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.

Comments

No control group

[Anonymous Coward]

How did they do when asked to name a famous man leader in tech?

Re:Could they name any leaders in tech?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only 3 paragraphs, but let me RTFA for you:

"Meanwhile, more than half of the respondents (57%) were able to correctly identify a male leader in tech, with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg being the most commonly cited names."

theres a few

[doronbc]

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

Re:I can barely name any either

[Bert64]

Exactly, women in general are less likely to be interested in tech than men and therefore less likely to get into tech roles. It has nothing to do with inequality and everything to do with personal preference.
Don't blame the industry, if anything blame gender biases during childhood, or just leave it be.

Not much to choose from, media at fault

[RightwingNutjob]

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.

Re:I can barely name any either

[gweihir]

Ada Lovelace does not qualify. She is massively over-hyped due to some people desperately needing a shining example. While not a complete air-head, she apparently never did most of the things attributed to her.

Re:I can barely name any either

[bickerdyke]

Thanks for going back a bit further..

Hedy Lamarr. Worlds most beautiful woman (well, according to MGM marketing) AND inventor of frequency hopping!