In recent years, many women have started to lead the way in Silicon Valley. These women are leaders in social media, marketing, healthcare and a wide range of other industries, that were often dominated by their male counterparts in the past. These women are inspiring future generations of female entrepreneurs who no longer need to be concerned about becoming a leader in their chosen field. Below are some of the most influential women in Silicon Valley at the moment.

Sheryl Sandberg

Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg is one of the world’s leading female business women and has been named Forbes Most Powerful Woman for the last five years. She is estimated to be worth $1.4 billion dollars and Sandberg is one of Facebook’s top executives. She believes females should feel more empowered in the workplace and more responsibilities should be shared in the home.

Sheryl Sandberg graduated from business school in 1995 and took up a role as a management consultant in the same year. She then went on to work in the Treasury and eventually moved to Silicon Valley in 2001 to work with Google, where she became Google’s President of Global Online Sales and Operations. After 7 years at Google, she impressed Mark Zuckerberg and became Facebooks COO.

Her main challenge when she moved to Facebook was to find ways for the company to make money. This was achieved through Facebook’s ad platform. Sheryl Sandberg currently looks after a number of departments in Facebook including business development, sales, marketing and communications.

Varsha Rao

Varsha Rao is an entrepreneur, Internet executive and Investor who started her first online venture in the 1990s when she launched Eve.com, an online beauty product e-commerce store. Starting an e-commerce business in the late 1990’s was a challenge because the tools and technologies available now, were not available back then or they were less than perfect. However, Varsha Rao overcame these hurdles and her e-commerce store reached the top ten on Fortune Magazine’s list of best e-commerce sites. In 2000 she sold the company.

Since her early success in business, Varsha has moved on to other ventures and became Head of Operations at Airbnb. She has maintained her interest in online retailing and consumer technology and advises and invests in a range of different startup companies

Hema Budaraju

Hema Budaraju is one of the leading mentors in Silicon Valley and works with industry giants like eBay and PayPal. Hema Budaraju is one of the people responsible for encouraging more women to work in companies like eBay and does this through eWIT or eBay Women in Tech, which looks after the interests of female employees who want to work in the technology sector. Areas she has worked in include mobile, retail and other companies she has helped include Amazon, Nokia and Oracle.

Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn

Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn works for Cisco Systems Inc. and is currently its Vice President and General Manager. This is a demanding job and Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn leads the way in developing new software and IT strategies that will be used now and in the future.

She has a keen interest in developing workplace education programs and is involved with a number of different education companies and experts. When she started out, Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn was one of the first to embrace the internet and look for ways to allow businesses to benefit from this new technology.

The most influential women in Silicon Valley are leaders in some of the world’s biggest organizations. In most cases, they have had to overcome all kinds of setbacks and challenges to get where they are today and they are inspiring many younger women who want to follow in their footsteps.