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People Were Asked To Name Women Tech Leaders. They Said 'Alexa' and 'Siri' (fastcompany.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The tech industry has a persistent problem with gender inequality, particularly in its leadership ranks, and a new study from LivePerson underscores just how depressingly persistent it truly is. When the company asked a representative sample of 1,000 American consumers whether they could name a famous woman leader in tech, 91.7% of respondents drew a complete blank, while only 8.3% said they could. But wait, it gets worse: Of those 8.3% who said they could name a famous woman tech leader, only 4% actually could -- and a quarter of those respondents named "Siri" or "Alexa." Now, granted, this represents only about 10 people in the survey group, but that's 10 people for whom the most famous woman in tech is a virtual assistant.
No shit, Sherlock!
I consider myself pretty tech-savvy and supportive of diversity and the only one I could think of was Melissa something who got fired or something from Yahoo? One from HP I think who was running for office. And another one who was with that bio firm that was apparently faking lab results or something. I can name plenty of female politicians however.
I don't know if that's my fault, the fault of the press/media/society for not making me more aware, or the industry for having practically no women in it.
We don't generally have 'leaders'. Those in the role are too clueless.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Go start a company. Entrepreneurs are the only men in tech that people know about. If asked, I could maybe name Grace Hopper, but CEOs of eBay or Yahoo aren't really "in tech" they are in "being CEO."
How did they do when asked to name a famous man leader in tech?
Did they ask those same people to name any ten leaders in tech? Is it a gender issue or the usual not being aware of something they don't particularly care about problem?
The only thing this study proves is that 1. Most people don't care enough to know who are CEOs and hot shots in tech 2. Some people are idiots.
By paying the CEO 25% less, you can free up more money for research and development
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Carly Fiorna (sp?) from HP didn't do so hot.
The lady w/Yahoo didn't do so hot.
The founder of Theranos will probably go to jail. Fail.
This is not to say all limelight female tech leaders fail, nor that male tech leaders don't.
What female tech leaders have actually been successful and made a difference?
I've no doubt there are some, but they need more press.
Melinda Gates does great stuff--but she's not a tech leader--so different category.
Maybe they said, "Siri, what's a good answer to that question?"
Table-ized A.I.
What's the name of that lady that destroyed Yahoo?
Oh yeah, and there's that lady that destroyed Hewlett Packard and then ran for office as a 'tarded republican. What was her name?
Every time you try to prop up a woman as a tech leader, you find out not only are they unethical but downright criminal.
Not only that but they are kind of a buzz-kill at the sex parties, even though being lesbians they should enjoy the escorts and abuse of female tech workers as much as anyone! Didn't anyone see those Hostel movies?
Maybe they just didn't want to name and shame...
Ask 1,000 American consumers whether they could name a CEO of a Fortune 500 company and, unless they happened to be an employee of a Fortune 500 company and named their own CEO, 90% would probably draw a blank.
It's not useful information to your average consumer. The only reason that people can name Zuckerberg and a few others is that they're (in)famous and extraordinarily obscenely rich, as opposed to the typical corporate leader who is a milquetoast that seeks to avoid bad publicity like the plague and is merely obscenely rich.
These are consumers, not people employed in a field being asked to identify female leaders in their field. The information is irrelevant to them.
When asked about Male leaders? 99% of respondents said Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Elon Musk. So...no real surprise about the women.
Fiona was not a leader. She was a manager, and she managed to destroy HP.
She is CEO of IBM and has a legit techy background. Only one I knew off by heart though.
Just like many other surveys regarding ppl who really aren't tuned into a particular segment of a thing.. they are gonna say whatever.
Lets also contrast the names ppl said for men. Bill Gates (not really a tech leader anymore does philanthropy) Steve Jobs (IS DEAD), Elon Musk... literally currently in the news because rockets, and making a big PR thing about it. Mark Zuckerberg, in the news well its facebook, and everyday is a PR disaster there.
So who'd currently in charge of MS or apple? Whos in charge of google? Is this more related to who makes (or is made into a big PR presence.
Email server in her bathroom. That's a tech leader.
