and provided an important case to defeat the sexists who say that women can't make it in tech.

Honourable mention: Caterina Fake
Iain Thomson: Caterina Fake is probably best known as the co-creator of the Flickr photo sharing service, but she has been involved in much more than that.

On the Flickr side of things we all owe her a debt of gratitude, since at last a tech fix has been provided to the problem of holiday photos. In days of yore whenever someone went on holiday you could be forced to look at their pictures when they got back. There's only so many times you can say 'what a wonderful view' without wanting to strangle someone. Now we just put them up on Flickr.

But Fake has achieved more than just Flickr. She's on the board of directors for Creative Commons and was pivotal in the development of Salon.com, which broke much of the ground in making online magazines feasible. She also ran Yahoo's technology development group, which nurtured new ways of interacting using the internet.

Her latest venture, Hunch, looks very promising for developing ways to make decisions based on multiple data inputs. If it's anything like the rest of her career Hunch could be very effective indeed.

Shaun Nichols: Ahh, the list of great technological university programmes in America: MIT, Stanford and … Vassar? Yes, the esteemed Seven Sister college in New York contributed two names on our top 10 list, of which the first is Catarena Fake. Take that, Harvard.

Flickr was one of the first photo sharing services that really embraced a social networking approach. Rather than just uploading pictures and embedding a URL somewhere, Flickr allowed users to share and categorise photos among themselves and with other users through tagging features.

Additionally, Flickr offered APIs and more to other web sites and services to help them embed photos in their sites. 'Synergy' is an ugly buzzword that we're not allowed to use, but in this case it might be warranted. The integration between Flickr and other services boosted traffic for all parties involved, showing the wisdom of the move.