While the metaverse is still in a state of (virtual) construction, leading innovators are fully immersed in building and shaping the next phase of how we interact with technology. Much like the days when the world wide web was still abstract and hadn’t become ubiquitous in the way we share, connect, and experience life, some people believed in the digital age long before we got there. And that’s exactly what’s happening now.

People are investing in Web 3.0 and anticipating it becoming our new reality. Except for this time, women are taking their rightful seat at the table not only to ensure inclusivity and accessibility to jobs in the metaverse but for the metaverse itself to reflect all people, especially underrepresented groups who are just beginning to see themselves represented and celebrated in our culture.

Here are 12 futurist women making strides in the metaverse who are equally enthusiastic about creating opportunities for girls and women gearing up for a career pivot. From a former lawyer to an entrepreneur who started her first business with just $20, these female visionaries’ backgrounds underscore that you don’t have to start in technology to become a significant player in it.

Sonya Worrell is co-founder and chief content creator of HBCU Nation, HBCUiRadio, and HBCU Smart TV. She is a cyber security analyst who handles all facets of online security, such as security risk assessments, and incident response. She is well versed in interrupting threat attacks and familiar with threat intelligence and cutting-edge security technologies. During her career, she has launched and maintained several broadcast productions from concept to creation. She has also built, launched, and currently manages digital platforms such as HBCUiRadio (on 10 worldwide streaming platforms ) HBCU Smart TV (hbcusmarttv.com, ROKU, and Amazon Fire TV). She earned a master's degree in cybersecurity from Norfolk State University, and an M.B.A. from Strayer University.

Sheila Khan Judkins is director of Marcom, Metaverse, Meta Reality Labs. She is a first-generation American and the daughter of immigrant parents from India and Italy. She is an insights-driven marketing leader who believes deeply in the power of people, investing and mentoring them, and being an advocate for representation in business and media. Her 20 years of experience working in toys, games, entertainment, education, and gaming for companies such as Hasbro and Electronic Arts involved driving internal and product transformation on brands like Star Wars, Play-Doh, Transformers, The Sims, and GI JOE.

While director of the brand on The Sims, Judkins led product efforts in representation, partnering with players to bring over 100 skin tones into the game, partnering with MAC to develop better makeup for darker skin tones, and redefining menswear with Stefan Cooke x British Fashion Council. She is passionate about cultivating more open-minded, empathetic citizens of the world by fostering connections and using technology to create safe spaces for education and self-discovery. She has served on the Board of Directors for Girls on the Run Rhode Island and was a mentor for Odyssey of the Mind, a creative thinking development program for children.

Nancy Beaton is the vice president of strategy at Together Labs, the technology parent company behind IMVU and VCOIN, an ERC-20 token built on Ethereum, the most widely adopted blockchain technology that can be exchanged inside the IMVU platform and, for the first time, off the platform. Beaton currently leads efforts to turn the economy of IMVU, one of the largest virtual 3D worlds, into the next generation of market exchange through blockchain technology and VCOIN, which lets all users hold, earn, and exit the platform with real value. She has built, developed, and grown startups and Fortune 500 companies.

Previously, as chief revenue officer at Amplifire, a SaaS-based learning platform based in cognitive science, she led all go-to-market offers, revenue generation, and sales teams across multiple verticals, including healthcare, education, and corporate performance. Beaton is an active Tech Stars mentor and holds a B.A. in rhetoric, an M.S. in journalism, and an M.B.A.

Loredana Crisan is vice president of messaging experience for Facebook Messenger and Instagram at Meta. She leads her team to develop innovative experiences for Messenger’s more than 1 billion users and push the boundaries in modern-day communication. Crisan is responsible for driving how messaging will work in the metaverse. This includes considering the metaverse's role in real-time communication, spanning social presence and intimate experiences, work, business, and entertainment, and existing across various hardware including PCs, mobile, game consoles, wearables, AR/VR devices more.

Previously, Crisan was on Messenger's design, brand, and research team. She led the launch of a new Messenger experience on Instagram, including cross-app communication between the two apps and Messenger’s redesign and rebranding in 2018 and 2020. Before Messenger, Crisan led brand and mobile design at Indiegogo, where she spearheaded the release of native apps and the launch of Indiegogo's charitable fundraising site, Generosity. Crisan grew up in Romania, and she studied piano and music composition at the National Music University in Bucharest.

Jossie Haines is a vice president at Tile. She is a tech industry veteran as an engineering leader at the forefront of emerging technology across Silicon Valley, including management roles at Apple, Tile, Zynga, and American Express. As VP of software engineering at Tile, she leads the mobile, backend, web, and platform engineering teams that empower users to find millions of lost items every day. She also heads up the diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and launched their mentoring program.

Haines is dedicated to the representation of women in tech. Her focus areas are retaining women in tech, empathy in engineering, and practical and fair management practices that reduce bias and empower all team members to thrive. She has given over 40 talks in the last two years, including at the Grace Hopper and Empowered Women of the World conference. Haines is a mentor at the Mentoring Club, Power to Fly, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Plato.

