Because women are vastly outnumbered by men in the tech industry, at a ratio of about three to one, women in the highest positions are even more rare. But they do exist.



Every year, Business Insider gives a shout-out to women in the tech industry with its list of “most powerful women engineers in the world.” This year, the publication featured 22 women, of which three were Israeli, by far the largest number of any country when compared to Israel’s small size and population.

Here are the Startup Nation’s three female engineering stars:

1. Tal Rabin, IBM

Who is she? Manager and a research staff member of the cryptography research group at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center.

Why Business Insider says she’s powerful: “Rabin’s early career was almost like the movie “Good Will Hunting.” When she was a student, she solved a math problem that experts thought couldn’t be solved. (It’s complicated, something to do with calculating numbers when most of them are not known, she told Business Insider).

At IBM she leads a team working on inventing whole new ways to secure computer data. The work is so advanced that Rabin was awarded the top honor at The Anita Borg Institute’s 2014 Women of Vision awards.

She’s also chairs conferences and professional organizations in her field. She has a doctorate in computer science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was a postdoctoral Fellow at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.”

2. Yoelle Maarek, Yahoo

Who is she? Vice president of research at Yahoo

Why Business Insider says she’s powerful: “Maarek leads research for Yahoo and heads research teams in Israel and India.

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She works on research projects with academia (and has published a boatload of academic papers on the topic) while also working with engineering and product teams to tackle scientific challenges that change Yahoo’s business.

Prior to Yahoo, Maarek founded the Google Haifa Engineering Center and was a Distinguished Engineer at IBM Research.

She was recently inducted as an Association for Computing Machinery Fellow for her work on web search.”

3. Tamar Bercovici, Box

Who is she? Senior manager of Backend Engineering at Box

Why Business Insider says she’s powerful: “Bercovici joined Box in February 2011 as the first woman hired to its infrastructure department, known as the “Backend Engineering” team.

She’s now a senior engineering manager where she leads a database project, known as Distributed Data Systems Team.

Bercovici is also in charge of Box’s twice-yearly Hackathon and is active on the speaking circuit. She’s given talks at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, Percona Live and Velocity Europe.

Prior to Box, Bercovici was an early-stage employee at XMPie (now a Xerox company).

She holds a doctorate in computer science from the Technion Institute of Technology, the Israeli version of MIT.”

To read the full article on Business Insider and find out who the other 19 women are, click here