If you ask 1,000 people to name any famous male tech leaders, I'd bet of those that can name any, only 95% of the people could only name Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
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What do you expect when you let women go to college? Did you think they'd major in anything other than gender studies or sociology and grow up to conduct completely invalid surveys designed to reinforce their worldview?
This gender inequality stuff is really starting to get to me. *facepalm*
What if, a certain gender just doesn't naturally have an interest in a certain subject? When I went to school for computer network administration almost 15 years ago now, there were 6 girls in my program of about 600. It is not that they weren't allowed or being held back from applying. My program was in the same course application guide as all the rest. I imagine females just don't care to work/learn about computer networks. Similarly, males just generally don't care to go into Early Childhood Education, or Nursing. With that said, you don't see me screaming out how men are misrepresented in the day care workforce! Not everything in this world has to be equal, that's what makes it so special. People like different shit. It is not that males are keeping females out of their "club", in fact I think some males would be MORE THAN welcoming to have a few female companions working in IT, as it would be the only exposure they have to the opposite sex.
So if women aren't going into IT related jobs because they don't have an interest for it, how can one expect a woman to be in a leadership role for one such company? Generally people who lead companies, started said company and have a deep interest in that subject. Makes sense to me.
At least her emails don't have treasonous collusion with Russia, unlike Donald Trumpovich.
is the only one I can think of that is actually an inovator
Gwynne Shotwell (COO of SpaceX), Meg Whitman (CEO of HP), Carly Fiorina (former CEO of HP), Marissa Mayer (former CEO of Yahoo), Limor Fried(CEO of Adafruit), Jeri Ellsworth(CEO of CastAR, self employed electrical engineer) current and former women of STEM: Peggy Whitson, Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Marie-Sophie Germain, Stephanie Kwolek, Katherine Johnson, Vera Rubin, Mary Somerville, Jill Tarter, Gertrude Elion, Beatrice Shilling, Katharine Burr Blodgett, Maria Mitchell, Marguerite Perey
There aren't any. Does Fiorina count? What about that one who's getting investigated for fraud with that blood technology company (oops, can't remember her name)
I guess this is a good click-bait article, so good job in that sense Slashdot. I liked how neither the summary, nor the article itself, nor the other website that that first article was citing, could list off any examples either. Why? It's pretty simple but not overly politically correct to say it, but here goes: there aren't any.
There are not currently any female equivalents of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or Bill Gates.
I have a hard time seeing that as a problem that we must somehow solve, and have a really hard time seeing that as some sort of "proof" of inherent unfairness. On the contrary: there are many, many, many men in tech and so the number that actually have widespread name recognition is, percentage-wise, a very small number. It's so small that the odds of being a famous tech person is more or less the same independent of gender. Or it could even be lower for men for that matter. Boo hoo!
What's really a shame is the whole mentality of "I spot a difference, so it goes without saying that it must be caused by racism/sexism/ageism/whateverism".
Tim Cook?
the SJWs and the feminists do. They can't seem to live in physical reality land.
>> The tech industry has a persistent problem with gender inequality. That's as valid as to say that women have a free will problem that prevents them from choosing to occupy all areas of employment in the same numbers as men. Is it as big an outrage that the coal mines are under-represented by women? Particularly when sampling at extremes of distributions (CEO level being one), outcomes are heavily distorted by any intrinsic bias (in choice, importantly) that slightly shift the mean of that distribution.
I consider myself pretty tech-savvy and supportive of diversity and the only one I could think of was Melissa something who got fired or something from Yahoo?
Ok, but how many *male* tech leaders can you name?
I can only think of a handful also. Jobs, Gates, Zuckerburg, Bezos, and kind of Musk (though he's almost outside the real of tech as it's normally thought of).
You mentioned Carly ran HP. Well who runs it now? I have zero idea. Same goes for who runs Yahoo, or Uber, or Github, or whatever.
There just aren't that many leaders, period, and I'm not sure women are so under-represented since there are three I can think of quickly (though one is sadly probably going to jail, I still feel like she had good intentions at the start).
Some people mentioned none of the women had a very good rep. Well, look at the men! Of current tech leaders who has a "great rep"? Zuckerburg???
It would be nice to see more women in charge of companies but it's kind of a hellish job that people have to choose and truly desire, not one that can be thrust on people. I don't know how you get anyone into that mental space, much less convince more women alone it's a good idea.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is a really poor quality Slashdot story - and I say that as a woman.
