As a senior executive with Google, Marissa Mayer may be one of the most powerful women in Silicon Valley, influencing how hundreds of millions of people access information on the Web every day. But as a former ballet dancer with a penchant for cupcakes and the fashion designer Oscar de la Renta, she's no ordinary geek.
A Stanford grad who never even owned a computer until college, Mayer only became a techie by accident, having reportedly swapped majors because of Stanford's "exorbitant tuition fees".
Despite her unchartered success, Mayer is concerned that just 15 to 17 percent of all Silicon Valley engineers are women -- that's less than 20 percent of all engineering and computer science majors in the U.S.
It's a dearth Mayer blames on tech’s "image problem". While for many of us growing up, computer jockeys were stereotyped as bespectacled loners who spent hours typing away at a screen, it's a different picture today.
According to Mayer, “The number one most important thing we can do to increase the number of women in tech is to show a multiplicity of different role models. The stereotype... really hurts people's understanding and ability to identify with the role and say, ‘Yes, this is something I can be in and want to be in.’”
However, Mayer is confident that sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Google, as well as smart phones and apps, will be a catalyst for changing the ratio in technical fields of computer science.
Mayer predicts that as women become more familiar and curious about tech, more and more of them will want to work in computer science and engineering fields. “...girls are experiencing a lot of computer science and a lot of technology on an everyday basis,” said Mayer. “I think it will create a curiosity and spur a lot more women into computer science and the technical fields.”
How would you feel about your daughter becoming a techie? Would you be proud of her ability to break into a male-dominated market, or rather she went into a more traditional, less "geeky" field?
Image Credit: photostock / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
"
Printer-friendly version