Susan Wojcicki, the chief executive of YouTube. Credit:The New York Times Missing from the panel was a discussion of Wojcocki's accomplishments in physics at Stanford University, of history and literature at Harvard, her not one but two Masters – one in science of economics from the University of California, the other in business admin from UCLA Anderson School of Management. Also omitted from the event was her professional growth at Google from the Doodle department to heading up the departments that created AdWords, Adsense and Google Analytics, (you know, the stuff that makes Google money), before becoming CEO of YouTube. I want to be able to say that Salesforce' Women in Innovation panel is a stand out example of tech brand's ability to relate to their female customers, investors & employees. I want to be able to say that. I cannot tell you how many bad women in tech panels I have reluctantly attended over the years. At a Microsoft event in 2011, during a Women in Tech panel, a male VP of a global cosmetics company earnestly exclaimed: "we really care what you ladies think, and how you think. We want to turn you upside down and shake you like a handbag, see what falls out."

Claire Connelly. A few years ago I sat in on a very last minute women in tech event, hastily thrown together at the tail-end of a conference, during the dinner where all the other "real journos" (read: men) were listening to keynotes from people and about things that actually mattered. The female journalists, vendors & PRs were hustled into a room, handed microphones and asked about what it was like being "successful women in business". At some point during the whole horrid affair I was asked whether my husband was OK about my travelling to the US alone. Women in tech panels are a dime a dozen for female tech journos but seldom have anything to offer besides fortune-cookie wisdom and repackaged logic. There are two exceptions to this rule: One was an interview I did with Pinterest engineer Tracy Cho, who after graduating from Stanford and completing internships at Facebook and Google became one of Quora's very first employees. She became an advocate for women in tech after uploading a spreadsheet to code-sharing platform GitHub asking more than 200 companies to disclose how many female engineers they employed. She discovered, to her dismay, that women held between 10-15 per cent of engineering roles - "an open secret for a very long time" in Silicon Valley. You can watch the interview below:

The other stand-out is Iraqi American activist Zainab Al-Suwaij, who told the audience at a Microsoft event about how she participated in the uprising against Sadaam Hussein, subsequently fleeing to the US where she taught Arabic at Yale University and helped to resettle refugees out of the Sudan until September 11 2001, when she co-founded the American Islamic Congress, "representing those American Muslims who cherished the freedoms of the US after living under repressive regimes". At some point during the whole horrid affair I was asked whether my husband was OK about my travelling to the US alone. You can bet your bottom dollar nobody asked her about how she managed work and motherhood.There are some very serious problems in tech – and in business more broadly – that no Women In Tech panel can solve. Only 28 per cent of ICT workers in Australia are women and of that 40.7 per cent make up admin and support roles, according to the Australian Computer Society and Deloitte's digital pulse report, leaving just 3 per cent of women engaged in electronic trades positions. This compared to 43 per cent participation in other industries.