Yes of course *I* can name women who are or have been company leaders in tech (Melissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg)
And I can also name hands-on technologists. Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace, Kathy Sierra and Sandi Metz all come to mind without trying.
That said, "we have a problem with an absence of women in tech -- most people can only name Siri and Alexa" is a story without real merit.
If you must discuss gender imbalance in our industry could you pick something smacking a bit less of click-bait as your only link? I mean, please.
If you'd like a link talking about why gender diversity is actually a boon to companies, try this one:
https://www.ncwit.org/sites/de...
If you'd like a link on ways of actually getting women to take the computer science plunge, try this one:
https://cs.stanford.edu/people...
I should really not allow myself to be trolled into commenting, but this is garbage and Slashdot can do better without even trying very hard.
OK
There ya go... Okay, Alexa and Siri. Now name famous men in nursing. Whoops! Times up!
These are artificial creations.
Can someone explain to me what exactly is the problem? They seen white enough to me.
Good answer! Although she's often associated with COBOL, which has negative connotations to many*, she was a pioneer of higher-level languages regardless.
Higher-level languages were considered a toy for amateurs or "loser" techies back in the mid 50's, so she had an uphill battle. When the military and big co's eventually discovered they were wasting too many resources re-translating existing programs for specific vendors and models of computers, they went hunting for cross-platform language ideas, and Grace was ahead of the curve.
* Although Grace was not directly involved in COBOL's definition, her languages had a huge influence on it. As far as the technical merit of COBOL, it's clunky by today's standards, but has survived because it does its niche well, having many built-in operations for the typical work found in back-end business, finance, and inventory processing. To match that with say Java or C#, you'd have to create bunches of data-processing and finance API's, and it would probably still be more code for the same task compared to COBOL.
Table-ized A.I.
Blacks and women don't belong in tech.
In today's gender-fluid world, perhaps the actual problem is that not enough people in tech identify as women.
Great role models for every young woman.
I can only name you a handful of men off the top of my head that I would identify as tech leaders. e.g. Elon Musk, Steves Jobs (obviously deceased) and Wozniack, Linus Torvalds, Gates used to be there. But other than that...
It's made out to sound like it is the male gender's fault. When I post one of my tech positions, you know how many women I get to apply? Maybe one. Most of the time none. And when they do, they have zero relevant experience or relevant education. Let's not create problems where they exist. Pay equity? I can get the griping in that. It's not a fact in my shop but if numbers are to be believed then it is a problem. That shows inequity. But because a place or an entire industry has lopsided representation that doesn't give the right to generalize on the cause. Not that this article did. But I see it all the time and am fed up.
Seriously. This whole "im being discriminated against" routine is getting old. Most of these groups are all about furthering their causes only for what they want. Women are a great example. They want the same equal rights as men but they certainly don't mind playing the advantages of their sex whenever they can. You don't see them fighting for signing up for the draft. You certainly don't see them fighting to change the gender bias in marriage and divorce where women are viewed as helpless damsels in distress leaving men with huge child support bills.
If you want equality try to be actually equal rather than just not wanting to be offended. If you don't actually want equality than shut up and accept things the way they are. This whole politically correct bullcrap is just annoying people and it's not changing their minds. All it's doing is cementing into people's minds bad sterotypes.
Women are often psychologically unsuited to be tech leaders. Here are four rules of women in the tech workforce.
1. Men compete by outdoing each other. If Sam builds a rocket which goes to 1,000 feet, then Jim competes with Sam by building a rocket which goes to 2,000 feet. Women compute by undermining each other. If Sally builds a rocket which goest to 1,000 feet, then Jill disses her on Facebook, spreads a rumor that Sally has venereal disease, and flirts with her boyfriend.