Luise Frohberg is the founder of Taara Quest, a community for game-based female leadership growth in the metaverse. Her vision is to empower women through immersive roleplaying virtual reality simulations to develop their full leadership potential and manifest change in the world. She believes that the metaverse is a tremendous opportunity for women to advance personally and professionally and is also an emerging world that needs to be co-created by women from the standpoint of safety, inclusivity, and equal access for all.

Frohberg started her career as a political leader and women's movement activist running for state parliament in 2018 and promoting gender equality in the political system of Germany. She was the chairperson of the Women’s Union of Leipzig board from 2014 to 2021 and a board member of the Women’s Union of Saxony. As a serial entrepreneur, published author, and innovation expert, Frohberg has extended experience in public and social innovation projects. She co-founded Mindful Innovation's digital innovation startup and designed, taught, and facilitated digital collaboration techniques. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the Humboldt University of Berlin. In her research, she studies the influence of key stakeholders on the success of public policy and innovation.

Anne Vetto is a software engineer at Mythical Games, a technology studio. Before pivoting to tech, she worked in neurodegenerative disease research at the University of California San Diego. She was inspired to change careers after realizing the creativity inherent in coding and tech’s progress with few resources. Vetto was a pioneering instructor of Disney’s CODE: Rosie internal coding Bootcamp for women and exhibited a 3D-printing app at Maker Faire to encourage little girls to create their robot figurines. Vetto emphasizes the need for diversity at all levels of STEM and the direct material effort that promotes it.

She encourages the conversation about women in tech to focus not only on barriers but also on achievements and the contributions of women of color in STEM. She centers her projects on artistic, multidisciplinary interests in her spare time and looks for chances to volunteer, skillshare, and lower tech barriers for people with nontraditional backgrounds. She strives to combine programming with her neuroscience background in an innovative, creative, and inspiring way and is always open to helping other women get into tech.

Louisa Spring is the founder of SAM Immersive, a consultancy focusing on virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), and other forms of immersive reality applications. As an entrepreneur, gamer, lawyer, producer, she has facilitated many extended reality (XR) deals with Intel, La Liga NFL, Toyota, Hershey, and Walmart with Spatialand. She also facilitates partnerships and business development in the metaverse, XR, 5GXR, and gaming. Spring has worked with Far Moor (acquired by Endemol) and William J. Macdonald (Rome) as a television producer. Spring is a former member of the board of BAFTA Los Angeles and, as a lawyer, represented actors such as Roger Moore, John Rhys-Davies, and Christopher Judge.

Miranda Mantey is an experienced researcher, foresight practitioner, and strategist with a passion for learning and all things about the future. As UX foresight strategist at ATB Ventures, Mantey evaluates global trends to understand implications to innovation strategy, the product portfolio, and customers. She believes that the metaverse will drive the next generation of computer interfaces in one form or another. Mantey is a published author and professional speaker who holds a Master of Science in foresight from Houston.

Suzanne Nguyen is a senior director for communications, brand, and community at Agora. She has been a leading innovator behind developer ecosystems for semiconductor, cloud, mobile, and enterprise products for over two decades at Adobe, T-Mobile, Samsung, and others. As senior director of communications, brand, and community at Agora, she leads the narrative around their real-time engagement platform. She was one of the first evangelists for the Java Mobile Edition and the originator of the Java ME developer program.

Nguyen was also one of the critical drivers for the Android community growth through T-Mobile’s developer community support. She led the “Apps with Feelings” campaign at Immersion Corporation, which popularized haptic implementations in mobile apps. Nguyen first became interested in the metaverse through her work at Samsung partnering with Oculus (now part of Meta) and other AR/VR app developers to promote the future of metaverse solutions.

Kate Hancock is the cofounder of Metaverse Collective, which empowers entrepreneurs to grow in the web 3.0/metaverse space through education, collaboration, and resources. Every week, members have access to presentations by industry experts and can attend a weekly party in the metaverse. Hancock built Metaverse Collective’s 100,000-plus member community on the social audio app Clubhouse.

She is the host and creator of META TALKZ TV on FOX 5 San Diego and NBC Austin, which features experts discussing their work in the metaverse to a broader audience, and principal partner of Metaverse Media TV, which produces META TALKZ TV as well as a publication and the entrepreneurial podcast Inspired By Her. Born in Camiguin, Philippines, Hancock is a serial entrepreneur who bootstrapped her first business with $20 and featured on Inc’s 5000 lists of Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America twice.

As a chief business officer of checkout automation fintech solution Be Secure (bsecure), Mehwish Aslam is helping small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the metaverse reduce friction points between turning a shopper into a buyer and a repeat customer. Through bSecure, she is developing a roadmap to help SMBs in the metaverse accept the complexity of financial assets such as real estate-backed tokens offered by digital asset organization DAO PropTech, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and a range of cryptocurrencies.

In doing so, she will refine the merger of virtual and fiat wealth while allowing digital natives to secure lease, mortgage, credit facilities through an NFT portfolio and other types of virtual assets. In the past, Aslam was head of media planning at several companies and taught at Iqra University in Pakistan. She holds a BBA in advertising and an M.B.A. in marketing.