10 women who made Apple great

It’s International Women’s Day so it seems appropriate to write a few words about some of the many women who have helped Apple put a “ding in the universe” across the years (in no particular order).

Joanna Hoffman

Hoffman joined Apple’s story as the fifth member of the Macintosh team in 1980 and (among other things) wrote the first draft of the User Interface Guidelines for the Mac and figured out how to pitch the computer at the education markets. Hoffman said of her time working with Jobs, “I’ve never been anyone’s work wife. And if I could impart that on to she would be an ally in that,” explaining how she advised on how that role was played. She gained a reputation as someone who stood up to Steve.

Deborah Coleman

The second woman to join the Macintosh team, Coleman was Apple’s finance and operations chief for eleven years. That’s just one of a series of achievements on her part – she has a PhD, is a managing partner at VC firms and has been on the board of numerous technology companies. She has much respect for Hoffman, saying, “Joanna was the one who represented all of us in learning how to stand up to Steve,” she said.

The women who were a part of the early days of the Mac #womenofinfluence pic.twitter.com/EZ0TJXkRpq

— James Martin (@Jamesco) November 3, 2015

Susan Barnes

Barnes was controller of the Macintosh Division at Apple and a cofounder of NeXT. At one time she was sent to cut a deal with an Apple partner, but the Japanese chairman of the company told her to go out and buy pearls while the men did the business. A terse fax from Steve Jobs appeared, telling the unreconstructed parochial dinosaur “Ms. Barnes makes the decision on this negotiation.”

Susan Kare

Kare designed Apple’s first icons. These approachable, friendly icons included things like the system-failure bomb, paintbrush, mini-stopwatch, and the acclaimed dogcow. The success of these icons arguably helped Apple establish the Mac product, and that’s all the more amazing when you consider Kare “didn’t really know anything about digital typography,” when she began. She’s still designing – check out Kare Design Studio, “I really try to develop symbols that are meaningful and memorable,” she said.

Angela Ahrendts

Ahrendts has reportedly generated high levels of loyalty across Apple’s retail teams and the former fashion CEO has reportedly been deeply involved in managing the Apple Watch release. Expect much more, as I don’t think we’ve seen the full Ahrendt’s impact on Apple just yet, though at present she’s the only female face in a sea of ten middle-aged white men on the senior management team.

Katie Cotton

Apple’s former VP Communications, Cotton was an essential aide to Steve Jobs and successfully led Apple’s communication strategy as it exercised one of the biggest turnarounds in US corporate history. Take a look at John Gruber’s account of working with her. She resigned post in 2014, “Katie has given her all to this company for over 18 years,” Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said in a statement at the time. “We are really going to miss her.” Cotton called leaving the company hard because it was “part of her heart”.

Rita Lane

Recruited by Tim Cook to oversee supply chain operations for the iPad and Mac in 2008, Lane was among the first women to join the US Air Force once the service began recruiting women. She became an officer during her five years service with the air force, before joining IBM and then Motorola to manage their supply chains. Her Purdue University dedication notes that she works to support underrepresented groups within IT, particularly gay and lesbian professionals, women, ethnic minorities, and veterans. She retired in 2014. On the glass wall in tech she said, “I realized that out of all my supplier meetings in the past five years, I had met with only one technical woman senior executive in the supplier’s company….If I can possibly be a role model and encourage more women and minorities to be in the engineering field, I would like to try,” she said.

Kim Vorrath

As VP of Program Management, Vorrath is the person tasked with making sure software is thoroughly tested in time for scheduled release windows – and is known to give short thrift to missed deadlines or poor excuses – she once slammed the door to her office so hard she locked herself in. She joined Apple in 1987 and holds an essential role.

Denise Young Smith

Now VP Worldwide Human Resources, Smith has been instrumental in recruitment since joining Apple in 1997. She helped build the retail teams prior to which she ran the company’s worldwide ops and executive hiring tasks. She is now responsible for attracting and retaining Apple’s top talents and reports directly to CEO Tim Cook. A soprano, she provided the voice for one of Apple’s recent diversity videos she sees the company’s focus on increasing diversity as very important, but, “you can’t just allow it to be this one-dimensional moment in time,” she says. The meaning of diversity itself “is going to change and evolve.”

Lisa Jackson

Lisa Jackson is Apple’s vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives, reporting to CEO Tim Cook. Appointed as Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency by President Barack Obama she joined Apple in 2013 to help spearhead the company’s determined efforts to minimize the environmental damage its business creates. “There’s an e-waste problem in the world,” she said recently. “If we really want to leave the world better than we found it, we have to invest in ways to go further than what happens now.” Jackson now controls Apple’s giant $1.5 billion green bonds fund dedicated to financing clean energy projects across its global business operations,

These are just a tiny sampling of the many women, past and present, who have or are helping build the company. In future it is to be hoped their ranks will be joined by many more as the company succeeds in becoming more diverse.

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