
Google's Marissa Mayer: Girls Can Be Geeks, Too - joshfraser
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/12/22/google-s-marissa-mayer-girls-can-be-geeks-too.html?from=rss
======
theDoug
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
Till that 15 to 17 percent changes (and it doesn't look like it will any time
soon), that won't happen.

~~~
gregable
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.

~~~
ars
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.

~~~
dannyb
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.

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sp332
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
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
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
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
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>

~~~
jakarta
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
Hmm, interesting. Why would larger companies have an imperative to be diverse?
Legality?

~~~
ekanes
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...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/business/04lawsuit.html?_r=1)

------
grammaton
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?

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coolswan
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
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.

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andrewvc
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
Here's a couple of presentations which address that question:

* <http://webchick.net/files/women-in-floss.pdf>

* [http://infotrope.net/blog/2009/07/25/standing-out-in-the-cro...](http://infotrope.net/blog/2009/07/25/standing-out-in-the-crowd-my-oscon-keynote/)

~~~
dexen
(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
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.

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

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zavulon
> ... 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?

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

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elvirs
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 :)

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middlegeek
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?

