27 Women Who Change the Tech World [Infographic]

From developers to designers, from CEOs to investors, today’s tech landscape is full of people redefining our perception and use of technology. Among them—many women spearheading this change. True, there are still too few of them in this world, but them women from listed below are doing their utmost to change that state of affairs.

About a year ago, women from our team met in one room to talk about how we could counteract the poor representation of women in the IT industry in our local community. We talked about our own stories, about how we found ourselves where we are, and decided to share those stories with high school and college students who would soon be making their own career choices. That was how we arrived at the idea of behind the Girls in IT project which enters its sophomore year in 2018.

We all agreed that these young women could be missing something very important on pretty much every stage of one’s career—a mentor, a figure they could look up to. That’s why we kicked off the Girls in IT series, and that’s why we decided to draft the list you’ll find below.

There are countless women who inspire thousands of people and make their mark on the tech landscape every single day. Women that made this subjective list were picked by my dear colleagues from Monterail, both men and women (special thanks to Paulina Łusiak, Marta Klimowicz, Jan Dudulski, Paweł Hawrylak, Rafał Rybicki, Marzena Kawa, Kacper Pucek and Robert Szczęsny for completing the list!). The selectees are leaders, executives, authors, developers, designers, and influencers, helping create innovative products and services. All of them transform the way we think about women in tech. All of them can be role models for the greatest minds out there and all of them are doing a great job of publicizing the issue of inclusion in the industry.

And to all of them we just wanted to say—you’re awesome.

Below the infographic, you will find short bio of every one of them, with links to their Twitters and websites. Enjoy!

(Click the infographic to get it in high resolution!)

Irene Au

Design Partner at Khosla Ventures, working with portfolio companies to make their design and UX great. She has led design and user experience at Google, Yahoo, Netscape, and Udacity. She also teaches yoga in Palo Alto.

Follow Irene on Twitter.

Erica Baker

Senior Engineering Manager at Patreon. She advocates for diversity and inclusion in tech, and expanding access to tech education. Connected with organizations such as Black Girls Code, Girl Develop It, and Hack the Hood.

Follow Erica on Twitter and her website.

Lin Clark

Author of Code Cartoons and a member of Mozilla’s Emerging Technologies group, where she works with the WebAssembly and Rust teams. Lin expertly explains the tech world with her great graphic skills. You can meet her at various conferences like React Conf and JSConf.

Follow Lin on Twitter and on Code Cartoons.

Abby Covert

Abby Covert is an independent information architect living and working in New York City. She specializes in delivering collaborative information architecture processes and sharing her knowledge with her co-workers along the way.

Follow Abby on Twitter and her website.

Sarah Drasner

Award-winning speaker, Senior Developer Advocate at Microsoft, and Staff Writer at CSS-Tricks. She’s the author of SVG Animations from O’Reilly and has given Frontend Masters workshops on Vue.js and Advanced SVG Animations. Sarah is also a confirmed ally for all women in tech and a hilarious human being!

Follow Sarah on Twitter and her website.

Susan J. Fowler

Writer, engineer, and startup advisor, currently working at Stripe as the editor-in-chief of Increment. TIME's Person of the Year as one of the "Silence Breakers" (after the infamous Uber case), also named the 2017 Person of the Year by the Financial Times.

Follow Susan on Twitter and her website.

Simone Giertz

Swedish inventor, maker, robotics enthusiast, TV host, and professional YouTuber. Previously worked in MMA sports journalism and served as an editor for Sweden's official website Sweden.se. “I build shitty robots,” she says about herself and this is exactly what she does for a living.

Follow Simone Giertz on Twitter and her YouTube channel.

Julia Grace

Head of Infrastructure Engineering at Slack, technical advisor to start-ups. She’s a driven technical executive with 15 years of experience in building software products. Uses her broad knowledge of technology and team leadership to advise early- and mid-stage startups.

Follow Julia on Twitter and her website.

Val Head

Web animation expert, author of "Designing Interface Animation," the curator of the weekly UI Animation Newsletter, and design advocate at Adobe. She’s also a keen writer and often appears as a speaker at various conferences.

Follow Val on Twitter and her website.

Suz Hinton

Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft and an acclaimed technical public speaker. Passionate about developer education, she specializes in accessibility, Internet of Things, and cloud computing.

Follow Suz on Twitter and her website.

