7 ms·

Google's Marissa Mayer: Girls Can Be Geeks, Too

95 points by joshfraser 16y ago

joshfraser 16y ago
Does anyone know which books they are referring to in this quote from the Google founders? “You know, we have seven engineers, and they’re all guys. But we’ve thought a lot about how we want to start our company, and we’ve read a lot of books, and we know that organizations work better when there is gender balance. So it’s important to us that we have a strong group of women, especially technical women, in the company.”
- anuleczka 16y ago
  Here's a report by McKinsey that suggests "a correlation between high numbers of female senior executives and stronger financial performance" [PDF]: http://www.positude.com/Images/A_Business_Case_for_Women.pdf http://www.positude.com/Images/A_Business_Case_for_Women.pdf
  - jakarta 16y ago
    Could this be correlation without causation? You see a lot of diversity at some of these blue chip companies (Coca-Cola, Pepsi, JNJ, AmEx) but maybe that is because they are so large and well known that they have an imperative to be diverse. Conversely you might have some unknown/private company that isn't really in the public eye and as a result does not have a mandate to have a ton of female senior executives (maybe Aramco?).
    - anuleczka 16y ago
      Hmm, interesting. Why would larger companies have an imperative to be diverse? Legality?
      - ekanes 16y ago
        The bigger you are, the clearer it becomes if you have gender biases in your hiring, pay or advancement. Walmart is a current example. eg. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/business/04lawsuit.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/business/04lawsuit.html?_r...
      - mrr2 16y ago
        They are more likely to be in the public eye. More visibility = more chances of being attacked for being sexist/discriminating = more programs and "support" to hire females, underrepresented minorities etc. A startup is working hard just to survive. This is a survivorship bias often ignored by media and report likely because its not politically correct.
    - danilocampos 16y ago
      Aramco is an... odd example. A company based in a country where women are treated as second-class citizens and aren't even permitted driver's licenses[1] isn't going to have any sort of mandate to employ them, public eye or not. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womens_rights_in_Saudi_Arabia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womens_rights_in_Saudi_Arabia
      - jwatzman 16y ago
        That pages doesn't exist, do you mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_rights_in_Saudi_Arabia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_rights_in_Saudi_Arabi...
    - dkarl 16y ago
      It can be causation without female workers adding anything by their "femaleness." Any effort to break old routines can result in replacing old, unexamined habits with better ones. Case in point: I read an article in the Financial Times several years back about how Norwegian companies adapted to the quota law requiring 40% of board members to be female. Norwegian companies were kind of at a loss because they normally recruited directors out of a pool of candidates known to their current directors and executives. They knew those traditional candidates very well, often personally, and knew their skills, qualifications, and trustworthiness. Unfortunately, that pool didn't include very many women. The companies were leery of hiring complete strangers into their boardrooms. Still, they were stuck with it, so they did their best. They identified skills and knowledge that would complement their existing boards and launched international searches for qualified candidates. Just by taking those steps, which most of companies had never bothered with before, they discovered a huge number of stellar candidates with skills that were completely lacking in Norwegian boardrooms. The candidates they found were significantly younger, more accomplished, and more internationally savvy than the usual old boys' club candidates. Result: big win for Norwegian corporations. Instead of looking at a few dozen old Scandinavian men, they started recruiting out of a huge pool of international talent. Being limited to female candidates was a minor factor at that point. At least, that's how the FT presented it.
- jdp23 16y ago
  It wasn't out at the time, but Scott Page's book The Difference is a compelling look at the underlying mathematical model for the value of diversity and problem solving. There's a good summary of it at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/science/08conv.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/science/08conv.html
- erikpukinskis 16y ago
  The seminal work on the subject is "Unlocking The Clubhouse" by Jane Margolis: http://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Computing-Jane-Margolis/dp/0262133989 http://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Computing-Jane-Mar...
middlegeek 16y ago
I am sure there is some great content and all, but did anyone else click on the story just to see if there was going to be audio or video of her awkward laugh?
theDoug 16y ago
It'd be nice for Newsweek and other outlets to cover Mayer and her good work without it repeatedly being yet another spin of the old "Girls can do it, too!" trope. Yes, they can do it, they've always been able to do it. Stop pretending it's surprising or 'news,' and you'll have fewer people incorrectly feel women are out of place in technology.
- ars 16y ago
  Till that 15 to 17 percent changes (and it doesn't look like it will any time soon), that won't happen.
  - lucasjung 16y ago
    Interestingly, that's about the same as the percentage of women in the military. I wonder how much of that is coincidence, and how much is driven by common factors (culture/climate? self-selection?).
    - _delirium 16y ago
      In tech's case, the extreme imbalance is fairly recent, though. Women are currently around 18-20% of new CS degrees, but in the early 1980s, they were 35-37%. Still a minority, but 2:1 rather than 4:1.
      - lucasjung 16y ago
