Telle Whitney

Telle Whitney
Telle Whitney in 2010
Alma mater	BS in Computer Science from the University of Utah, Ph.D. in Computer Science from Caltech
Occupation	CEO and President of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology

BS in Computer Science from the University of Utah,

Telle Whitney is CEO and President of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. A computer scientist by training, she cofounded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing with Anita Borg in 1994 and joined the Anita Borg Institute in 2002.

Telle Whitney was born into a Mormon family 1956 in Salt Lake City, Utah. She is descended from Brigham Young.

Whitney received a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Utah in 1978 and a Ph.D. in computer science from Caltech in 1985. She moved to Silicon Valley to work in the chip industry, creating chips and the software that supports them. She held senior technical management positions at Actel and Malleable Technologies, as well as senior roles at several startup technology companies.

In 1994, Whitney and Anita Borg founded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference, which is the largest gathering of women in computing in the world. With simply the initial idea of creating a conference by and for women computer scientists, Borg and Whitney met over dinner, with a blank sheet of paper, having no idea how to start a conference, and started to plan out their vision. The first Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing was held in Washington, D.C., in June 1994, and brought together 500 technical women. Telle Whitney described walking into the conference and being surrounded by 500 technical women as “life-changing.”

In 2002, Whitney became President and CEO of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, then known as the Institute for Women and Technology. This was originally intended to be a temporary situation, while the organization searched for a replacement for Anita Borg, but ended up being a turning into a permanent role for Whitney.

Under Whitney’s leadership, the Anita Borg Institute has expanded its size and programs. Since 2003, six Grace Hopper Celebrations have been held, and in 2010, the first Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing India was organized. In addition to the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Awards, a new awards program has been established to recognize companies that support technical women, the Anita Borg Top Company for Technical Women Award.