In Which We Get a Girl Crush on Google’s Marissa Mayer
Newsweek’s Dan Lyons interviews Mayer for our end-of-year Interview issue (also check Jess Bennett’s excellent Dan Savage/Jane Lynch piece), and gets right to the good stuff:
Why are so few women working in the technology industry?
Well, it’s something that I care a lot about changing … I guess I was very lucky. I was always good at math and science, and I never realized that that was unusual or somehow undesirable. So one of the things I care a lot about is helping to remove that stigma, to show girls that you can be feminine, you can like the things that girls like, but you can also be really good at technology. You can be really good at building things.
Does Google make an effort to recruit women and hire more female engineers than the industry average?
I was Google’s first woman engineer. And right away during my interview, [Google cofounders] Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] said, “You know, we have seven engineers, and they’re all guys. But we’ve thought a lot about how we want to start our company, and we’ve read a lot of books, and we know that organizations work better when there is gender balance. So it’s important to us that we have a strong group of women, especially technical women, in the company.”
Go, geeks. (And paging changetheratio.)
