Technically Women

(image / link: fast company -- the most influential women in technology 2010)

As easy as it is to find fault with typical “best-of” lists, picking apart who’s present and who’s absent, I find little to complain about today with Fast Company’s 2010 piece on The Most Influential Women in Technology.

Fast Company has assembled a great list of diverse women with varying backgrounds and partitioned the list into intriguing buckets from media to activism to executives and more. We’re particularly pleased to note that three of our very own Technically Women are noted in the list. Here’s to you, Laura, Shireen, and Susan:

Laura Fitton:

Under her Twitter handle @Pistachio, Fitton found her niche as Twitter’s expert marketer and started her company, Pistachio Consulting, later popping out a little book called Twitter for Dummies. Now she’s flexing her tech-trend-spotting skills once more by founding OneForty (oneforty.com), an app store for Twitter. The service catalogues and curates the best extensions and apps for the microblogging service through a community of users who share and rate tools. Fitton has already gathered more than $2 million in funding. But as is evidenced on her own Twitter feed, “I am not a praying woman, but startup life, eeet makes me more contemplative and spiritual than I used to be.” If anybody can make it work for them, we think it’s you, Laura.

Shireen Mitchell:

A social-media consultant, diversity advocate, and tech nonprofit founder, she still often finds herself the only African American female on IT teams and at conferences. Only about a fifth of science and engineering managers are female, and even fewer make it to the board level of prominent high-tech firms.

“Even if the door is wide open and unlocked,” she says, “if someone walks past the room and peeks in and sees a bunch of white men, they’ll wonder if they’re welcome. Until everyone understands what it’s like to walk through a door when the people inside don’t look like you and wonder why you’re there, we still have work to do.”

Susan Scrupski:

Susan Scrupski thinks there’s a smarter way to work — and it’s totally transparent. “Most people know what Facebook and Twitter are; imagine using those same type of tools to communicate internally in a big company,” she says. “It’s much more complicated, because you have all of these things that complicate the handling of data, like privacy, compliance, federal regulators. And in your job, you’re not used to transparency. For as long we’ve had groups there’s been competition, all this human nature we bring to the job, it’s very unsettling to put everything out there and be yourself at work.”

I’m also proud to personally know the fine people Caterina Fake and Jen Bekman.

Many thanks to all on the list for the great achievements, to everyone else who advances the cause of diversity in technology, and to Technically Women for the honor to be amongst you.

So where do we go from here? Tune in to the replay of Technically Women’s own Cathy Brooks’ Social Media Hour from today in which she focuses on this topic and, in her own words:

… on the angle of looking forward and how we harness the successes that are starting to percolate and actually move the discussion of supporting women forward.