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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? 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.
How did they do when asked to name a famous man leader in tech?
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."
Hey you leave Melissa alone!!! Shes misunderstood.
Oh she did it for the money... then maybe shes not so misunderstood after all.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Melinda Gates does great stuff--but she's not a tech leader--so different category.
Oh, she certainly is a tech leader. Unless you think Microsoft Bob isn't visionary.
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."
All 4 of which are famous not for tech but for being rich figureheads. If you excluded the half dozen super famous then people would likely not do any better. Ask the average person to name 3 people (male or female) in a specific field like AI, biotech, etc... It's not surprising that 3 of the 4 people who were named were in charge of some of the largest companies on earth. Elon Musk is the outlier but that's just because like Trump and Tony Stark he intentionally keeps himself in the limelight.
In today's gender-fluid world, perhaps the actual problem is that not enough people in tech identify as women.
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.
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.
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.))
This is how the goal posts are going to shift: even when women are pushed into "STEM" at higher rates it won't be good enough because they'll be mostly asian and white and therefore not oppressed enough.
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/
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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.