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Sheryl Sandberg and Technology's Female Leaders
AlistairCharlton writes "While the rest of the world continues to see men dominating, the technology industry seems set to change that. I investigate how Sheryl Sandberg, Marissa Mayer, Meg Whitman and Joanna Shields are paving the way for the rest of the business community. From the article: 'A glance at the male/female split of world leaders (178/17), Fortune 500 CEOs (96 percent/four percent) and FTSE 100 board seats (85 percent/15 percent) reveals there is a huge imbalance between the sexes, but in technology change is underway - and Sandberg is at the very forefront of it. Along with Meg Whitman, Marissa Mayer and Joanna Shields of HP, Yahoo and London's Tech City respectively, Sandberg represents a shift in what was not so long ago an all-male industry.'"
Surprising that this article praises the disaster that is Meg Whitman, and completely omits Ginni Rometty the current CEO of IBM who has worked everywhere within the company over 30 years and has CS and EE degrees.
Anything with women in it must be better than if it has men. Holds true for movies, car show rooms and now corporate board meetings.
Women are better than men. Better educated, better social skills and better at multitasking. Generally better. Can a man have babies? See. Women are better. Men consume more resources, even more food, and behave worse. Most killers are men. Wars are fought by men. See. Men are really animals, like the Swedish feminist Ireen von Wachenfeldt stated on national television.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBtKxYKQI_8
... which has had all female CEOs since 2001.
Xerox is not as exciting as HP, but its CEOs have not done large, showy reorganizations that destroyed once-proud solid engineering traditions, so there's that.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Add Ursula Burns (CEO of Xerox) who comes from a disadvantaged background and has two science degrees.
A significant amount of the smart, talented women I know despise working for other women because female managers can be awful to women in a way that many men cannot even dream of treating female subordinates. Even in college, I saw some of this as one female professor was known to be utterly ruthless to female students who slacked off to a degree she almost never, ever dished out to her male students.
So I look forward to this trend with amusement because it very well may lay the foundation for an implosion of female involvement in our fields. And then the cycle will repeat itself...
That's not really true, and it shows the dangers of lumping people together. An example of the difference:
- Marissa Mayer has a B.S. and M.S., with honors, from Stanford specializing in artificial intelligence. That's where she met Larry and Sergei, and became Google employee #20 as an engineer. It's safe to say that if you put her down in front of a bash prompt with some broken code she'd show you that she is in fact quite capable technically. So I'd consider her a woman in tech, and a highly successful one at that.
- Meg Whitman has no technical skills whatsoever, and is the exemplar of the myth that it's possible to run an organization well when you have no clue what your people are doing. Her career start was as a brand manager for Proctor & Gamble, then management consulting, and as far as I can tell she's never held a job where her primary responsibility was to actually make a product or sell a product. To give you an idea, at the beginning of her time at eBay, the website crashed, so Whitman's first goal was to create a new executive team.
I am officially gone from