Proud to be Influenced by Truly Influential Women in Tech

Fast Company magazine has a fantastic feature on the Most Influential Women in Technology 2010, including a glowing profile by Lillian Cunningham on Shireen Mitchell, a friend of Qworky and all around superstar, that delves deeply into her work exposing and changing the lack of diversity within the technological landscape.

A social-media consultant, diversity advocate, and tech nonprofit founder, she still often finds herself the only African American female on IT teams and at conferences. Only about a fifth of science and engineering managers are female, and even fewer make it to the board level of prominent high-tech firms.

“Even if the door is wide open and unlocked,” she says, “if someone walks past the room and peeks in and sees a bunch of white men, they’ll wonder if they’re welcome. Until everyone understands what it’s like to walk through a door when the people inside don’t look like you and wonder why you’re there, we still have work to do.

Fortunately for us, Qworky recognizes this travesty, and we are doing everything we can to ensure our company will lead the way to changing it—including incorporating Mitchell’s leadership directly.

Today, plenty of people have become believers in Mitchell and are starting to practice what she’s preaching. Jon Pincus, former general manager of strategy development in online services at Microsoft, has recruited Mitchell to work closely with him on his new Seattle-based startup, Qworky. “Most software is written by guys for people like themselves. Even if it’s unconscious, it seeps into everything,” Pincus says. For this reason, he’s tapping Mitchell to help him design Qworky’s technology, culture, and Internet presence to be more inviting to a diversity of users from the get-go. “One of her real strengths is that she balances the tech aspect, the social aspect, and the political aspect. You can usually find someone who can do two of those,” Pincus says. “It’s very rare to find someone who can balance all three.”

Clearly, we are quite the fans of Mitchell, and particularly take her lessons about the diversifying nature of social media to heart as we build a small business software-house the social media way. It’s quite heartening to see her describe Qworky as exactly the kind of tech models she is eager to see, and we couldn’t be happier for her and all of the other amazing women honored by Fast Company in this feature!