Google's Marissa Mayer: Girls Can Be Geeks, Too

Isn't that called propaganda, and is the job of the government and ad agencies? (And they've both certainly done it successfully for plenty of causes they've decided were important.)

Journalistic integrity is important - even if it goes against your social cause.

This is a very common complaint about journalists, that by reporting on it, they are causing it. It might be a valid complaint, but any attempt to fix it makes it worse.

> 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.”

And for the record, many of them consider themselves geeks for legitimately geeky things, not 'playing angry birds on their phone' as you so derisively mention.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womens_rights_in_Saudi_Arabia

Case in point: I read an article in the Financial Times several years back about how Norwegian companies adapted to the quota law requiring 40% of board members to be female. Norwegian companies were kind of at a loss because they normally recruited directors out of a pool of candidates known to their current directors and executives. They knew those traditional candidates very well, often personally, and knew their skills, qualifications, and trustworthiness. Unfortunately, that pool didn't include very many women.

The companies were leery of hiring complete strangers into their boardrooms. Still, they were stuck with it, so they did their best. They identified skills and knowledge that would complement their existing boards and launched international searches for qualified candidates. Just by taking those steps, which most of companies had never bothered with before, they discovered a huge number of stellar candidates with skills that were completely lacking in Norwegian boardrooms. The candidates they found were significantly younger, more accomplished, and more internationally savvy than the usual old boys' club candidates. Result: big win for Norwegian corporations. Instead of looking at a few dozen old Scandinavian men, they started recruiting out of a huge pool of international talent. Being limited to female candidates was a minor factor at that point. At least, that's how the FT presented it.