Google Exec Marissa Mayer Explains Why There Aren’t More Girl Geeks
First Posted: 07/06/11 01:58 PM ET Updated: 09/05/11 06:12 AM ET
In 1999, Marissa Mayer, then a recent Stanford University graduate, joined a little-known startup with fewer than 20 employees that she calculated as having a two percent chance of success: Google.
Now, as a senior executive with the search giant, Mayer is one of the most powerful women in Silicon Valley. Her work at Google influences how hundreds of millions of people access information on the web and she plays a key role in shaping Google’s most important products, from the look and feel of its homepage to popular features like Google News and Gmail, as well as its more recent forays into location-based services.
One of the most iconic women in tech today, Mayer’s career path offers lessons for how to attract more women to a male-dominated field and undermines the assumption that to foster more female techies, it’s early or never. Mayer, who calls herself a “proud geek,” did not grow up obsessed with computers — she bought her first one in college — or with dreams of becoming the next Bill Gates. She wanted to be a pediatric neurosurgeon.
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