These million dollar babes aren’t calendar pinups or movie starlets, but intelligent women who run multi-million dollar technology businesses across the IT sector in Australia, where men account for more than 82 percent of all IT employees.
The Million $ Babes awards, created by ThoughtWare CEO Sonja Bernhardt, highlight the entrepreneurial spirit that is demonstrated by so many tech-savvy women, but that largely goes unnoticed in a field dominated by men.
“In my own life I know and come across a significant amount of women in the IT industry that actually do run million dollar and multi-million dollar businesses, yet I know they tend to be invisible to the general public,” Bernhardt said in a Computerworld article.
The name of the awards was chosen, not to be demeaning to women, according to Bernhardt, but to confront and expose two critical errors in thinking: that women can only be “babes” and that to be taken seriously they have to deny acknowledgment of their femininity. With these awards, she wants to encourage women to embrace femininity and to prove that gender is not a barrier to being successful in IT.
The key criteria for award winners are that the women own (or majority own) the company and that the firm either brings in annual revenues of at least $1 million — or they have raised investment funds of at least $1 million.
Winners of this inaugural award include: Vanessa Brewis, CEO of Taurus Software; Liesl Capper, CEO of My Cyber Twin; Lisa Fletcher, CEO of b-Free; Raeleen Gillett, CEO of Octahedron; Danielle Lehrer, CEO of Go-Shout; and Julie Irwin, Executive Chairman of AcknowledgeDB Group.
Bernhardt believes that by recognizing the most successful women in IT, more young women will be inspired to pursue careers in technical fields and feel encouraged to create their own technology businesses.
“What we do know and what does seem to be consistent across the globe is the overall perceived nerd image does negatively impact female perceptions,” Bernhardt said in a Sydney Morning Herald article. “Million $ Babes helps to adjust that inaccurate nerd image.”