Yahoo’s Geek Goddess

A well-written and researched piece. Two snippets:

'She will bring a tub of blueberries to a meeting and just stare at you, popping blueberries into her mouth. People feel so dismissed.”

Great way to unnerve your peers! And here's what, I think, to be a very accurate assessment of the Find the Lady game (shy nerd, powerful woman, company savior) that Mayer perfected:

"Another [...] thinks that Mayer figured out very early on that being a female engineer—a rarity in a culture that reveres engineers—gave her a pass that other women without that credential would never have. After all, her flaws, like her habit of being late, are easily fixable—should she care to fix them. “This idea that she is shy and just a quiet engineer is such fucking bullshit!” the executive says. “She is savvy about knowing that it makes her Teflon.” '

This is tech sexism in all it's glory.

Will all those who poured hate and bile on @bnoordhuis for gender specific pronouns or @antirez for his views on sexism in IT please step forward and throw rotten tomatoes at Bethany McLean, the author of this sexist tome? Thank you.

At Google there was a wall of articles about Marissa in building 43 as I recall. Basically various pieces that had been done on her by various magazines. It always struck me as out of place, too much focus on an individual vs on their works. This reads very much like those pieces. "Ooh look how geeky she is!" I appreciate what she has done for Yahoo!'s stock price, would love more focus on getting moribund engineering organizations moving.

I swear, the term "goddess" is the indicator of the feminine equivalent of machism. Amazing there's no word for that (I'm assuming "feminism" doesn't qualify).

Instead of concentrating in the price of its stock, Yahoo should concentrate on making its products better. Yahoo Mail sucks compared to Gmail or even to Yandex.Mail.

The article date is January 2014!

Is this an article from the future?