2. Men deduce causal relationships and use those to control outcomes. Women assign emotional valances to everything and react to those. If the instrument's Z axis drive motor burns out, Larry measures the weight of the platform and the lead screw pitch, looks up the torque specs of the motor, then calculates that the load exceeded the motor specs. Mary sees that a stepper motor was used to drive the Z axis which makes her feel that stepper motors are "bad" and she issues a company-wide order prohibiting the use of stepper motors in designs. (This, by the way, is a real example)
3. Never, under any circumstances, make placement or promotion decision according to gender. It should have not influence whatsoever. Behavior is not reliably related to gender. Some men behave in a characteristically female mode and some women in a characteristically male mode. There is a plausible argument that had Margaret Hamilton been denied her role in the Apollo program that the United States have many frozen astronaut corpses on the moon.
4. If you follow the guidance in the previous point exactly, hiring always the most qualified candidates with no regard to gender, you will end up with disproportionally more men in tech leadership positions because of the first two points.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Unless you persist with the dream that men are only better athletes and it stops right there at the brain.
I suspect the respondents were just being smart asses with their Alexa and Siri answers. As for me, about the only women tech leaders that immediately come to my mind are Sheryl Sandberg (mainly because of her Lean In book, as prior to that I heard very little of her), Meg Whitman (former eBay CEO), Carly Fiorina (formerly of HP), and Marissa Mayer (formerly of Yahoo).
There's many more women tech/business leaders that, by accident or by design, just don't get the limelight. A few that immediately come to mind:
Glynne Shotwell (SpaceX)
Ginny Rometty (IBM)
Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos) Note: Given that she was accused of defrauding investors Holmes isn't exactly a good example, but for a brief time she was quite the media darling.
I'm sure there's many others, but those are the only ones that I can immediately think of.
I'm not sure why some women tech leaders don't get much media attention. I suspect one reason is the political bias of journalists, who want to push the idea of the tech industry being a "good ol' boys club" and women tech executives run counter to that narrative so the general public is unaware of the progress that women have made (and more progress certainly needs to be made, but it won't happen overnight as much as feminists want it to).
(quickly) Name 10 male romance novel authors
Can't do it? Huh, seems to be based on some kind of "availability heuristic"
I can barely name any MALE tech leaders. Why? Because I don't care who leads a tech company! I concern myself more with the benefits and quality of a company's products than I do who leads the company. If you need a tech leader to be the public face of your company, your marketing department is doing something wrong.
..I don't think I can name any men tech leaders, either.
Oh, I can remember the names of a few tech company CEOs, but the day one of these companies is "leading" you, is the day you have lost all hope of your tech ever not totally sucking.
Ok, fine, I just thought of an exception: Linux Torvalds. He's a man, though, in case anyone was wondering. But I'd say he's still a leader, at least.
> You asked "to name women tech leaders" and got idiot answers, but did you ask "to name men tech leaders"? No, you didn't. You presumed you wouldn't get idiot answers.
Not just that, but they should calculate the percent of CEOs that are known by name, male and female. There are many more male CEOs that are unknown by the public.
Learn @%#^ grammar morons. No Wonder you got Alexa as an answer. Alexa is a tech leader.
And I know lots of women. One named Alexandra....Speak ENGLISH not Netglish and get a
real answer.
Any female at the top of the corporate ladder is given such outsized attention that their flaws become outsized too. Examples off the top of my head:
Elizabeth Holmes...fraudster
Marissa Mayer...OK at Google, failure at Yahoo resulting in ugly buy-out. Bit of an limousine-SJW streak about her, but not possible to tell how good she actually is, just that she's cocky and the dice rolled her way at Google but bit her in the rear at Yahoo.
Carly Fiorina...enough said.
Ursula Burns...seems like a solid person, and but it's not clear whether Xerox did well or poorly under her.
Whitney Wolfe...bumbling gun-grabber who wants to censor the rest of the internet too, not just her own app, which I had never heard of until she made it clear that guns are verboten on her app. OK...who cares?
Cheryl Sandberg...thinks every woman wants to be a superwoman who gives a 110% of her attention to both work and home life. And she does something at Facebook...right?
Ginni Rometty...maybe she's the exception here, because as far as I can tell she's just another run-of-the-mill PHB without anything glaringly wrong with her that isn't wrong with any other CxO at a big tech company.
Mary Barra...they sent (yet another) accountant to do the job of a car guy.
Gwynne Shotwell...OK SpaceX is successful. And you'll notice that she's more likely to be a rocket geek than a hard-core feminist in her NPR appearances. At least the ones I've heard. An Elon Musk hogs most of the camera time anyway.
