When Alice Brooks was a little girl, she asked her father for a Barbie doll. He gave her a saw, which she used to hack a dollhouse. Alice, now 24, excelled at school and went on to study mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This summer, while enrolled in graduate school at Stanford University, a project has been brewing: can a toy inspire the next generation of young girls to love science, technology, engineering and math?

If you Google ''women in tech'', it's likely that the same 5-10 women will pop up in your search results. These hyper-visible women (Sheryl Sandberg, Marissa Mayer, Susan Wojcicki, to name a few) have become the poster girls of women leaders in Silicon Valley. They're great at what they do, and they certainly act as role models for women interested in breaking into tech. While creating a group of superstars serves its purpose, may be that seeing the same faces repeatedly gives the impression that they're the only women succeeding in Silicon Valley, when in reality, exceptional women leaders are not as hard to find as one might think!

Like many other male dominated industries, the field of technology presents both challenges and opportunities for women today. To get a better understanding of how women can be successful in this field, the author of the article interviewed three women who have each started their own companies and are considered superstars in the technology industry today.

According to new research into the glaring gender gap in science and math-related fields, the psychological phenomenon known as the stereotype threat may be discouraging female scientists from relishing their work, which sucks because without more women entering the scientific workforce, America is probably going to soon become a nation of cave-dwelling primates that believe thunder is just God's giant cosmic dog thumping against celestial floorboards in an effort to scratch behind its ear. Or some such non-scientific wackiness. NPR's Shankar Vedantam reports on a study about why so many women drop out of science-related fields conducted by University of British Columbia psychologist Toni Schmader and her University of Arizona colleague Matthias Mehl. Using a device called an Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) that the Stasi would have been super jealous of, Schmader and Mehl collected daily soundbites (about 5 an hour and 70 a day) of women working in science-related fields.

Silicon Valley companies portray themselves as inventors of the future, but they're afflicted by a longstanding problem. From board rooms to ''brogrammers,'' men still dominate many corners of the tech industry, where the pantheon of famous founders - from Hewlett and Packard to Jobs to Zuckerberg - is still a boys' bastion. The gender-imbalance issue came to the forefront again recently when a partner at the country's most prominent venture capital firm filed a sexual harassment lawsuit alleging a former colleague retaliated against her for years after she cut off a brief relationship with him. The firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has denied the allegations.

Ask someone to tell you the reasons that there are not more women in technology positions and chances are they will point to one of the numerous articles written lately. They usually start with ''top 10 reasons why women…'' or ''break the glass ceiling by…''. But instead of doing the hard research, they produce the literary equivalent of 'all flash and no substance'. To understand the reasons and circumstances of the issue, we must go beyond the pretexts to an examination of the occupational conditions for women throughout their life. And I chose to discuss it with 10 successful women that have all made it to the top of their professions in technical related fields.

The United States has produced viable female presidential candidates, women athletes who command millions of dollars in endorsements, and the first female Nobel economist. Yet there is still no female equivalent of a Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg. Women continue to lag behind men in computer science, where their share of the workforce has actually declined over the past 25 years. Today, women hold 27 percent of all CS jobs, down from 30 percent a decade ago, and account for just 20 percent of undergraduate CS majors, down from 36 percent in 1986. The tech gap begins at home, where boys get their first computers and video game consoles at a younger age than girls and are more likely to play with toys that build spatial reasoning skills, like Lego.

Ideas about women not being "hardwired" to do math are falling like dominos in the research area. Even when girls say they believe this message, they don't really believe it. Researcher Pascal Huguet of Aix-Marseille University in France found in 2009 that middle school girls did less well on a math test when told that boys generally did better in math than girls. Even girls who denied they held a belief in girls' inferiority did poorly. Without the negative information, they score nearly as well as men.

A recent Girl Scout Research Institute study showed that 74% of high school girls are interested in STEM. But few girls pursue careers in these areas, in part because many think they'd have to work harder than men to be taken seriously.

Women dominate social networks, according to the latest Nielsen report. This is not news. Women have been ruling social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and social gaming platforms for the past few years. Women also bring in half or more of the income in 55% of U.S. households. And women ages 50 and older control a net worth of $19 trillion and own more than three-fourths of the nation’s financial wealth, according to MassMutual Financial Group. Simply put, women are influential and drive the economy.