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

95 points| joshfraser | 15 years ago |newsweek.com | reply

44 comments

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[+] theDoug|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
Till that 15 to 17 percent changes (and it doesn't look like it will any time soon), that won't happen.
[+] Jun8|15 years ago|reply
In addition to the media bias, I'm also thinking that Google is using Mayer as their "look how diverse we are" showcase. In almost all such stories about Google I see Mayer, aren't there equally accomplished women in Google? With a great 40-60 ration of women to men they should be.

Also, why have her wear that photomodel outfit? This is like asking Larry or Sergei wear a suit for photo shoot. I've seen her in many videos from her talks and she tends to wear normal stuff.

Edit: Here's an extensive look at Meyer's outfits: http://gawker.com/5174126/lesley-stahl-investigates-marissa-...

[+] taylorbuley|15 years ago|reply
I agree with your point, but before you bashed Newsweek did you read any of their previous Mayer coverage? http://www.newsweek.com/search.html?q=marissa+mayer

I think you'd have a hard time putting together a collection of "Girls can do it, too!" articles that outweigh all the regular coverage of Mayer and her work at Google

[+] Qz|15 years ago|reply
Yeah, this definitely seems like old news to me. Many of the girls I know consider themselves geeks in one way or another (and most of my friends aren't in the tech circle, so that's not an issue).
[+] sp332|15 years ago|reply
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 , 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|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] joshfraser|15 years ago|reply
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.”

[+] grammaton|15 years ago|reply
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?

[+] coolswan|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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.

[+] Aloisius|15 years ago|reply
Pfft. Anyone who has spent 15 minutes around Bio and Chem girls knows that they can be hardcore geeks. :)
[+] zavulon|15 years ago|reply
> ... 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?

[+] pathik|15 years ago|reply
OT: She is the cutest geek ever. They should have a movie based on her with Diane Kruger playing the lead.
[+] elvirs|15 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] middlegeek|15 years ago|reply
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?