In honor of International Women's day, Croud highlights some of the women who have contributed to products we use every day.

1. DAY
INTERNATIONAL
WOMEN'S
@LUVDESIGN
CELEBRATING THE WOMEN IN
TECH WHO SHAPE OUR LIVES
Most of us will be familiar with the names of the women who run some of the world’s biggest
businesses and who regularly make lists that begin with ‘most powerful’ and ‘most influential’, but still
end with ‘women’ (because apparently we still haven’t moved beyond applying a gender caveat to
women’s achievements). Today, as always, we’re grateful for their work and leadership. In honor of
International Women's day, Croud USA also thought it would be interesting to highlight some of the
women in tech who build, develop and design products that have become part of an everyday
vocabulary for many of us. We’d like to celebrate and acknowledge their contributions to the industry
and our lives, with the understanding that without them things would look a little different.
JESSICA MCKELLAR
DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING AT DROPBOX
Jessica McKellar is Director of Engineering at Dropbox, a role she has
held since 2014 when Dropbox acquired Zulip, a real-time
collaboration startup which McKellar cofounded. Holding both
Chemistry and Computer Science degrees from MIT, she currently
leads Dropbox’s design, product and engineering teams, meaning
she’s in charge of what how everything looks, feels and works when
you nimbly upload a file. She dedicates a lot of her time to
improving diversity in tech and creating a more inclusive culture,
both at work and the Python coding community. This involves
initiatives such as running diversity outreach workshops to ensuring
that better representation of women at PyCon, a prestigious Open
Source conference held every year. Her enthusiasm for these efforts
stem from a belief that: "[...] we will build better products if the
people who are developing these products are a reflection of the
population that we are serving." Jessica also acts as a senior
technical consultant on HBO’s Silicon Valley, and many of the more
outré storylines which feature on the show are based on anecdotes
from her time at Ksplice, a start-up she joined in 2010.
If you’d like to continue learning more, The Techies Project, which focuses on sharing stories of subjects who tend to be
underrepresented in the greater tech narrative, is a wonderful resource.

2. ERICA BAKER
SENIOR ENGINEER AT SLACK
Erica is a Build and Release Engineer at Slack technologies, a role she took
on in 2015 after 9 years spent in various Engineering roles at Google. With
over 15 years of experience in the tech industry, this Mensa member
originally began her career doing tech support at the University of Alaska.
She has written and spoken out on issues that affect minorities working in
the tech industry, sits on the advisory board of Atipica and Black Girls Code
and recently launched a new initiative with fellow Silicon Valley luminaries
including Ellen Pao, Freada Kapor Klein and Tracy Chou called Project
Include, which aims to provide practical support for companies and startups
on how to implement successful diversity initiatives.
WHITNEY WOLFE
CO-FOUNDER AND CEO AT BUMBLE
Another oft-used app or program that (most) young millennials will be
familiar with is Bumble, the dating app that subtly subverts dating norms
by having women initiate the first move. The company, which Whitney
Wolfe founded and helms, is now the 4th most popular dating app on the
market, with over with 7 million users. Whitney was one of the original
founders and VP of Marketing at Tinder, where she is largely credited with
its meteoric rise and speedy rate of adoption. After leaving Tinder amidst
a highly publicized Sexual Harassment lawsuit, she sought to create a
business model that better reflected her values. With the intention of
creating a very different type of company (and company culture), she
moved Bumble’s HQ to Austin, Texas, where she has hired mostly women.
KATHARINE BURR BLODGETT
INVENTOR AND ENGINEER
Katharine Burr Blodgett is our historical throwback, but she invented something
so essential that without it, you wouldn’t be reading this text on your screen.
Born in 1898, Katharine Burr Blodgett became the first ever woman to obtain a
Ph.D. in Physics, from the University of Cambridge. She was hired as a
research scientist by General Electric, the first woman to be employed as a
scientist by the firm. During her time there, she developed monomolecular
coatings designed to cover surfaces of water, metal or glass which led to one
of her most well-known inventions: a low-reflectance, “invisible” glass. This
type of coating is called the Langmuir-Blodgett film and has applications in
everything ranging from projectors and cameras (first used in Gone with the
Wind), submarine periscopes and airplane spy cameras to the screens on your
mobile phones and laptops.