        That's very interesting. Is this happening because fewer women are going into CS, or because way more men than women have gone into the field? A good way to answer this would be to look at some different statistics: what percentage of women college graduates majored in CS in the early '80s vs. today, and the same comparison for men. Of course, that doesn't answer the underlying question of why more men than women choose to major in CS. CS was a relatively young discipline in the early '80s, so its share of total graduates has probably grown significantly since then. I'd be willing to bet that growth is due to both more men and more women entering the field, but disproportionately men. CS graduates back then were, in a sense, all "early adopters," so both the men and the women in the field were outside of the mainstream. It could be that men now consider CS to be mainstream, but women don't: among men, the discipline has grown as one would expect, but among women the discipline is stuck at an earlier stage. Of course, this just leads to further questions about why this disparity in adoption exists.
elvirs 16y ago
sure they can, but they don't, because i think they are more concerned about what people around them think about them, while boys are more confident and pay less attention to the opinions of others. thats why boys are not afraid of being called a geek and pursuit their ideas and keep working on things they like while girls mostly would give up and do something thats considered cool/awesome/whatever. some women journalists are complaining about low number of women in executive positions in tech startups and blame men for that but the fact is that while those guys who now hold executive positions were considered geeks and not cool and were working on tech related stuff in their dorm rooms while the girls were busy partying and trying to fit in with the crowd. yes girls can be geeks, and they should if they like that. geeks would welcome that :)
zavulon 16y ago
> ... in our hiring practices we make sure there’s a woman engineer on each interview, and I think that makes a big difference in terms of how engineers relate to each other. Because there are a lot of male engineers who can only really relate to other men. Really? Does anyone else have a problem with this?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
sp332 16y ago
Disclaimer: this post may overstate things :-) Have you ever seen the show SciGirls on PBS? In the episode "Robots to the Rescue" http://pbskids.org/scigirls/video2?asset=show110 http://pbskids.org/scigirls/video2?asset=show110 , some high-school girls "team up with" actual roboticists to help develop a rescue robot. I put "team up with" in quotes because the girls totally outclass the roboticists. Sure, the girls are interested in "science" but they are totally not nerds. And they are planning MIT- or CMU-level behavior into these bots, and I don't mean wishful thinking but carefully planned and organized ideas, to the level that I think with more time they would have written the code themselves. (Spoiler: the hardware can't keep up, and the bots do almost nothing useful.) They collect useful data from the experiment and actually advance the project in the time they are there. Really impressive.
PostOnce 16y ago
Ada Lovelace and Marie Curie started us down a path that brought us to programmable ICBMs. Yeah they can do it, and they can kick ass at it. Also, my wife is better at math and understanding mathematical concepts than me, so I find myself asking her to help me wrap my head around programming problems, even though she's not a programmer and doesn't know how to code.
- zootar 16y ago
  I don't think anyone believes that there has never existed a woman who was good at math/science. The questions some people have are about averages and gender roles. Offering specific "counterexamples" always strikes me as an odd thing to do in discussions about workplace or classroom diversity.
Aloisius 16y ago
Pfft. Anyone who has spent 15 minutes around Bio and Chem girls knows that they can be hardcore geeks. :)
andrewvc 16y ago
Here's my question. Where are the girls in FOSS? Given that 15-17% number, you'd think there would be more. What are the barriers?
- follower 16y ago
  Here's a couple of presentations which address that question: * http://webchick.net/files/women-in-floss.pdf http://webchick.net/files/women-in-floss.pdf * http://infotrope.net/blog/2009/07/25/standing-out-in-the-crowd-my-oscon-keynote/ http://infotrope.net/blog/2009/07/25/standing-out-in-the-cro...
  - dexen 16y ago
    (somewhat off-topic) Sometimes FLOSS is put forward as the meritocracy in the world of software development, as opposed to big business ruled by bean-counters and arbitrary quotas. Yet when it comes to gender ratio, it's implied and/or assumed women and girls are driven out of FLOSS for some irrational reasons, and the gender ratio in the big business is the natural one. Why such assumption? A honest question; as I don't know the reasons and reasoning behind all that.
    - andrewvc 16y ago
      It is a meritocracy in that simple projects often only have 1 person working on them. One would think, given that , there'd be more women involved, as there's no discrimination there.
- spitfire 16y ago
  Soap.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
pathik 16y ago
OT: She is the cutest geek ever. They should have a movie based on her with Diane Kruger playing the lead.
coolswan 16y ago
Profit-maximizing firms are gender-blind. The fact that Google wouldn't hire anymore men until they hired a women is a huge problem and does the opposite of helping the "more girl geeks" cause.
- squarecog 16y ago
  Right. Let Google's failure to make bucketloads of money be a warning to other firms that might have similarly laughable ideas! What a waste, that company really looked like it might be profitable one day.
grammaton 16y ago
So, at the risk of being flamed into oblivion - wouldn't a great way to attract more women into engineering be to stop fawning over them as soon as they show up, treating them like they're a rare and special orchid? "oh you're a woman engineer, oh how wonderful!" How creepy. How about we just call them engineers and call it a day?