Male CEOs certainly have their scandals, but their maleness isn't so front-and-center in their public personae that when they fail, they fail, when they succeed they succeed. But if it's a woman CEO...good Lord, the press falls over themselves talking about her clothes and her diet and her everything that doesn't matter about running a company that then they go splat, they leave a bad taste in everyone's mouth.
And this was California in the 90s-00s.
Out of the girls that DID choose to be in the program, most were asian (korean and japanese, no chinese, viet, etc while I was there, although one of the colleges had a large minority of asian students, say 1/3 of the student population), eastern european (engineering degrees not computer related), or were older women who'd been working for years and decided on a change in career path for intellectual stimulation, better pay, or other reasons.
There's a years-old video out there where a guy goes around a university with a petition getting women to sign up in support of a ban on womens' suffrage. The only thing either of these situations proves is that people are ignorant. And if you weren't ignorant, you'd have already known that.
Ellen Pao .. bwhaha. Failed at claiming sexism. Failed at reddit. Now that I think about it - the only modern high up women I can think of who have made an impact are the ones who've really screwed everything up. That's not to say men don't screw everything up too - there is no shortage of them, but at least there are superstars like Musk to balance it out.
OK, I'm not anti-feminist, I have a fairly good grounding in tech fields (I mean, it's my career, hobby and interest, so you have to have, no?), I read the news, I see new tech come out, I know the main brands, I am aware of some famous people associated with those brands and things they've said and done - over the last 30-something years.. So long as we're constraining it to tech as in consumer-brands, things you'll have heard of, not "science" as such, etc.
Erm... well, I'm struggling. I'm sure that someone can reel off 20 names, but I honestly can't think of one that springs out that the random person in the street will have heard of. Who's the female Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates? Even Jeff Bezos etc. is pushing it expecting people to know who he is, but who's a female in a similar position that a person in the street will go "Oh, yes, I forgot about her!" or "I didn't think you meant that type of company".
Sure, it's indicative of a problem in the tech field but is it really that damning if there aren't any female household names in tech? People who you'd say "Oh, this should be a good interview / discussion / court case / advert, it's got her in it"? I can't name one.
Okay, I'm going to cheat. Google. "famous women in tech" (the equivalent male version of which gives me Elon Musk,
Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai (?),
Evan Spiegel (wasn't he in Ghostbusters?))
Sheryl Sandberg. Nope.
Grace Hopper. Not by name. Picture suggests possibly one of those NASA calculator people from decades ago? (Google tells me she was a programmer... okay).
Ada Lovelace. Now I know who she is. It's possible a few of my science-y friends will have heard of her. But the person in the street won't have. And how far back are we going here.
Meg Whitman
Radia Perlman.
Hedy Lamarr (I know she did some cool stuff, including something like inventing the glider plane or something? But nobody's going to have her on the tip of their tongue for tech innovation alongside, say, Bill Gates).
Okay, I'll go more recent: Sheryl Sandberg (again), Susan Wojcicki (?), Ginni Rometty, Meg Whitman, Angela Ahrendts, Safra Catz, Ruth Porat, Lucy Peng, Amy Hood, Jean Liu, Zhou Qunfei, ... I've not heard of any of these people, sure as hell none of my friends have.
Maybe the reason that people can't name a famous woman in tech is because there aren't many (or maybe any depending on your definition of "famous" and "tech"... is Julian Assange?). That, sure, is a problem. But making it sound like we're dumb because we can't name one when... well, there aren't any... that's just attacking people on the basis of them being ignorant of a fact which you possess. That's not a fair fight. How many of those reporters could name one BEFORE they started writing the article? How many of the people interviewing the people in the street?
For sure women are under-represented, and I don't see why that couldn't and shouldn't be changing. But I don't see why a "man-in-the-street" quiz is somehow detrimental to that.
If you want us to name a famous woman in an industry - be that person. Make us remember your name. For sure, nobody is ever going to remember mine. But if you say "tech" and "woman" together, pretty much the Venn intersection is exceedingly narrow and niche.
