Julie Wainwright, CEO of Pets.com, rose to fame when her company's sock puppet became a sensation.
When Carly Fiorina was named CEO of Hewlett-Packard, her name glossed the pages of industry magazines worldwide.
Last year, the nonprofit San Francisco Women on the Web chose Fiorina and Wainwright as two of their high-profile Top 25 Women on the Web.
But after a tumultuous year of dot-com shakeouts, the names topping this year's list aren't just CEOs and Internet celebrities, but behind-the-scenes designers, producers, activists, educators and technology pioneers.
This year's winners, who will be awarded at a gala Tuesday night, include a diverse group of women who are changing the landscape of how the Web is used.
The Top 25 winners are ... Monika Henzinger, Karan Eriksson, Tracy Wilen, Katharine Mieszkowski, Jayne Cravens, Sharron Rush, Joan Korenman, Mari Matsunaga, Ardith Ibanez Rigby, Bonnie Bracey, Barbara Simons, Tiffany Shlain, Ruann Ernst, Ann Navarro, Louise Kirkbride, Carol Muller, Netochka Nezvanova, Patricia Beckmann, Janette Bradley, Mala Chandra, Tracey Pettengill, Roberta Furger, Evelyn Pine, Mie-Yun Lee and Doreen Galli.
The awards recognize the work of programmers such as Mala Chandra, VP of platform engineering for Zaplet; Web activist Evelyn Pine; and Ardith Ibanez Rigby, creative director of Web design studio Akimbo Design.
"We've gone from sock puppets to using the Web to improve how we live or work," said Janette Bradley, director and executive producer of AvidProNet.
"It's about accountability now, it's not about hype," said Bradley, who launched her engineering and design career "long before the Web was trendy."
While other more high-profile executives were praised last year, Bradley's efforts to build Internet infrastructure went largely unnoticed. Now that the dot-com hype is diminishing, people are paying attention.
Like many of the other award winners, Bradley has faced many hurdles while trying to establish a career in technology. She was told she couldn't join the high school computer club because she was a girl, and she was one of only two women in her engineering school class.
Women have made strides in impacting technology since the awards began in 1998, and in fact as many women are using the Internet as men.
A recent survey of women living in Silicon Valley, conducted by Collaborative Economics and Community Foundation Silicon Valley, found that more than half of the 826 respondents work in technology-related fields.
"The Internet has opened a lot of doors for women," said Lara Thurman, executive director of SFWoW.
Thurman hopes for the day when women's contributions to the Internet will be so extensive that they won't need to be singled out in an awards ceremony.
"I think that might be a great goal," Thurman said.
However, while more women are working in technology, the top spots continue to go to men. Although women comprise nearly 40 percent of managers in Silicon Valley's private sector, they make up only 6 percent of senior executives at the largest 150 public companies, according to the survey.
"Women still hold fewer top management positions than men do," said Louise Kirkbride, CEO of Broad Daylight. "But it's not as bad as it used to be."
"It's great to see more women engineers," Kirkbride said. "But it's wonderful seeing more women salespeople (because that's where the top positions are)."
The study found that women in technology are nearly twice as likely as women in other professions to believe that their gender is a significant barrier to advancement. Balancing work with personal and family responsibilities was women's No. 1 source of stress.
Some women fear that the current market shakeout will make it harder for women new to the industry to advance. "There's going to be a pull back now," Bradley said. "There will continue to be a gap."
Bradley believes that it's incumbent upon women working in technology to make a point of interviewing, hiring and mentoring other women for technical and management roles.
"The No. 1 thing is that every woman in this field has to see themselves as a role model," Bradley said.
