Megan Smith, Google’s vice-president, new business development, is no ordinary engineer. She is adventurous: she once raced a solar-powered car 2,000 miles across Australia's Outback. She has a knack for business, helping PlanetOut, a gay and lesbian online community, grow tenfold in reach and revenue, during her tenure as chief executive. And she is a big believer in technology’s ability to bring about social change.Read more

Candace Johnson, an American who helped pioneer the satellite industry on the Continent, was dubbed “The Satellady” in a 1996 Economist article. A career as a trailblazer also earned her a few other labels: she was called “the most dangerous woman in Europe” by an angry media mogul after she foiled his plans to build a cartel and “Enemy No. 1” by Germany’s Deutsche Telekom when she won a landmark case against the company for illegal subsidies of data networks.Read more

Early in her career Gabriele Zedlmayer, now HP’s vice president, office of social innovation, took a gutsy risk to get the world’s richest and most powerful people to start using personal digital assistants at the World Economic Forum’s 2000 annual meeting in Davos. Now, she is spearheading an effort to use similar devices to help curb deadly disease and put a crimp in the sale of counterfeit drugs in some of the poorest and least connected parts of the world.Read more

 Companies are waking up to the fact that women wield substantial influence over big ticket household purchases. But few realize that due to the explosion in women-led companies, females are now also responsible for an increasingly important portion of the estimated $1.9 trillion spent annually on information technology, says Marilyn Johnson, vice-president, market development for IBM.Read more

Changing corporate culture is tough and all the more so when the company in question is in the male-dominated auto industry. But Ursula Schwarzenbart, director of global diversity management at Daimler, is succeeding in her 23 year quest to promote change inside the German car manufacturer. And, the company is now spearheading efforts  to reach out to schools to encourage girls as young as ten to become the engineers of the future. “Our world is going to be more and more technology driven so this will be the career to have," she says.Read more

No business, large or small, can afford to ignore the growing economic power and potential of women in the 21st century, but when it comes to gender balance we are only half way there, says Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, CEO of 20-first, a gender consultancy. The reason? Toxic “gender asbestos” is still hidden in the walls and cultures of many big corporations and needs to be routed out.Read more