((I'd also like to point out that all the guys I can name, I dislike. Because to a tee they are business and mouth-piece over any kind of actual technical innovator, loudmouths, eccentric, say stupid things, etc. etc. These aren't engineers, they're salesmen and stock-brokers.))
How come Amazon, Apple, and Google's virtual assistants are ALL Female, at least by default?
Are they trying to conform their product to traditional gender stereotypes --- regarding the gender of person who would most often have the job role they see their assistant as filling?
Why can't we have Alex and Sean instead of Siri and Alexa?
Or, are they saying people would think their virtual assistant was incompetent or weird, OR expect it to do more advanced functions if it was male by default?
The first serious answer I came up with was Limor Fried. I remembered her as the leader of AdaFruit and had to google for the actual name.
That's not the caliber as Zuck, but I don't think there's any arguing her influence in the single-board computer field. At the CXO level I immediately thought of Carly Fiorina; but she sucks.
This is a really poor quality Slashdot story - and I say that as a woman.
beep. I detected that you are of the WOMAN gender. Slashdot harbors an inclusive environment. Please notify us if someone touches your SHARP KNEES without consent. beep boop.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Really? Do you really believe that only 4% of the population can come up with Bill Gates, Musk or Zuckturd?
I think you're full of shit, to the point that you reek and are toxic. I don't believe in equality of outcome, but it's blatantly obvious that young ladies don't have a fair opportunity in a field with no mentors, no inspiration, but plenty of people like you who create a toxic atmosphere by doing things like lying like you did here.
Meanwhile male suicide rate is still high and no one cares to fix this. Gotta worry too much that women aren't doing what they don't want to do instead.
Popular male "tech leaders" all crossed over into pop culture whereas (current) female ones haven't. Female "tech leaders" either aren't as wealthy, or their businesses weren't as trendy (when they were in charge), and/or they weren't tied to or closely associated with a specific business (e.g. starting it in their garage/dorm) as their male counterparts.
I'm not surprised ...
On the other hand I'm super bad with names, I basically only know them 'passively'.
You can ask me: do you know Zuckerberg? I would say yes. But if you asked me for tech leaders I would first of all not call him a tech leader and secondly his name would not come to my mind anyway.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It's been a long time since Dr. Sbaitso. I don't think I've heard a digital assistant with a male voice since.
Women complain about gender bias all the time. How come men don't complain that our cars, computers, smartphones, and household assistants don't sound like us?
I cry foul sexism. We ought to be insisting that Siri come with a male-voice option. It's only fair.
I am person, hear me roar.
Of those 8.3% who said they could name a famous woman tech leader, only 4% actually could -- and a quarter of those respondents named "Siri" or "Alexa." Now, granted, this represents only about 10 people
So, what happened again? The inability to express the issue clearly kinda takes the sting out of the critique.
Besides, the more alarming thing was that all the other active respondents identified Tay. :)
Once again, Microsoft gets no respect. Maybe they need to make commercials or something, showing Cortana is a woman.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
This has nothing to do with gender inequality. There is nothing unequal about the situation.
The first statement may be true, but the second doesn't follow. We can have unequal and unfair circumstances, even if a particular example is fair.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The 4 common 'male names' are billionaires who have been around a LONG time, invented/created the most widely used products in the world (Elon being a bit of an exception but he's his own 'marketing machine' for himself). How many people know about Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman and a whole host of other men that aren't billionaires & thus household names for that reason alone.
Feel free to name a single woman who is a billionaire AND created a 'tech product' that the world uses on an every day basis...I'm waiting...
Nobody is holding women in tech back, if they want to invent shit, create companies & become tech billionaires I'm sure there's more then enough Venture Capitalists to invest in good ideas.
Lots of people are talking about women, and the frequency thereof.
What about the topic of leaders? In general, leaders are bad things to have. Leaders are the people you complain about, because they have way too much power. A leader is always an enemy.
Perhaps women are fortunate to not have quite so many people of that level of infamy. All the shit-talking that necessarily happens whenever people are stuck with a fucking leader, usually ends up stuck to a man.
I bet the answer would be entrepreneurs and CEOs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Probably Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. And that's probably it.
Most people would only recall something or someone they saw in the news, not who invented binary logic or created a revolutionary mathematical theory of computation.
