If you’re trying to hit an end-of-year reading goal or going holiday shopping for a girl in your life who wants to get into the tech industry, I have a recommendation for you.
The new coffee table book Opulis is a project from the organization Women in Cloud with Journey Ink Publishing. It’s a celebration of the women who built Microsoft into a trillion-dollar company. I was honored to play a small part in its publication by writing the foreword to this project.
It’s a bit of a departure for me and for Fortune MPW. Typically, we’re covering the women at the top, those whose names we all know or will soon. This project is about the unsung women behind the scenes, without whom Microsoft wouldn’t exist as we know it today. (Although it does include Melinda French Gates!) As I wrote in my foreword:
As AI transforms society, it’s often the leaders at the top who get the credit, from Fortune 500 CEOs to the best-known researchers. But it’s not only those at the top who decide our future, it’s the people doing the work, discovering breakthroughs, and dedicating themselves to a future that is truly transformed by technology for the better.
There are 50 women highlighted in the book, too many to mention them all here, but parsing through its pages will introduce you to engineers, C-suite executives, marketers, academics, and more. It’s a really special project that reminds us of how critical women are to all of the world’s greatest achievements—whether or not we get the credit.
You can order Opulis online here.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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ON MY RADAR
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PARTING WORDS
“Performance is inherently vulnerable and therefore quite embarrassing and unmasculine. There’s no bravado in suggesting that you’re a mouthpiece for someone else’s ideas.”
— Kristen Stewart on men and method acting