95 points by joshfraser 16y ago

Does anyone know which books they are referring to in this quote from the Google founders? “You know, we have seven engineers, and they’re all guys. But we’ve thought a lot about how we want to start our company, and we’ve read a lot of books, and we know that organizations work better when there is gender balance. So it’s important to us that we have a strong group of women, especially technical women, in the company.”

anuleczka 16y ago
Here's a report by McKinsey that suggests "a correlation between high numbers of female senior executives and stronger financial performance" [PDF]: http://www.positude.com/Images/A_Business_Case_for_Women.pdf http://www.positude.com/Images/A_Business_Case_for_Women.pdf
- jakarta 16y ago
  Could this be correlation without causation? You see a lot of diversity at some of these blue chip companies (Coca-Cola, Pepsi, JNJ, AmEx) but maybe that is because they are so large and well known that they have an imperative to be diverse. Conversely you might have some unknown/private company that isn't really in the public eye and as a result does not have a mandate to have a ton of female senior executives (maybe Aramco?).
  - anuleczka 16y ago
    Hmm, interesting. Why would larger companies have an imperative to be diverse? Legality?
    - ekanes 16y ago
      The bigger you are, the clearer it becomes if you have gender biases in your hiring, pay or advancement. Walmart is a current example. eg. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/business/04lawsuit.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/business/04lawsuit.html?_r...
    - mrr2 16y ago
      They are more likely to be in the public eye. More visibility = more chances of being attacked for being sexist/discriminating = more programs and "support" to hire females, underrepresented minorities etc. A startup is working hard just to survive. This is a survivorship bias often ignored by media and report likely because its not politically correct.
  - danilocampos 16y ago
    Aramco is an... odd example. A company based in a country where women are treated as second-class citizens and aren't even permitted driver's licenses[1] isn't going to have any sort of mandate to employ them, public eye or not. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womens_rights_in_Saudi_Arabia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womens_rights_in_Saudi_Arabia
    - jwatzman 16y ago
      That pages doesn't exist, do you mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_rights_in_Saudi_Arabia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_rights_in_Saudi_Arabi...
  - dkarl 16y ago
    It can be causation without female workers adding anything by their "femaleness." Any effort to break old routines can result in replacing old, unexamined habits with better ones. Case in point: I read an article in the Financial Times several years back about how Norwegian companies adapted to the quota law requiring 40% of board members to be female. Norwegian companies were kind of at a loss because they normally recruited directors out of a pool of candidates known to their current directors and executives. They knew those traditional candidates very well, often personally, and knew their skills, qualifications, and trustworthiness. Unfortunately, that pool didn't include very many women. The companies were leery of hiring complete strangers into their boardrooms. Still, they were stuck with it, so they did their best. They identified skills and knowledge that would complement their existing boards and launched international searches for qualified candidates. Just by taking those steps, which most of companies had never bothered with before, they discovered a huge number of stellar candidates with skills that were completely lacking in Norwegian boardrooms. The candidates they found were significantly younger, more accomplished, and more internationally savvy than the usual old boys' club candidates. Result: big win for Norwegian corporations. Instead of looking at a few dozen old Scandinavian men, they started recruiting out of a huge pool of international talent. Being limited to female candidates was a minor factor at that point. At least, that's how the FT presented it.
