Winifred Mitchell Baker
Company: Mozilla
Home: Peninsula
Famous for her flaming red hair cut in a style reminiscent of her company’s logo, Baker (who goes by Mitchell) has the best title of any of the women on our list: chief lizard wrangler. As one of the first Netscape employees, Baker wrote the license for Mozilla, an open source project that was spun off as an independent non-profit in 2003 after AOL bought Netscape. The Firefox web browser was the leading product to come out of Mozilla, and it has been chipping away at Microsoft’s stronghold on the browser market ever since. By late 2008, Firefox had a more than 20 percent share, while Internet Explorer had fallen to about 70 percent. Baker, a part-time trapeze artist, was included in Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World: Scientists & Thinkers” in 2005.
