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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.
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
And they aren't exactly what I'd call positive examples.
It used to be said that "A woman has to be twice as good as a man to go half as far". . So it is a sign of progress that incompetent women are able to rise to the same level as incompetent men. If Jerry Yang can be CEO of Yahoo, then why not Melissa Mayer?
This is not just limited to tech. In politics, we had Condoleezza Rice, who was both female and black, rising to the highest levels of government, despite blundering from failure to fiasco in every job she had.
Some stats: years ago, I counted kernel developers on "git shortlog -sn" who have a gender-obvious first name (I'm familiar with Western and Slavic names). People whose names I did not recognize were skipped completely; the first 1000 recognizable names had 8 women. There are multiple outreach programs for women, none exclusively for men.
A more rigorous count, of who maintains Debian packages. I extracted the most recent changelog entry of all "key" packages in Stretch (as defined by autoremoval criteria -- ie, high popcon, d-i, or a build-dep completion of those). Whenever a name is not gender-obvious, I did a quick DuckDuckGo search. Stats:
This means, only 0.9% of gender-recognizable uploads were done by a woman. Those 10 women in the analyzed set also did only 60% uploads a man would do. Likewise, outreach programs target women but none targets exclusively men.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
And yet, go back in the time machine and you will indeed see many women interested and working in tech. Just because today there is an insane frat boy culture in place in the IT basements does not mean that biology has changed. The first computer operators were very often women, because it wasn't considered a high status job. Sysadmins in the 70s and 80s had lots of women in those roles. The field of programming languages has been highly influenced by women from the start. You have a woman to thank for the system that Steve Jobs borrowed from.
What happened is the personal computer.
BYTE Magazine ran a few reader surveys back in the late 1970s, and they reported that its readership was 98-99% male. This was at the time that, indeed, people working in CS/IT were a quarter female; but the people who made a hobby of computing were effectively all male from the very start of personal computers making it a viable hobby.
As personal computers became more common, more and more people were exposed to them early, so the number of (male) people taking up tech as a hobby increased, and the CS/IT intake pipeline got more and more dominated by hobbyists who decided to turn their interest into a career. People who decide that it might be a worthwhile career in college (or the workplace) wind up in classes with people who have years of experience with tech as a hobby and spend their free time getting better at it.
Which means that interventions at the college and employment levels are far too late, and even high school is probably not soon enough. Whatever filter is behind boys and not girls getting into computers as a hobby acts in early adolescence at the latest.