The recent July 2006 Business 2.0 magazine (love it!) feature article is “The 50 Who Matter Now, the Most Influential Players–and What You Can Learn From Them.”

Of the 50 influentials, I count 5 women (A whopping 10%. And apparently, it helps to be named Patricia.):

• Susan Desmond-Hellmann of Genentech
• Caterina Fake of Flickr
• Patricia Woertz of Archer Daniels Midland
• Patricia Russo of Lucent Technologies
• Oprah Winfrey of, well, you know

While Googling “Business Women” for insight into the lack of “influentials” of the female gender, I stumbled across Bob Brown, not a woman, but apparently a bionic man. He ran the equivalent of 2 marathons a day for 71 days to complete a 3100 mile run from Huntington Beach, California to New York and thereby winning the “Run Across America” in 2004. Geez. This has nothing to do with influential women in business.

I know so many awesome women doing amazing things that for a moment I forgot that it wasn’t just the government that didn’t have a demographically accurate representation of the population. Hmm, off in fantasy land I was.

You’ll notice I haven’t challenged Business 2.0’s criteria or rationale. They explained why they consider each of their choices to be influential, but it’s all relative. Bill Gates being portrayed as a modern day saint for philanthropically distributing his massive fortune doesn’t cut it in my book. And it’s not just because I’m a Mac user.