jdp23 16y ago
It wasn't out at the time, but Scott Page's book The Difference is a compelling look at the underlying mathematical model for the value of diversity and problem solving. There's a good summary of it at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/science/08conv.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/science/08conv.html
erikpukinskis 16y ago
The seminal work on the subject is "Unlocking The Clubhouse" by Jane Margolis: http://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Computing-Jane-Margolis/dp/0262133989 http://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Computing-Jane-Mar...

middlegeek 16y ago

I am sure there is some great content and all, but did anyone else click on the story just to see if there was going to be audio or video of her awkward laugh?

theDoug 16y ago

It'd be nice for Newsweek and other outlets to cover Mayer and her good work without it repeatedly being yet another spin of the old "Girls can do it, too!" trope. Yes, they can do it, they've always been able to do it. Stop pretending it's surprising or 'news,' and you'll have fewer people incorrectly feel women are out of place in technology.

ars 16y ago
Till that 15 to 17 percent changes (and it doesn't look like it will any time soon), that won't happen.
- lucasjung 16y ago
  Interestingly, that's about the same as the percentage of women in the military. I wonder how much of that is coincidence, and how much is driven by common factors (culture/climate? self-selection?).
  - _delirium 16y ago
    In tech's case, the extreme imbalance is fairly recent, though. Women are currently around 18-20% of new CS degrees, but in the early 1980s, they were 35-37%. Still a minority, but 2:1 rather than 4:1.
    - lucasjung 16y ago
      That's very interesting. Is this happening because fewer women are going into CS, or because way more men than women have gone into the field? A good way to answer this would be to look at some different statistics: what percentage of women college graduates majored in CS in the early '80s vs. today, and the same comparison for men. Of course, that doesn't answer the underlying question of why more men than women choose to major in CS. CS was a relatively young discipline in the early '80s, so its share of total graduates has probably grown significantly since then. I'd be willing to bet that growth is due to both more men and more women entering the field, but disproportionately men. CS graduates back then were, in a sense, all "early adopters," so both the men and the women in the field were outside of the mainstream. It could be that men now consider CS to be mainstream, but women don't: among men, the discipline has grown as one would expect, but among women the discipline is stuck at an earlier stage. Of course, this just leads to further questions about why this disparity in adoption exists.

elvirs 16y ago

sure they can, but they don't, because i think they are more concerned about what people around them think about them, while boys are more confident and pay less attention to the opinions of others. thats why boys are not afraid of being called a geek and pursuit their ideas and keep working on things they like while girls mostly would give up and do something thats considered cool/awesome/whatever. some women journalists are complaining about low number of women in executive positions in tech startups and blame men for that but the fact is that while those guys who now hold executive positions were considered geeks and not cool and were working on tech related stuff in their dorm rooms while the girls were busy partying and trying to fit in with the crowd. yes girls can be geeks, and they should if they like that. geeks would welcome that :)

zavulon 16y ago

> ... in our hiring practices we make sure there’s a woman engineer on each interview, and I think that makes a big difference in terms of how engineers relate to each other. Because there are a lot of male engineers who can only really relate to other men. Really? Does anyone else have a problem with this?

