Wired Women's Top 10 Women
Mar. 15 -- In 1999, wunderkind Jeff Bezos was redefining business success, the world was full of 10-minute millionaires, and venture capitalists — the heroes of the hour — belonged to an insiders' club that was almost exclusively male.
Today, just three years later, all that has changed. Investors expect profitability, the dot-com bust is behind us, and women are major players in every high-tech sector, including venture capital.
From industry, e-commerce, academia, and public service, to the arts, the media, and social activism, women are making decisions that are shaping our lives, our understandings, and our future. While they're still not present in equal numbers, they're as much a part of the high-tech landscape as those T-shirted dot-com geeks ever were.
They're making a difference. And it's about time these women got some acknowledgement. Wired Women salutes those who created the technologies, the business innovations, the learning environments, the artistic and media messages, and the opportunities for public access and public service that make our technology-driven world the amazing place it has become.
The Top 10 Wired Women for 2002
Zoe Baird, Char Davies, Carly Fiorina, Founders of Studio XX, The Oxygen Team, Nora Paul, Mehmooda Shikeba, Ellen Spertus, Sherry Turkle, Meg Whitman
Zoe Baird, President of the Markle Foundation
If technology has created new opportunities for those who have access to it, it has also raised new issues of equity for those who do not. Only one in four of America's poorest households was online in 2001, compared with eight in 10 households earning over $75,000. The digital divide isn't going away, and it is increasingly left to private philanthropy to find a way to bridge the gap.
Zoe Baird is among those leading the way. After joining Markle in 1999, Baird committed the foundation to spending up to $100 million over five years to ensure that the Internet and other new media serve public needs. The foundation's current projects include an initiative to create e-strategies and solutions that advance health, education and other goals in developing nations; a partnership with The Council on Foreign Relations to create an online encyclopedia of terrorism; and a program that provides rural and inner-city women with breast cancer with services through the Internet.
Baird, who was President Clinton's first choice to be attorney general until her nomination was derailed, has worked in business, government and academia. Last week, the Markle Foundation, the Center for Strategic and International Initiatives, and the Brookings Institution established a Task Force on National Security in the Information Age, co-chaired by Baird and Netscape Communications Chairman James Barksdale. And in February, Baird was one of nine candidates nominated to serve on the Independent Review Council of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, in recognition of her "high professional standing and accomplishment."
Char Davies, Virtual Artist
If anybody understands the power at the intersection of technology and imagination, it's Canadian virtual artist Char Davies. Her installations — exhibited in England, Mexico, New York and San Francisco — are real-life cyberspace experiences driven not by traditional point-and-clicks but by the visitor's breath and balance. They are technology, they are human experience, they are art — and they are unlike anything anybody else has ever created.
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