Albeit Alan Turing has gained popular appeal or late, given his conflicted life and the movies dedicated to depicting it. Oh and because Benedict Cumberbatch played him.
I don't think of Marissa Mayer and Carly Fiorina as tech leaders.
Do you cucks really think the average person could name a male tech leader who isn't Bill Gates or Steve Jobs?
I mean Zuckerfuck might get a name drop because there was a movie.
CEO of General Motors, trained as an electrical engineer. She's going to beat Tesla in electric and self-driving vehicles.
My first thought was Lisa Su. She's an engineering nerd turned CEO, and I think she's doing good for AMD.
This is the problem with selective polling and ad hoc reasoning. Many Americans can't name a single Supreme Court justice, why would you expect them to know female or male tech leaders.
Wojkiki-whatever of youtube, Pao of reddit, the one from HP, the one from the blood analysis company.
And every single one of them was grossly corrupt and/or incompetent.
MAYBE if they stepped it the fuck up...
Marissa Mayer.....there's a woman tech leader. We need 100 more like her. right?
I don't see anything like "a persistent problem".
I see normal people chosing what to do with their life and that choice being different for different genders.
It's only a problem for nasty people who want to homogenise the world and TELL people what jobs they should be doing, not letting them do what they WANT to do.
Feminists, everyone, should fight AGAINST DISCRIMINATION ( against men and women ), not FOR HOMOGENISATION of people's differences.
From Wikipedia:
She became CEO of Autodesk in 1992. According to Forbes, Bartz "transformed Autodesk from an aimless maker of PC software into a leader of computer-aided design software, targeting architects and builders." She is credited with instituting and promoting Autodesk's "3F" or "fail fast-forward" concept – the idea of moulding a company to risk failure in some missions, but to be resilient and move on quickly when failure occurs. She stepped down as CEO in 2006 and became the executive chairman of the board.
During her 14-year tenure as the company's CEO, Autodesk net revenue substantially increased, and annual revenue rose from $300 million to $1.5 billion, with the stock price rising an average of 20 percent annually.
Her tenure at Yahoo didn't go so well, but it's tough moving from a software company to a media/advertising company.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
I don't see anything like "a persistent problem" here.
I see normal people chosing what to do with their life and that choice being different for different genders.
It's only a problem for nasty people who want to homogenise the world and TELL people what jobs they should be doing, not letting them do what they WANT to do.
Feminists, everyone, should fight AGAINST DISCRIMINATION ( against men and women ), not FOR HOMOGENISATION of people's differences.
Grace Hopper operated early computers for the Navy after WWII. She developed the first program compiler/linker, and her engineering contributed to languages like COBOL that are still used today. Computing as we know it is based upon her foundation of machine-independent, human-accessible tooling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
I find it very ironic that programming is a male-dominated field when a woman all-but created it.
Watch the confusion on peoples faces.
Where would we be if she had not been able to put up with her husband's shit and keep him under limited control? She must be a saint.
God bless you Mrs.Torvalds.
Limor Fried is the first lady who comes to my mind when I think of tech leaders. Marissa Mayers seems to be a successful product manager who evolved into business leader than a truly tech person.
Women are more than two thirds of college graduates. Nobody is holding them fucking back from anything. Youâ(TM)re upset that women have the freedom to choose what the fuck they want to do and they donâ(TM)t choose the thing youâ(TM)re unwanted them to choose, so youâ(TM)re up blame men â" who have fuck all to do with it.
The truth is, nobody can name anyone who is arch leader other than fucking CEOs. Fuck, I have almost three decades in the tech industry as an engineer and I canâ(TM)t really think of any âoetech leadersâ who are actual tech leaders instead of CEOs... that anyone in the general public would have any reason to know the name of.
Filing sexual complaint at the printer for bumping into her ass.
Equality of outcome not. Saying that women are in general just as interested in programming as men could only come from someone with no knowledge or experience in the field. That some women are is great, and all barriers to their careers should be removed. But being interested in tech doesn't in this context mean wanting a latest iPhone to play games and take photos and watch YouTube. Social Justice Warriors please go home.
