5 Famous Women who changed the Tech industry forever

Sunday 8th March marks a very special day on the International calendar, International Women's Day. Here are just 5 of the many hundreds of thousands of women whose contributions, leadership and pure devotion change the tech industry on a daily basis.

1. Susan Kare – The Apple Icon

Susan Kare designed the suite of icons that made the Apple Macintosh revolutionary, a computer that you could communicate with in pictures. As an artist and graphic designer best known for her interface elements and typeface contributions to the first Apple Macintosh in the 1980s. She was also Creative Director at NeXT, the company formed by Steve Jobs after he left Apple in 1985 and has since worked for Microsoft, IBM, Facebook, and Pinterest.

2. Gladys West - GPS visionary

Gladys West is largely hailed as the figure whose mathematical work led to the invention of the Global Positioning system (GPS). She programmed the IBM 7030 ‘Stretch’ computer that delivered refined calculations for a geodetic Earth model, which eventually became known as GPS. In 2018, she was inducted into the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame.

3. Margaret Hamilton - Put NASA on the Moon

Margaret Hamilton, renowned mathematician and computer science pioneer, is credited with having coined the term software engineering while developing the guidance and navigation system for the Apollo spacecraft as head of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory.

4. Radia Perlman - Spanning Tree Protocol (STP)

Radia Joy Perlman is an American computer programmer and network engineer. She is most famous for her invention of the spanning-tree protocol, which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges, while working for Digital Equipment Corporation.

5. Donna Dubinsky - PDA Leader

Donna Dubinsky is an American business leader who played an integral role in the development of personal digital assistants serving as CEO of Palm, Inc. and co-founding Handspring with Jeff Hawkins in 1995.

6. BONUS - Women in Tech

PwC has Women in Tech programme that provides valuable insight into Tech at PwC and what it takes to make it in an organisation like PwC.

PwC Women in Tech

These are just 5 Women, why not add your favourites to the comments of this article.