How important are career mentors and what does it take to succeed as a woman in a field dominated 4:1 by men? This week at the 2010 Grace Hopper Celebration, the world’s largest tech conference for women in computing, 15 of Yahoo!’s brightest  technologists and scientists, along with our leading lady, CEO Carol Bartz, will go on stage to share insights about everything from work-life balance to lessons learned throughout decades in Silicon Valley. In case you’re wondering, Grace Hopper was a pioneer in computer science, and she’s credited with developing the first modern computer programming languages. She was ahead of her time, wowing people around the globe with her ingenuity in the 1950s and 1960s – a time when the lights were just starting to come on in the world of computing.

Our own luminary, Carol Bartz, will give a keynote speech at the awards ceremony. She will talk about the rise of the insight-driven enterprise; the importance of science, technology, and data to our business; and the power of intense personalization — how we make our products increasingly relevant and improve consumer experiences.

In addition, our top techies will lead discussions about the world’s largest-scale technology challenges, the art of conducting social science research with data from hundreds of millions of people, and the potential for open source technology to change lives, among other topics. Here is a sample of just a few of the talks on the docket at Grace Hopper:

• Elizabeth Churchill, a Yahoo! Labs principal research scientist, will be presenting the results from her recently published paper “Anger Management: Using Sentiment Analysis to Manage Online Communities.”
• Barbara Poblete, also a Yahoo! Labs scientist, will present an introductory workshop on Hadoop, discussing how it can be leveraged for gleaning insights from social data.
• Julia Lee, director of engineering for Yahoo! Mail, will talk about innovating on one of the world’s largest Web mail services, Yahoo! Mail.
• Avni Khatri (front end software engineer) and a team of colleagues will facilitate the open source Codeathon for Humanity event through the Sahana Software Foundation, dedicated to humanitarian projects. During this hands-on event, conference attendees will build software that directly helps those in need.
• Fay Hellal, director of global advertising product marketing invites Kakul Srivastava, vice president of product management for communication products at Yahoo!, on stage for a chat about Women Thriving in Leadership.
• Mani Soni Abrol, an engineer from Yahoo! India, joins colleagues from IBM India and Intel Labs India for a panel on Women in Computing in India: Experiences With Boundaries. They’ll discuss the gender gap and the challenges faced by Indian women in technical industries, including research and academia.

We think technology remains the most rewarding career for women because ultimately it’s about envisioning a better future. This week we celebrate all the women technologists who are making a difference in our world. And to those embarking on their careers in technology: Welcome aboard!