Despite advance­ments in gen­der equal­i­ty in the pro­fes­sion­al world over the past decades, it is true that men still dom­i­nate the high­er ech­e­lons of busi­ness. But things are begin­ning to look up for the fair­er sex, with increas­ing num­bers of female start­up founders, and just as impor­tant­ly, many recent­ly and high­ly suc­cess­ful women-led star­tups, with many IPO’s and acqui­si­tions of note. This arti­cle takes a look at some the best ideas and suc­cess stories.

TaskRab­bit – Leah Busque

As if her for­mer role as an IBM engi­neer wasn’t suc­cess­ful enough, Leah Busque had a brain wave one day when she didn’t want to get pet food for her dog – what if there was a web­site where you could hire some­one to do all the errands and tasks when you don’t want to? The web­site TaskRab­bit is the end result of her ven­ture, and the results have been excel­lent so far.

Learn­Vest — Alexa Von Tobel 

Alexa Von Tobel, like many oth­er suc­cess­ful female busi­ness start-uppers, went to Har­vard Busi­ness School, and while it was her aim to get into Wall Street, it was her inter­est in per­son­al finance that began Learn­Vest; an online per­son­al finance resource, main­ly aimed at help­ing women han­dle their finances.

Layar – Claire Boonstra

Claire Boonstra’s exper­tise and expe­ri­ence in mobile, mar­ket­ing and new media has cul­mi­nat­ed in the start-up com­pa­ny Layar, an indus­try lead­ing busi­ness which is at the van­guard of aug­ment­ed real­i­ty. Aug­ment­ed real­i­ty is open­ing many new doors, espe­cial­ly in terms of mobile, through the use of video, GPS and oth­er sen­sors to track the visu­al fea­tures of the phys­i­cal world and super­im­pose them with dig­i­tal features.

Khush – Pre­rna Gupta

Khush’s life began in 2009 with the founder Pre­rna Gup­ta want­i­ng to cre­ate an intel­li­gent music app. She built the com­pa­ny from the ground up, even­tu­al­ly turn­ing a prof­it, and by the end of 2011 Smule acquired the com­pa­ny for an “eight fig­ure deal” com­prised of stock and cash.

Hearsay Social – Clara Shih

Hearsay Social is an online cloud-based social media plat­form that gives com­pa­nies a pow­er­ful tool to man­age their social media mar­ket­ing efforts. This start-up has enjoyed the most suc­cess­ful Face­book media cam­paign in his­to­ry, gain­ing 2 mil­lion fans in a sin­gle day, and a cur­rent $21 mil­lion raised for the plat­form. Shih’s pres­tige goes much fur­ther too, being the author of The Face­book Era and a board mem­ber of Star­bucks.

HTC — Cher Wang

Named as “one of the most pow­er­ful female exec­u­tives in tech­nol­o­gy whom you have nev­er heard of” by the New York Times, Cher Wang’s mobile start up is a com­pa­ny that needs lit­tle intro­duc­tion. The suc­cess of HTC is in no small way thanks to her efforts in part­ner­ing HTC with Google for the now huge­ly pop­u­lar Android range of smartphones.

Chomp – Cathy Edwards

Cathy Edwards is the joint founder of Chomp, a mobile appli­ca­tion search engine which uses a pro­pri­etary search algo­rithm to help make search­ing more accu­rate and reflec­tive of the user’s inter­ests. Chomp launched on the iPhone in 2010 and on Android soon after, with Apple mak­ing an acqui­si­tion ear­li­er this year for $50m.