There are few businesswomen that make it to the top of the nation’s largest corporations and even fewer women of color at the top. Often times these women fight hard to make a name for themselves but find when they decide to step down, their legacy is lost in the media write up of their failures. Writer and Gen Y Consultant Erica Dhawan cautions young women entering the corporate world to think twice before judging their women mentors. The media’s criticism of these powerful women often ignores the contributions these women have made to a company.

Take for instance Erin Callan, the former chief financial officer at Lehman Brothers right before its fall from the economic crisis. She was promoted too late to be able to save the firm and was publically criticized and ridiculed for her poor performance during her six months in the CFO position.

What the media failed to mention was her hard work and loyalty to the company since 1995, and how she was able to rise quickly to the top while still making time to talk with junior women at the firm to advise them on their career paths.

Then there was Sallie Krawcheck, the former Bank of America exec who supposedly “died like a man” according to Business Insider. Krawcheck had been supposedly forced out of Bank of America but her strong will and assertiveness on Wall Street throughout her career had been forgotten.

Carol Bartz was instrumental in doubling Yahoo’s operational income and margins, but was instead remembered for cursing in the workplace.

When these top businesswomen fall, young women often look down upon them and shake their heads, forgetting how hard these women worked.

Dhawan reminds young women that, “being a woman leader is about speaking and embodying what you believe, not just accommodating to an organization’s culture or pursuing media rewards.”

Have any women executives and leaders helped you along your professional journey? What can you learn from their legacy?

This year, there are a wealth of conferences committed to empowering women all over the nation. Known for effectuating change in the community, these conferences have relatively shaped the way women have been perceived in mainstream circles while achieving success. Take your pick from among these favored conferences:

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If you just graduated and would like to know which companies are scooping up all ye class of 2010 edu-ma-cated darls, check out Forbes’ list.

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(Black Web 2.0) — As technology is an amorphous, constantly evolving entity, I think most techies would agree with me that being involved in the tech sphere lends a level of constant excitement not to be had in other industries. Every day there’s a chance for the next big thing to break, whether its a new piece of software, a way to improve our social interactions, or new gadget that’s everyone’s clamoring to get their hands on. And although we’ve heard it many times before and we’ll hear it repeatedly going forward, there’s really no better time to be a techie than right now.

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(Social Media Today) — [S]tudents are losing the ability to study properly. Constant use of the internet has rewired their brains to function differently from those of earlier generations: they skip from topic to topic in an “associative” mode of thinking, and are less capable of the linear thought required for skills like reading and writing at length. Some have even warned that the result could be greater rates of mental illness.

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(Entrepreneurs) — Seven years ago, this blog you’re reading now was an online column offering advice on such things as traveling with a PDA in lieu of a laptop. On that particular topic, I wrote that accessing the internet on a PDA was like “driving cross-country in a Pinto with a cracked windshield–painfully slow and monumentally irritating.” One of the main options for checking e-mail on a handheld, I explained, was to connect the PDA to “a dial-up modem and a landline connection.”

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