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

sp332 16y ago

Disclaimer: this post may overstate things :-) Have you ever seen the show SciGirls on PBS? In the episode "Robots to the Rescue" http://pbskids.org/scigirls/video2?asset=show110 http://pbskids.org/scigirls/video2?asset=show110 , some high-school girls "team up with" actual roboticists to help develop a rescue robot. I put "team up with" in quotes because the girls totally outclass the roboticists. Sure, the girls are interested in "science" but they are totally not nerds. And they are planning MIT- or CMU-level behavior into these bots, and I don't mean wishful thinking but carefully planned and organized ideas, to the level that I think with more time they would have written the code themselves. (Spoiler: the hardware can't keep up, and the bots do almost nothing useful.) They collect useful data from the experiment and actually advance the project in the time they are there. Really impressive.

PostOnce 16y ago

Ada Lovelace and Marie Curie started us down a path that brought us to programmable ICBMs. Yeah they can do it, and they can kick ass at it. Also, my wife is better at math and understanding mathematical concepts than me, so I find myself asking her to help me wrap my head around programming problems, even though she's not a programmer and doesn't know how to code.

zootar 16y ago
I don't think anyone believes that there has never existed a woman who was good at math/science. The questions some people have are about averages and gender roles. Offering specific "counterexamples" always strikes me as an odd thing to do in discussions about workplace or classroom diversity.

Aloisius 16y ago

Pfft. Anyone who has spent 15 minutes around Bio and Chem girls knows that they can be hardcore geeks. :)

andrewvc 16y ago

Here's my question. Where are the girls in FOSS? Given that 15-17% number, you'd think there would be more. What are the barriers?

follower 16y ago
Here's a couple of presentations which address that question: * http://webchick.net/files/women-in-floss.pdf http://webchick.net/files/women-in-floss.pdf * http://infotrope.net/blog/2009/07/25/standing-out-in-the-crowd-my-oscon-keynote/ http://infotrope.net/blog/2009/07/25/standing-out-in-the-cro...
- dexen 16y ago
  (somewhat off-topic) Sometimes FLOSS is put forward as the meritocracy in the world of software development, as opposed to big business ruled by bean-counters and arbitrary quotas. Yet when it comes to gender ratio, it's implied and/or assumed women and girls are driven out of FLOSS for some irrational reasons, and the gender ratio in the big business is the natural one. Why such assumption? A honest question; as I don't know the reasons and reasoning behind all that.
  - andrewvc 16y ago
    It is a meritocracy in that simple projects often only have 1 person working on them. One would think, given that , there'd be more women involved, as there's no discrimination there.
spitfire 16y ago
Soap.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

pathik 16y ago

OT: She is the cutest geek ever. They should have a movie based on her with Diane Kruger playing the lead.

coolswan 16y ago

Profit-maximizing firms are gender-blind. The fact that Google wouldn't hire anymore men until they hired a women is a huge problem and does the opposite of helping the "more girl geeks" cause.

squarecog 16y ago
Right. Let Google's failure to make bucketloads of money be a warning to other firms that might have similarly laughable ideas! What a waste, that company really looked like it might be profitable one day.

grammaton 16y ago

So, at the risk of being flamed into oblivion - wouldn't a great way to attract more women into engineering be to stop fawning over them as soon as they show up, treating them like they're a rare and special orchid? "oh you're a woman engineer, oh how wonderful!" How creepy. How about we just call them engineers and call it a day?