Stephanie Hurlburt

A graphics engineer and business owner. Co-owner of Binomial, a Seattle-based software company that's building Basis, a popular image/texture compression product. Stephanie is up for collaborating on projects that help others, especially underprivileged communities in the US.

Follow Stephanie on Twitter and her website.

Jessica Kerr

Developer, conference speaker, writer. Her seventeen years of development experience dovetails nicely with her propensity for seeking out in-depth tech knowledge and a talent for sharing it.

Follow Jessica on Twitter and her blog.

Laura Klein

Author of Build Better Products and UX for Lean Startups. Product management and user experience design expert with over 20 years of experience in tech. Specializes in helping companies innovate responsibly and improve their product development process.

Follow Laura on Twitter and her website.

Amélie Lamont

Product Designer at Thoughtbot, she co-runs Good for PoC, a list of companies providing inclusive and safe work environments for people of color in tech. In her writing, she explores the intersection of design, tech, womanhood, anthropology, culture, and race.

Follow Amélie on Twitter and her website.

Claire Lew

CEO of Know Your Company. Frequent public speaker focused on creating more open, honest work environments. Harvard Business Review, Business Insider, CNBC, and Fortune contributor. Her life's mission is to help people become happier at work.

Follow Claire on Twitter and her website.

Ela Madej

A tech entrepreneur, Y Combinator alum, and a venture capitalist. Her early stage VC firm, Fifty Years (fifty.vc), invests in companies attempting to solve the world's biggest problems using technology. She co-founded and runs the Impact.tech community of tech entrepreneurs in San Francisco.

Follow Ela on Twitter.

Karen McGrane

Managing Partner at Bond Art + Science, where she helps companies with their Web strategies and creates interaction designs. Led major redesign initiatives for The New York Times, Condé Nast, Disney, and Citibank.

Follow Karen on Twitter and her website.

Stacey Mulcahy

Senior Program Manager of the Garage, an internal resource at Microsoft focused on developing communities and managing a maker garage. Spends much of her free time volunteering with Young Game Makers and Code Liberation. In a previous life, she was the lead developer working with a variety of technologies at Big Spaceship, a digital agency based out of Brooklyn, NY.

Follow Stacey on Twitter and her website.

Nathalie Nahai

Award-winning speaker with a background in psychology and digital strategy. A leading voice in the field with both academic and hands-on experience in engineering online persuasion.

Follow Nathalie on Twitter and her website.

Ellen Pao

Investment Partner at Kapor Capital, Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at the Kapor Center for Social Impact, and co-founder of the diversity consulting non-profit organization Project Include. Former interim CEO of Reddit, Investment Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Board Director at Flipboard, and corporate attorney.

Follow Ellen on Twitter and her website.

Stefanie Posavec

Information designer whose favorite design material is data. Worked on projects and commissions for Penguin, Facebook, British Council, BBC, and more. Her personal work focuses on the visual representation of language, literature, or numbers and has been exhibited internationally.

Follow Stefanie on Twitter and her website.

Leisa Reichelt

Leisa leads the Research and Insights team at Atlassian where she explores ways of unleashing the full potential of every team. An active blogger, conference speaker, and curator of a weekly newsletter on research, design, user experience, and more.

Follow Leisa on Twitter and her website.

Lea Verou

Tech speaker, advanced CSS book author, Human-Computer Interaction researcher who started several popular open source projects. She’s given almost a hundred talks at Web design and development conferences around the world.

Follow Lea on Twitter and her website.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher

A content strategy and UX expert, author of Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech, recognized by Wired as one of the top tech books of 2017. Also co-hosts No, You Go podcast.

Follow Sara on Twitter and her website.

Christina Wodtke

Led redesigns and initial product offerings for companies such as LinkedIn, Myspace, and Zynga. Founder of two consulting startups, a product startup, and an online design magazine. Author of Amazon bestsellers on design.

Follow Christina on Twitter and her website.

Brianna Wu

Video game developer and computer programmer. Co-founded Giant Spacekat, an independent video game development studio. Well-known public speaker focused on issues affecting women in tech. Currently running for Congress.

Follow Brianna on Twitter.

Julie Zhuo

Product Design VP at Facebook. Had a direct hand in crafting the content of Newsfeed, the ways you Like and React to posts, how you share photos, and much more–all the while rising from an engineering internship to being VP of Product Design. Writes about design, management, and tech.

Follow Julie on Twitter and on Medium.