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

I can barely name any either

[Galaga88]

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.

Re:I can barely name any either

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care if there are women in the field or not; it's their choice. If we were asked to name some leaders in fashion design, I am sure there could be plenty of women, none of which I would be able to name but that doesn't make it unequal towards men, but there is a clear difference in choice. My wife hates World of Warcraft, but I loved it for years. This has nothing to do with gender inequality. There is nothing unequal about the situation. It is simply life choices. Men by nature choose nerd stuff (astronomy, electrical engineering, etc.) more often than women. So what.

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.

Re:I can barely name any either

[jellomizer]

For me.
Ada Lovelace
Grace Hopper
Come to mind. But they are old examples.

Most of the male tech leaders? Are not really tech leaders just CEO of big tech companies who are rather outspoken.

Most of the real tech leaders are in the background making meaningful changes and directing technology without getting any real notice (man and women)

Re:I can barely name any either

[ShanghaiBill]

Also, it is silly to say this is a "tech" issue, since tech is actually doing much better than other industries. Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, Melissa Mayers, were all CEOs of major tech firms. Even those led by men have women in high levels, such as Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook. 45% of top executives at Google are female.

What other industry does as well?

Journalists just like to pick on techies because we make more money, and we are changing the world and they aren't.

Re:I can barely name any either

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:I can barely name any either

[butchersong]

I can tell you that when something breaks or needs built around the farm... the women have zero interest in it. They want to take care of the animals or do house chores/cooking. Maybe some yard work or gardening. All of that is good and needs doing but believe me, I would love some help repairing fence or building a run-in shed or whatever else. None are interested in things or designing stuff.

Strip away the abstractions of modern life and take things back to basics, you learn some core truths pretty quick.

Re:I can barely name any either

[KiloByte]

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:

• 3 packages had (wrongly) a team as person
• 42 were maintained by someone whose gender did not pop up in ~60 seconds of DDGing
• 34 by women
• 2 by a man who identifies as female
• 4720 by regular men

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.

Re:I can barely name any either

[dinfinity]

Melissa Mayers

Just as famous as tech CEOs Bob Gates, Steven Jabs and Marco Zurkberg.

Re:I can barely name any either

[Anonymous Coward]

Linus Torvalds is a tech leader. CEO's are typically accountants, managers and business leaders, not necessarily tech leaders.

Re:I can barely name any either

[Myrdos]

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.

I used to think that way. Now, I'm not so sure. When I was in high school in the 90s, only boys were likely to play video games. The girls just weren't interested. Maybe you'd find a girl who played one game because her brothers played it or something.

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. My point is that we thought there was an inherent difference in preferences between the genders, and it turned out we were mostly wrong. Games makers catered to boys because there was overwhelming evidence that there was almost no female interest in gaming. It's amazing how people conform to the way society expects them to be.

Conversely, if IT support became known as a "girl thing", I bet the number of men trying to get in would plummet. And they would be genuinely disinterested, not just faking it to fit in.

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!

Re: I can barely name any either

[liefer]

You think Google's discriminatory hiring and promotion process is "doing well"? Interesting. And yes, hiring and promoting based on race and gender is discriminatory even if it gets you a pat on the head from the women in your life for supporting it

No control group

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Ric Romero reporting in...

[MrLint]

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.

Gender Inequality

[GoJays]

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.

Re:Gender Inequality

[SEE]

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.

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

But how many men are "Leaders" either?

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:But how many men are "Leaders" either?

[Bert64]

I can't think of who's in charge of most tech companies...
In fact, those in charge generally only come to prominence if they are big personalities or if they screw up catastrophically. Your average company leader sits in his/her office and gets on with their job quietly.

Could we skip the clickbait please?

[ScrappyTheObscure]

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.

Grade Hopper [Re:If you're a woman]

[Tablizer]

Grace Hopper

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.

Re:Could they name any leaders in tech?

[Wycliffe]

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.

Which genders are unequal?

[Dog-Cow]

In today's gender-fluid world, perhaps the actual problem is that not enough people in tech identify as women.

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.

Ok

[ledow]

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.))