Marissa Mayer takes the top job at Yahoo. If only there was a word to express how exciting this news is.
As one of Google’s earliest and most heavily-involved engineers (Mayer held key roles in Google Search, Google Images, Google Books, Google Product Search, Google Toolbar, iGoogle, Google News and Gmail.), Marissa Mayer has been lauded for her role in the company’s success and clean aesthetic. Mayer has been seen as a trailblazer, and yesterday she once again surprised the tech world by assuming the role of CEO for Yahoo. From CNN:
Google’s first female engineer, Marissa Mayer, has made a career out of bucking expectations — and she did so once again on Monday by
announcing she will leave Google to be the new CEO of Yahoo, the struggling company that once was Google’s main competitor.
“I’m not a woman at Google, I’m a geek at Google,” she told CNN in April. “If you can find something that you’re really passionate about,
whether you’re a man or a woman comes a lot less into play. Passion is a gender-neutralizing force.”
As a high-profile and powerful woman working in Silicone Valley, Marissa Mayer has been seen as a bit of a remarkable anomaly, and while she downplays her gender (as per above), recent studies (such as this report from the AAUW) consistently show women working as Computer Programmers, Software Engineers, and Hardware Engineers hovers around 20% of the total workforce.
I hope Ms. Mayer’s success at Google (and now Yahoo) is a beacon for younger women to enter technology fields. Do you think she is a trailblazer, or just a really good engineer?
Photo of Marissa Mayer courtesy of AP/Evan Agostini
If feminists truly wanted to help women, not just cast men as oppresors and women as helpless victims, they would hold this PREGNANT Fortune 500 CEO as an example of why more women aren’t Fortune 500 CEO’s and how they can become such. 1. Study business and STEM 2. Go into business and/or STEM 3. Spend the necessary time at work, making necessary personal life sacrifices 4. Want to be a Fortune 500 CEO with all the pressures of dealing with angry, never satisifed shareholders and their board of director minions. If feminists truly want to close the wage gap,… Read more »
I respect her accomplishments enough to take her statement at face value and ignore her gender, just as she wants. We’ll see if she’s able to turn things around.
She slept with the boss (Larry Page). I don’t respect her at all.
I don’t respect her either, someone who got ahead by sleeping with her boss. She makes all us female engineers look bad.
1. What is your evidence for that? I doubt you have any.
2. Since Larry Page doesn’t sit on the Yahoo board, that obviously wouldn’t have any impact here. All Yahoo’s board cares about are corporate profits. They seldom care who the CEO slept with years ago.
3. She successfully ran a large part of Google. Thus, she has proven herself.
4. Wall Street highly respects her, as do I.
1. You can use ahem Google to find the evidence if you really wanted to, but you don’t really want to.
2. Her dating impacted her career at google which impacts her career at yahoo. Yahoo board has a horrible track record on the last 4 CEO’s.
3. She wasn’t promoted at google past basic exec and she was also removed from Larry Page’s inner circle.
4. Why would you take Wall Streets word for anything.
Pick another business woman to worship. Do you need a suggestion?
She was employee #20. How has Google performed financially (revenue and stock price$ since then? Well, by all accounts, including her business unit.
Who she was in a relationship with didn’t cause her business unit to post strong profits.
Explaining business: the only thing that matters is business performance. She delivered that at Google.