Yes, they can do it, they've always been able to do it. Stop pretending it's surprising or 'news,' and you'll have fewer people incorrectly feel women are out of place in technology.
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.
The whole question of media bias really comes down to the bottom line. If a format of words plus carefully chosen images favored traditionally conservative causes (which for the most part they don't) there would be widespread complaints about right wing media bias. AS it is, I think there is very little remanent of journalistic ethics in mass media.
> 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.”
CS was a relatively young discipline in the early '80s, so its share of total graduates has probably grown significantly since then. I'd be willing to bet that growth is due to both more men and more women entering the field, but disproportionately men. CS graduates back then were, in a sense, all "early adopters," so both the men and the women in the field were outside of the mainstream. It could be that men now consider CS to be mainstream, but women don't: among men, the discipline has grown as one would expect, but among women the discipline is stuck at an earlier stage. Of course, this just leads to further questions about why this disparity in adoption exists.
Also, why have her wear that photomodel outfit? This is like asking Larry or Sergei wear a suit for photo shoot. I've seen her in many videos from her talks and she tends to wear normal stuff.
Edit: Here's an extensive look at Meyer's outfits: http://gawker.com/5174126/lesley-stahl-investigates-marissa-...
I think you'd have a hard time putting together a collection of "Girls can do it, too!" articles that outweigh all the regular coverage of Mayer and her work at Google
"Geek" doesn't mean the same thing it used to, or even close to it. Teenage girls running around calling themselves geeks because they spend a lot of time playing angry birds on their phone is a far cry from the MIT Media Lab.
The same goes for latte-sipping hipsters who can use Garage Band on their MBP, or any other person who uses consumer technology as an end-user, then proceeds to proclaim themselves a geek, or FSM forbid, a hacker.
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.