Wired Women's Top 10 Women

Mar. 15, 2002 -- 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.

Davies brings both an artist's sensibility and a technologist's understanding to her work. Her professional background includes stints as a painter, a documentary filmmaker, an animator, and a dot-com entrepreneur. A founding director of Softimage, Davies headed up the company's Visual Research group from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, during which time it went public and was acquired by Microsoft.

At the same time, Davies was a working digital artist. While at Softimage, she began to experiment with 3-D technology, teaming up with programmer John Harrison and 3-D designer Georges Mauro to create what they called immersive environments. The result: Osmose, which premiered in 1995, and Ephemere, which premiered in 1998. Today, Davies teaches, writes, lectures, and in her spare time, she lives on 400 acres in rural Quebec, where she says she gets real inspiration for her virtual art.

Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett Packard

Carleton S. Fiorina took the top job at computer giant Hewlett Packard in July 1999 and was charged with transforming the stodgy but venerable company into a more responsive, creative player in the Internet age. At 44, she was the first woman to head a Dow 30 company, and the first outsider to be tapped for any top executive job in HP's 60-year history.

Today, Fiorina is engaged in the battle of her professional life. On Sept. 3, 2001, HP announced that it would merge with No. 2 PC maker Compaq Computer Corp., touching off an internal war between Fiorina and the pro-Compaq forces, and board member Walter Hewlett, who opposes the merger.

HP shares are down 14 percent since the merger announcement. Many Wall Street analysts are skeptical. But Fiorina's holding firm. The federal government OK'd the merger, and Fiorina recently warned shareholders that failure to approve what would be the biggest computer merger in history could jeopardize HP's future. HP shareholders will vote on the $21 billion deal March 19.

Kathy Kennedy, Patricia Kearns and Kim Sawchuk, Founders of Studio XX

Since 1995 Studio XX has been one of Canada's most vital and active digital resource centers for women. Located in downtown Montreal, it works with women "to expose, demystify, give access, equip, question and create technologies." Its activities include a dynamic mix of computer training; multimedia demonstrations; gatherings of tech-types; social activism workshops and resource materials; and an annual cyberart festival, Maid In Cyberspace.

"It is the studio's goal that women not only use these technologies, but are a defining presence in cyberspace," reads the Studio XX mission statement. Kennedy, Kearns and Sawchuk have helped thousands of Canadian women make real strides toward that goal.

The Oxygen Team

New media is all about convergence, and nobody gets convergence the way the folks at Oxygen do. Founded in 1998 and in operation since 2000, Oxygen is both a 24-hour cable television network and a Web site; its programming is designed to integrate the two. Sounds simple — and it's anything but.

The company's founders — media heavy hitters Geraldine Laybourne, Marcy Carsey, Tom Werner, Caryn Mandabach and Oprah Winfrey — have had their share of ups and downs, including highly publicized layoffs and media criticism of its feel-good, you-can-do-it women's fare. But the $450 million Laybourne managed to raise from investors, including Paul Allen, Bill Gates' former partner, has bought the company some time to survive on the bleeding edge. Last month, it announced it's replacing its much-criticized preachiness with a new brand of humor and light-hearted spirituality (hey, it works for Oprah).

Whether Oxygen will be around to see 2003 is anybody's guess. But nobody can dispute the fact that it's one of the first real examples of media convergence, a pioneer in women's programming, and a groundbreaking contribution to the 2002 multimedia mix.

Nora Paul, Director of the Institute for New Media Studies, University of Minnesota

New media is also about connectivity, and Nora Paul, the founding director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota, is the guru of making connections — between ideas, between projects, between people. She arrived in Minnesota in July 2000 after nine years at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank in St. Petersburg, Fla., where she was one of the first real computer-assisted reporting experts in the country and where she managed to build bridges between reporters and the scholars who studied them.

More recently, Paul's creating what she calls "convenings" at the University of Minnesota — meetings of media professionals of all backgrounds and interests to see where their ideas might converge. In November, it was "Playing the News" with game designers and journalists; in February, it was "Painting the News," an exploration of how digital art might inform online news. In every instance, it's about looking at traditional subjects from new angles. It's about getting people to talk to each other. It's about synergy. And because of Paul, it's happening at the University of Minnesota.

