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Where Are The Women In Tech? On The Forbes Most Powerful Women List

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The question “where are the women in tech” could be the unofficial drumbeat of women’s business journalism, particularly over the past twelve months. At the world Economic Forum in Davos, a party co-hosted by ForbesWoman and Ernst & Young brought together 20 2011 Power Women and still business media bemoaned the gender inequity of the conference. At March’s South By SouthWest, more than a dozen panel discussions were devoted to the subject—and several women-only events were held throughout Austin. A Google News search of the past 12 months returns 81 million headlines.

Even among the fashion-set, women in tech has been hot: everyone from Chanel to Alice & Olivia have flirted with high level tech executives recently and this month shoe designer Christian Louboutin unveiled his latest pump: a tech-themed Lady Peep ‘Geek’ embroidered pump, retailing for just $1,695. But we could call that the Marissa Mayer effect—Yahoo’s new CEO hasn’t been shy about her penchant for Oscar de la Renta.

And it certainly hasn’t slowed her down professionally. "I'm not a woman at Google, I'm a geek at Google," Mayer once said."If you can find something that you're really passionate about, whether you're a man or a woman comes a lot less into play. Passion is a gender-neutralizing force."

Now we’re not kidding ourselves here: women in technology are indeed a minority. Industry sources count them at just 5% of the founders and chief executives of tech start-ups, a quarter of computing professionals and 11% of tech investors. But just because the numbers are small doesn’t mean that women aren’t there. In fact, when we decided to highlight women working in technology this year for the annual FORBES list of the 100 most powerful women, we were pleased to see that a number of engineers, executives and entrepreneurs in technology made the cut.

You heard it here first: 15 of the most powerful women in the world are women in tech.

In Photos: Where Are The Women In Tech? On The 2012 FORBES Most Powerful Women List

From the Valley to the Alley, if the tech world were high school, Mayer would be this year’s prom queen—her July decision to buck her employer of 13 years got so much attention in the press that even reporters got tired of covering the story. Is it ground-breaking that Mayer’s a mom-to-be? Not really. Is it insulting Mayer’s intelligence that we even bring up issues of fertility? I doubt it. The angles pitched to our inbox by the minute were endless, and each one seemed more small-minded than the next.

But Mayer, a brilliant computer scientist, who’s credited with more than 100 new Google products, has, in fact, taken an incredibly challenging position—to turn around a struggling tech giant that’s seen five CEOS in as many years—and the fact that she’s chosen to do so in her third trimester of pregnancy is, in fact, significant.

Why?

Just ask Sheryl Sandberg—the mom-in-chief Facebook COO—who made it her business in 2012 to tell working women everywhere that, no, it may not be easy to achieve work-life balance with a demanding job and kids at home, but if they really wanted it bad enough, it could be theirs. Sandberg’s lack of hard science and engineering credentials — she received a MBA from the Harvard Business School and earned a B.A. in Economics as a Harvard undergraduate — has not prevented her from being widely hailed as the most powerful woman in tech, although it has brought some whiplash her way as FORBES contributor wrote earlier this year:

“Sandberg is great [at] controlling the mothership,” says scientist Heidi Dangelmeier of the Girl Approved design agency. “But I hope that isn’t as good as it gets. I would hope that our aspirations as females in relationship to technology would be more than managing young geeks. Girls need to invent the ship, not run the crew” — a reference to Sandberg’s Harvard Business School graduation speech last month: “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.”

But if engineering chops are the true measuring stick of women in tech (or at least the ones taken seriously within the community), you’ll find no shortage of them on this year’s Power Women list. Ginny Rometty, the new CEO of IBM holds degrees in computer science and electrical engineering while Ursula Burns, CEO of printing solutions giant Xerox, has made mechanical engineering her life’s work. The one-time intern has spent her life with the company and climbed her way through Xerox’s product team before taking the lead in 2009. Not only is she a leading woman in technology and a champion for girls’ STEM education, but Burns has the distinction of being the first African American woman to run a major U.S. corporation.

If only all interns were that dedicated…

Further down the chain of command (and slightly our of the glare of the obsessive media spotlight) but no less technically impressive is Google’s Susan Wojcicki. Wojcicki is by far the most senior woman in the organization and, as the head of Google’s ad products including AdWords, AdSense, Analysitcs and DoubleClick, is responsible for over 96% of the company’s revenue. Got beef with the ads Gmail serves you alongside your email? Blame Wojcicki, Google’s 16th hire and the woman credited with renting her garage to Sergey Brin and Larry Page and their nascent search engine in 1998.

Far from shaken by criticism that Google’s ad serving-intuition is invasive, Wojcicki is pleased as punch, saying "It's about the moment. When you're searching for something you're interested in a topic right then and there. Through search we're able to match advertisers all over the globe with you specifically at that moment--no matter what you're searching or how obscure it is, we have advertisers for it."

The list of the most powerful women in technology also has an (At least to me) even more inspirational bent: it’s chock-full of entrepreneurs. Weili Dai has the distinction of being the only woman co-founder of an American semiconductor company, Marvell Technology. HTC’s Cher Wang founded the smartphone manufacturer with husband Wenchi Chen while Kiran Mazumdar Shaw set up Biocon in 1978 at just 25 years old. The industrial enzymes maker went on to become only the second Indian firm to list a $1 B IPO on its first day of trading. The company is now in talks with Bristol Meyers Squibb to bring oral insulin mainstream.

While it seems to me—at least in terms of measuring the always-introspective tech industry—that we’re missing some of the trend-setters and queen makers of the business (ahem, Kara Swisher, cough cough), there is one dowager empress on this year’s list of the 100 Most Powerful Women in the World. Or would we call her an oracle? Mary Meeker, currently a partner at VC Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers, is relied on for her investing know-how and her omnipresent view of the technological landscape. As a colleague of Meeker’s told FORBES’ Eric Savitz this spring:

“There’s an entire generation of entrepreneurs who have grown up on Mary’s research,” says Kleiner partner Chi-Hua Chien. “you can line them [the reports] all up, and the predictions, plus or minus 24 months, are where things ended up.”

In Photos: Where Are The Women In Tech On The 2012 FORBES Most Powerful Women List?