And yet among early teenager girl they are still a minority playing CS:GO or whatever. And you cite the 90ies , well those boy playing game many of them tried to program their own late 80ies and early 90ies. And later became developer because they found tech interesting. When I was in university for a few lecture to student (lecture about virus how they are made, psychology, and how to protect , late 90ies for developer) and I had a quick conversation with the women there a pattern emerged : SOME (not all) of the men were there because they liked all tech or computer game stuff. NONE of the women I ever spoke were into that, they were laughing at it and wanted in for the money. Now this is anecdotal, so I can't generalize to whole population. But I do wonder if indeed there isn't simply something fascinating for boy/men in those technical stuff which go bleep-bloop with pretty light, which simply does not attract the crushing majority of girl/women. Another anecdote is all women I know programming where I work now grew into it from other position, and telling them you code stuff for fun is as foreign as speaking being an alien from another planet. They simply view it as a job - like other job. I have yet to meet a woman which went for it for the passion. They do exists, but compared to men who do it for the passion.... At some point you start wondering if all those "inequality" article are just BS and there is indeed a more fundamental reason why women are underrepresented. They simply don't care for it.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I didn't get into coding because it was hot. It was for nerds who were not physically strong enough to get into manufacturing and not social enough to be in management. Few girls wanted to be total outcasts. I had a physical fistfight with my father for not going into business instead. If you really want a (far out) chance to be a recognizable household name, follow your inner calling rather than current trends. It may not pan out, but you will have fun.
Lets call James Damore and see what he thinks.
It's actually more surprising that it's only people considering that almost 50% of a recent poll thought it was a good idea to make Trump US president....
I feel so sig.
Number 1 comment whenever I tell women what I do:
Ugh, I always hated math.
Why the hell is everyone calling her Melissa?
5% of the people gave a nonsense answer? That fits in with the standard that 5% of the people who get asked questions troll. (The so called lizardman constant, where 5% of the people say they are in fact lizardmen).
Survey finds 5% of people are trolls. Nothing to see here.
Name the top 5 women in nursing?
Now do the reverse -- name the top 5 men in nursing?
The point? Whether it be nursing or tech -- no one gives a fuck.
the only tech leaders I remember when asked are ones whos' actions and policy towards customers, privacy, and product honesty are criminal or should be.
If the women leadership is avoiding the Zuckerberg and Whitman pitfalls, then good job.
Posting to invalidate modding error
... But wait, it gets worse: Of those 8.3% who said they could name a famous woman tech leader, only 4% actually could ...
So, wait: by "4%", do they mean "4% of the just-mentioned 8.3%" (which would be only 0.332% of the total number of people tested), or do they mean "roughly half of the 8.3%" (which does indeed equal about 4%)?
I'm supposing that the summary writer intended the latter meaning, but what they wrote looks (to me) more like the former.
Fast forward to today. Girls are playing video games left and right. And it's not just dating sims or Barbie Adventure or whatever, they're fragging people online.
Women gamers mostly play:
1) all kinds of "mobile games"
2) Sim's kind of games
3) very little of "frag" kind of games (outnumbered 20 to 1 or so)
So while there definitely is a sizable pool of girls playing "boys games", that's not what most girls do.
Marissa Mayer ran Yahoo into the ground.
Meg Whitman ran HP into the ground.
Susan Mauldin (BA and MFA in "Music Composition") was the CSO (Chief Security Officer) at Equifax
For bonus points,
* Melinda Gates (Yes, Bill's wife) came up with Microsoft Bob
* Julie Larson-Green https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
> Julie Larson-Green (born 1962) was the Chief Experience Officer (CXO) of the Office
> Experience Organization at Microsoft,[1] where she worked 1993 through 2017.[2]
> Larson-Green notably managed the implementation of ribbons in Microsoft Office 2007
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
kind of Musk (though he's almost outside the real of tech as it's normally thought of)
Musk leads teams that design more-physical assets (rockets and cars). So he's like Wernher von Braun and Henry Ford. That's the realm of tech as it's more-traditionally though of, not as it's been thought of in the digital/web-centric period of the last 2 - 3 decades.
"Tech as it's normally thought of" might someday return its focus to things other than digital devices and the web.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
They totally forgot "CORTANA"!!!!
They don't know why they celebrate the 4th of July, for example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-Be9f7Ovgg