While the tech profession tends to be dominated by men, as more women have been entering the field in search of a rewarding career, an increasing volume of highly successful female executives have emerged in recent years. The following article profiles the most influential women in tech…

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook

Presently serving as Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg has had a decorated career working in a number of different roles that has prepared her for the high-powered position that she hols today.

After acquiring her MBA (with top honors) from Harvard Business School in 1993, she went on to work in the Clinton administration as a chief of staff under Larry Summers, who was the Secretary of the Treasury at the time.

After helping broker debt forgiveness for several nations deep in the hock in the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis, Ms. Sandberg joined Google in 2001 as a sales and operations VP, which saw her manage Google online ad sales and the ongoing Google Book project to scan texts in the public domain, thus putting their contents online for all to see.

Jumping to Facebook in 2008, she spearheaded the drive to make the popular but unsustainable social networking site profitable. Using targeted ads in a smart way, she achieved this goal only two years later.

Since the site’s IPO, Sheryl Sandberg has since sold half her shares, with the remainder of her stake in the company being worth over one billion dollars.

Susan Wojcicki, Youtube

Currently serving as the CEO of Youtube, the world’s most popular video sharing site, Susan Wojcicki took a path very different from most in her family, with her parents and one of her sisters being involved in academia.

While Susan graduated with a history and literature in Harvard, she soon became fascinated with high tech while in school, and instead shifted focus from the arts to getting her Masters in Science from Ucal-Santa Cruz and her MBA from UCLA in the late 1990’s.

Shortly after, Sergey Brin and Larry Page began Google from her garage in Menlo Park, with Ms. Wojcicki working on viral marketing campaigns that helped get the word out about the search engine that currently dominates our lives. Her biggest contribution to the company was her central role in creating the Adsense and Adwords program, which have generated 96% of Google’s revenue to the present day.

She proposed to Google’s board of directors that they should purchase Youtube. She was named as a senior vice president for this video sharing site in 2012, and was promoted to the position of CEO in 2014.

Marissa Mayer, Yahoo!

Marissa Mayer serves as the president and CEO of Yahoo!, which is one of the world’s largest portal sites, offering news, entertainment, sports and other content that hundreds of millions of people read everyday. Graduating from Stanford with a Bachelor of Science with honors in 1997, she went on to get her Masters in Computer Science from the same school in 1999.

After mulling well over a dozen job offers, she elected to join Google as employee #20 in 1999, and began by managing small teams and cranking out some of the base code that helped make Google’s core search product the success it was in its early days.

After rising through the ranks by occupying various product engagement positions, she became a VP in 2005, overseeing aspects of various Google products through the lens of the experience of the end user. After a brief sojourn heading up Google Maps, Marissa Mayer was recruited to become Yahoo’s CEO in July 2012.

She started her time there by righting a ship that was suffering from internal discontent. By instituting HR policies that included improved maternity leave policies, a suggestion box software application that helped management flag issues in the workplace, and a performance evaluation system that uncovered those not pulling their weight, Yahoo! has returned to being a highly profitable company in the high tech world.