Are Women faring better in the technology sector?

Beyond the most well-known female at the top of technology companies, Meg Whitman, the president and chief executive officer of PC giant Hewlett Packard (HP), Yahoo President and CEO Marissa Mayer, Virginia Rometty CEO at IBM, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg — Does technology sector welcome women?

According to the National Center for Women and Information Technology’s publication “By The Numbers,” in 1985, women made up 37% of graduates with a Computer Science degree. By 2010, only 18% of Computer and Information Science graduates were women; at major research universities it was just 14 percent.

Back in 2012, Stanford University announced that its introduction to computer science course had an almost equal number of men and women. The increased number of women in computer science courses at both schools are credited to big changes in the curriculum. At Berkeley, that meant expanding the introductory course beyond just programming, and doing more to explain the real-world implications of computing.

A list of power women in the tech arena that you should know :

• Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook
• Meg Whitman, the president and chief executive officer of PC giant Hewlett Packard (HP)
• Virginia Rometty, CEO, IBM
• Marissa Mayer, CEO, Yahoo
• Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube
• Padmasree Warrior, chief technology and strategy officer (CTO), Cisco Systems
• Ursula Burns, chairman & CEO, Xerox
• Mitchell Bake, Chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation
• Cher Wang, co-founder and chair, HTC
• Safra Ada Catz, co-president & CFO, Oracle
• Sun Yafang, chair, Huawei Technologies Co.

Mitchell Baker, the Chair of the Mozilla Foundation told CNBC that despite the famous women at the top in some places, “I don’t think we have quite so much to be proud of in the tech industry. I don’t think we have the answer yet.

I do know that to succeed in the tech sector in particular for a woman you need to just not notice any more. Sometimes I see photographs and when I see it I realize I was the only woman in that gathering.”

She concluded: “I think we have a way to go. I wish I had the magic key.”

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that “It was the first time since at least 1993 — as far back as university enrollment records are digitized — that more women enrolled in an introductory computer science course.” 106 women enrolled, versus 104 men.

Maybe it also means our technology sector is not nearly as good as it could be.