5 Women Leaders Who Are Shaping IT

08.03.2011
Given that Tuesday is , people the world over are celebrating the achievements of women in virtually every aspect of life. More than 1700 events around the globe are planned to mark the event, in fact, including nearly 250 in the United States alone.

Here in the high-tech world we clearly have our own female luminaries and key players, perhaps even more notable for their success in what's still largely a male-dominated field. What better time, then, to celebrate them and all they've brought to the industry?

Here, then--in no particular order--are a few women most would surely agree are among the key influencers of the industry today.

1. Mitchell Baker, Mozilla

As the leader of the Mozilla Project, Mitchell Baker is charged with no less than organizing and motivating the worldwide collective of employees and volunteers who work every day on Firefox, Thunderbird and other products used by millions of people around the world. Of particular recent note is that Baker just joined the advisory board of the new , a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing the participation of women in open technology and culture.

"What's been most helpful to me is realizing that those times when all the heads in the room turn and look at me as if I was crazy, reinforce my own leadership capability," Baker told Mother Jones in a 2008 . "Because I've been in a number of those settings where I've been right. And I've been right often enough that now when it happens I don't automatically think, "Oh, my, what's wrong with me?"