Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley. The term "Silicon Valley" refers to the area in which high-tech business has proliferated in Northern California, and it also serves as a general metonym for California's high-tech business sector.
Amelia Jones, originally from Durham, North Carolina, is an American art historian, art theorist, art critic, author, professor and curator. Her research specialisms include feminist art, body art, performance art, video art, identity politics, and New York Dada. Jones's earliest work established her as a feminist scholar and curator, including through a pioneering exhibition and publication concerning the art of Judy Chicago; later, she broadened her focus on other social activist topics including race, class and identity politics. Jones has contributed significantly to the study of art and performance as a teacher, researcher, and activist.
Lian Amaris is an American writer, artist, and creative communicator working to connect real world experiences, performance events and the new media landscape. She is Artistic Director of Vector Art Ensemble and has authored five plays and performances that have been professionally produced at such venues as Nuyorican Poets Cafe, HERE Arts Center, The University of Chicago, P.S. 122, the Contemporary Arts Center and The University of Massachusetts. Her work also includes popular memes such as Silicon Valley Ryan Gosling and Things that cannot screen for breast cancer.
Vivek Wadhwa is an Indian-American technology entrepreneur and academic. He is Distinguished Fellow & Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon's School of Engineering at Silicon Valley and Distinguished Fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. He is also author of books Your Happiness Was Hacked: Why Tech Is Winning the Battle to Control Your Brain—and How to Fight Back, Driver in the Driverless Car,Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology, and Immigrant Exodus.
Sue Gardner is a Canadian journalist, not-for-profit executive and business executive. She was the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation from December 2007 until May 2014, and before that was the director of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's website and online news outlets.
Arse Elektronika is an annual conference organized by the Austrian arts and philosophy collective monochrom, focused on sex and technology. The festival presents talks, workshops, machines, presentations and films. The festival's curator is Johannes Grenzfurthner. Between 2007 and 2015, the event was held in San Francisco, but is now a traveling event in different countries.
Waymo LLC, formerly known as the Google Self-Driving Car Project, is an American autonomous driving technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.
New Relic, Inc. is an American web tracking and analytics company based in San Francisco. The company's cloud-based software allows websites and mobile apps to track user interactions and service operators' software and hardware performance.
Valerie Anita Aurora is an American software engineer and feminist activist. She was the co-founder of the Ada Initiative, a non-profit organization that sought to increase women's participation in the free-culture movement, open-source technology, and open source culture. Aurora is also known within the Linux community for advocating new developments in filesystems in Linux, including ChunkFS and the Union file system. Her birth name was Val Henson, but she changed it shortly before 2009, choosing her middle name after the computer scientist Anita Borg. In 2012, Aurora, and Ada Initiative co-founder Mary Gardiner were named two of the most influential people in computer security by SC Magazine. In 2013, she won the O'Reilly Open Source Award.
PandoDaily, or simply Pando, was a web publication offering technology news, analysis, and commentary, with a focus on Silicon Valley and startup companies.
Megan J. Smith is an American engineer and technologist. She was the third Chief Technology Officer of the United States and Assistant to the President, serving under President Barack Obama. She was previously a vice president at Google, leading new business development and early-stage partnerships across Google's global engineering and product teams at Google for nine years, was general manager of Google.org, a vice president briefly at Google[x] where she co-created WomenTechmakers, is the former CEO of Planet Out and worked as an engineer on early smartphones at General Magic. She serves on the boards of MIT and Vital Voices, was a member of the USAID Advisory Committee on Voluntary Aid and co-founded the Malala Fund. Today Smith is the CEO and Founder of shift7. On September 4, 2014, she was named as the third U.S. CTO, succeeding Todd Park, and serving until January, 2017.
uBiome, Inc. was a biotechnology company based in San Francisco that developed technology to sequence the human microbiome. Founded in 2012, the company filed for bankruptcy in 2019 following an FBI raid in an investigation over possible insurance fraud involving the US health insurance program Medicare.
Sexism in the technology industry is overt, subtle, or covert occupational sexism which makes the technology industry less friendly, less accessible, and less profitable for women. While the participation of women in the tech industry varies by region, it is generally around 4% to 20% depending on the measure used. Possible causes that have been studied by researchers include gender stereotypes, investment influenced by those beliefs, a male-dominated environment, a lack of awareness about sexual harassment, and the culture of the industry itself. Margaret O'Mara, a professor of history at the University of Washington, in 2019 concluded that Silicon Valley is uniquely influential locale that is shaping our world. But she points to problematic failures regarding diversity. Male oligopolies of high-tech power have recreated traditional environments that repress the talents and ambitions of women, people of color, and other minorities to the benefit of whites and Asian males.
Tracy Chou is an American software engineer and advocate for diversity in technology related fields. She previously worked at Pinterest and Quora with internship experience at Google and Facebook.
Liz Henry is an American blogger, author, translator, technologist, and activist. She is a co-founder of the first women's hackerspace in San Francisco, Double Union, where she is still active. She is also an advocate for disability technology and hacking existing technology for use by disabled people.
Double Union is a San Francisco hacker/maker space. Double Union was founded by women in 2013 with the explicit goal of fostering a creative safe space. The organization's mission is to be a community workshop where women and nonbinary people can work on projects in a comfortable, welcoming environment.
Maciej Cegłowski is a Polish-American web developer, entrepreneur, speaker, and social critic, based in San Francisco, California. He is the owner of the bookmarking service Pinboard, which he calls a social bookmarking site for introverts.
Leanne Pittsford is an American entrepreneur. She is the founder of Lesbians Who Tech, a community of queer women and their allies in technology.
Shanley Kane is an American technology writer, born in 1987. She was co-founder, CEO and editor of the quarterly technology journal Model View Culture until its cancellation in 2017.
Carol Elizabeth Reiley is an American business executive, computer scientist, and model. She is a pioneer in teleoperated and autonomous robot systems in surgery, space exploration, disaster rescue, and self-driving cars. Reiley has worked at Intuitive Surgical, Lockheed Martin, and General Electric. She co-founded, invested in, and was president of Drive.ai, and is now CEO of a healthcare startup, a creative advisor for the San Francisco Symphony, and a brand ambassador for Guerlain Cosmetics. She is a published children's book author, the first female engineer on the cover of MAKE magazine, and is ranked by Forbes, Inc, and Quartz as a leading entrepreneur and influential scientist.
