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.
I'm curious if this is not only an effect, but also a cause. If the news reports that it is unusual for women to be in computing, doesn't that in a small way reinforce that message within popular culture? Newsweek should know better.
So basically you want newsweek to lie in order to promote a social cause? Because right now it is unusual, so that is how they should report it.
Isn't that called propaganda, and is the job of the government and ad agencies? (And they've both certainly done it successfully for plenty of causes they've decided were important.)
Journalistic integrity is important - even if it goes against your social cause.
This is a very common complaint about journalists, that by reporting on it, they are causing it. It might be a valid complaint, but any attempt to fix it makes it worse.
I think that article was essentially a propaganda piece, albeit unintentionally. My guess is that Newsweek puts out blurbs like that in order to reach out to a targeted demographic, in this case women.
The whole question of media bias really comes down to the bottom line. If a format of words plus carefully chosen images favored traditionally conservative causes (which for the most part they don't) there would be widespread complaints about right wing media bias. AS it is, I think there is very little remanent of journalistic ethics in mass media.
It's unusual, but it's also obviously unusual. So, do you take the obvious story, or do you figure out something new? Not that I'd expect Newsweek to do anything else.
Will the industry actually benefit if additional women join its workforce, rather than anyone (regardless of gender) who is competent and wants to? I suppose it's possible that there's something to gain from diversity, perhaps from morale or just diversity of mindsets/ideas/backgrounds, but that seems like a bit of an immeasurable stretch.
> Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] said, “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.”
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?).
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
And therein lies the problem with a definition whose meaning has been diluted to near meaninglessness.
"Geek" doesn't mean the same thing it used to, or even close to it. Teenage girls running around calling themselves geeks because they spend a lot of time playing angry birds on their phone is a far cry from the MIT Media Lab.
The same goes for latte-sipping hipsters who can use Garage Band on their MBP, or any other person who uses consumer technology as an end-user, then proceeds to proclaim themselves a geek, or FSM forbid, a hacker.
I don't see dilution of the definition as a problem. Video games used to be geeky. Now everyone plays video games. Everyone is geeky. To paraphrase Gordon Gekko, 'Geeky is Good.'
And for the record, many of them consider themselves geeks for legitimately geeky things, not 'playing angry birds on their phone' as you so derisively mention.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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?).
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
(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.
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.
> ... 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?
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 :)
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?
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.