Emerging Business and Executive Women of Australia

Stephanie Rice became the golden girl from Glamour Girl after winning the gold in the Beijing Olympics. In a country like ours where we look for role models, we normally follow people who are accomplished sports person. We definitely don't have as many role models in the business community as compared to sports, which also suggests some interesting aspects of our society.

In a knowledge-based economy like ours it's vital that we need to encourage people to look at entrepreneurship as a career. There are not many people who follow this path here, but there are some who have chosen this path especially if you are a woman, which makes it more laudable. So I have compiled this list of emerging Business and Executive Women of Australia, who are not only contributing to our economy but also helping others to flourish in their ventures. Let's look at this list:

Amanda Gomes, founder of online website SmartCompany - the website for SMEs and entrepreneurs. After 20 years in print journalism, Amanda joined forces with independent publishers Eric Beecher and Diana Gribble of Private Media Partners to create SmartCompany.com.au



Emily Boyd, co-founder & interface designer. She previously founded MatMice, a website that has been used by more than one million children worldwide to create their own web pages. She has received a number of awards for her work and is a former NSW Young Australian of the Year.




Fiona Adler (formerly Harrington), co-founder of www.WOMOW.com.au - a user-generated directory for Word Of Mouth On the Web. She became the 3rd Australian woman to reach the summit of Mt Everest in 2006.


Jackie Taranto, Managing Director of CeBIT's organiser, Hannover Fairs Australia,






Dr Katherine Woodthorpe is the Chief Executive of the Australian Private Equity & Venture Capital Association Limited (AVCAL), a position she has held since December 2006. In addition, Dr Woodthorpe has been Chair of the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre since 2002, Director of Insearch Ltd since 2000 and Council Member, of the University of Technology Sydney since 2004. Prior to AVCAL, she worked as a professional Non-Executive Director and management adviser; her areas of expertise included developing strategies for rapid growth and commercialization of technology products and services.


Kathie M. Thomas founder of Virtual Directory. She has pioneered the Virtual Assistant industry in Australia and currently manages a network of virtual assistants with members in 16 countries and is the moderator for two well-established VA chat forums which have over 1,500 virtual assistant members collectively. She is an industry leader who frequently speaks at public seminars and workshops throughout Australia about working virtually.
Kathie was nominated for Australian of the Year in 2008 for her community service related to guiding and mentoring women in establishing businesses at home so they could be there for family.


Meg Tsiamis, founder of dLook, Obits, Aussie Bloggers from Sydney, Australia. Her earlier working life consisted of a range of accounting and administrative type roles. In 2000 she set up a finance brokerage which grew until she started with these internet ventures.



Susie Hambleton, founder of Kahuna Bay, from Gold Coast, Australia. She is an MBA from California State University and a Bachelors in Management and Marketing. Her prior roles included working in financial sales, then as a business studies lecturer and later moving into corporate communication and marketing.





Viki Forrest, CEO of the ANZA Technology Network. Originating from Sydney, prior to this she has worked for the Australian arm of Digital Equipment Corporation for many years. In the mid-1990s she headed up DEC’s 300-strong sales support team in Asia Pacific. In 1999, she joined an Australian technology startup as the VP of Marketing and was part of the company’s US team, based in San Francisco.





Grainne E. Kearns, General Manager, enterprise infrastructure services of Sensis. PG from HBS, she joined Sensis after working in Telstra, one of the country's biggest consumers of data storage equipment. She is probably the exception to this list, but considering her role, she seems to be playing a vital role in the emerging fight of the local search market between Google and Sensis.




Silvia Pfeiffer, CEO of Vquence provides services in social video metrics. She is also the vice president of SLUG (Sydney Linux Users Group) and the president of the Annodex Association, a non-profit organisation created around the open-source technology Annodex. She came to Australia in 1999 as a just-graduated PhD student in digital media. She joined the CSIRO to work on automated audio-visual content analysis algorithms for video.