Mehmooda Shikeba, Communications Director for RAWA

Mehmooda Shikeba is one of about 2,000 members of RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a grassroots pro-democracy group whose work includes providing education, health care and economic opportunity to Afghanistan's most oppressed citizens: its women. Throughout the Soviet invasion of 1979 and the ensuing civil war, throughout the six harsh years of Taliban rule, and throughout the U.S. coalition's attacks on terrorism, RAWA has continued to provide education and health care to Afghan women and children.

It has established schools and orphanages in Pakistani refugee camps, and home-based schools in Afghanistan. Its mobile health teams have treated women and girls who could not receive care from Afghan physicians. It has helped Afghan widows find ways to feed their children. And, in 1997, it began to use the Web to share its story with a global audience. "I hope you understand the hard conditions of our struggle against brutal fundamentalists," she wrote in a recent e-mail. "I have deemed it necessary to work for the cause of Afghan women because I was witness to their unbelievable miseries." And now, thanks to RAWA and Mehmooda Shikeba, so, too is the world.

Ellen Spertus, Sexiest Geek of the Year

Ellen Spertus is an assistant professor at Mills College, where she teaches computer science. She's MIT-cubed: she earned her bachelor's degree, master's degree, and a doctoral degree in computer science there. She's also the author of software that detects nasty emails — flames — and she's a member of the board of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. But none of that earned her the kind of headlines she got last June, when Spertus became the nation's reigning Sexiest Geek. She won the title at a pageant in Silicon Valley after showing up in a corset with a printed circuit-board pattern, a long black skirt, and her father's slide rule strapped to her thigh.

Spertus decided to compete for the title not because she's into beauty pageants, but because she's a fierce advocate of women in science and technology. She wanted to prove to her students and to all young women that geeks can be attractive, sexy, fun and smart. Mission accomplished.

Sherry Turkle, Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self

Long before most of us knew there was anything except Real Life, Turkle was exploring the relationships we were developing with our computers, and the impact of those relationships on our perceptions of ourselves, our lives, and the differences between our Real and Virtual personas.

Her work has explored what it means to create ourselves in a digital world, a place where "your words are your deeds, your words are your body"; what does it mean when we can create and recreate ourselves with every new Internet account and online nickname? While there are no clear answers to those questions, Turkle reminds us — calmly, clearly and with careful insight — that there are psychological and emotional implications to our investment in — and even obsession with — the technological tools of our age.

Meg Whitman, CEO of eBbay

It's about time somebody made real money on the Internet. And that somebody happens to be a woman: Meg Whitman, the down-to-earth, old-fashioned, commonsensical and highly successful CEO of the Internet's largest auction and trading site. A 1979 graduate of Princeton University (B.A. in economics) with an MBA from Harvard, Whitman's career path took her from brand management at Procter & Gamble to consulting at Bain & Co., and then on to Disney, where she opened the first Disney stores in Japan (Disney is the parent company of ABCNEWS.com). From there, she moved to StrideRite shoes, then to Florists' Transworld Delivery (FTD), first as president and later as CEO, and finally to Hasbro's Playskool Division, a company with 600 employees and $600 million in annual sales.

When she joined eBay in 1997, it was a company with 19 employees, a black-and-white Web site, and a good idea. Five years later, it's an Internet miracle. And fans and critics alike acknowledge that it's Whitman's aggressive identification of new partners, e-commerce competitors, and market opportunities that has driven her company to its status as the most successful e-business online.

Editor's Note: The selections for the Wired Women Top 10 come from Dianne Lynch and do not necessarily reflect the views of ABCNEWS.com. To arrive at the choices, Lynch considered those who were widely recognized within their field of expertise. She also took diversity in race, geography, perspective and occupation into account. Plus, Lynch looked for women who work with and in technology, with a particular focus on the Internet.

A teacher and a journalist, Dianne Lynch is the author of Virtual Ethics.