3 Ways Women Are Changing Silicon Valley Culture (Slideshow)

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1. Obviously, Marissa Mayer

Last week, Marissa Mayer, an engineer and Google VP, became the new CEO of Yahoo with a milion-dollar salary.

She is expecting her first child in October. It’s impossible not to laud her being the first-ever pregnant CEO of a Fortune 500 company (can you imagine anyone typing that a few decades ago?).

Nonetheless, Mayer’s announcement that she will take no more than a “pause” for maternity leave is stirring up a national debate about maternity and paternity leave and the need for workplace accommodations to care for children, not to mention elderly and disabled spouses, partners and relatives. The New York Times points out, women in as prominent a position as Mayer — and ample resources to provide childcare and to flexibility in her schedule — may find that such an “abbreviated leave” suits them and their new status as mothers just fine:

…In interviews, many said that for women at the top of their profession or running their own show, the decision to not take a traditional leave can feel like an empowering choice — and at the same time, not a choice at all.

“You can think of a lot of moms who have more than one child, and do they ever say, ‘I’m going to stop feeding my older child because I have a newborn’?” asked Pooja Sankar, 31, chief executive of Piazza, an online forum for teachers and students to solve problems. Ms. Sankar, who gave birth to her first child three weeks ago, thinks of Piazza as one of her own, too: “I’m the C.E.O. of a company. This ‘child’ depends on me to run, to exist, really.’”

Certainly, plenty of women need to get back to work ASAP and start collecting paychecks. Other women, such as teachers, those in the food-service business and child care workers, “can’t send e-mails from their iPhones and call it ‘working.’”

Amid the debates, we shouldn’t forget what Mayer’s accomplishment says about how far women have come, to the point that they can call the shots — a feat that’s all the more notable in the tech industry, where sexist attitudes still mean that women are under-represented.

Photo from rankun76 via flickr

Next: Microsoft and the “Big Boobs” Code

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Photo by Annie Mole

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of
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g d c.

9:25AM PDT on Mar 23, 2013

March 23
send a green star

Duane B.

6:56AM PDT on Mar 11, 2013

Thank you for sharing.

March 11
send a green star

Demet G.

1:36PM PST on Nov 8, 2012

and explanatory text has been narrated was a great wide thanks to everyone who contributed

consistency Elbise Modelleri has been fully explained in the article is quite descriptive writing and sharing parts of your post I want to share all liked it very much thanks

Thank you, that your site is very nice touch topics that up until a date and I congratulate you for the labor of a successful site

November 8
send a green star

federico b.

9:25AM PDT on Aug 6, 2012

Grazie.

August 6
send a green star

Carina K.

3:56PM PDT on Jul 26, 2012

Dear author, thanks for the article, also - nice find with that line in VM source code.
One small note: while part of C source code can definitely be called a string (i.e. several letters in a row), as far as C sources go those two are sequences of hex values. Specifically, in this case, those are something like constants. Constant is a value that is associated with some easy to use handle (like MAX_RETRY_ATTEMPTS = 10;). So the "humor" in this case probably is that some MS developer used this integer constant as ID for Linux guest (virtual machine). Why would it matter at all? This "big boobs string" is almost impossible to notice in a binary, contrary to viewing source code. Which means even a hacker reverse-engineering this executable file would most probably miss the hex sequence.

Mit W., if you follow the link in the article on BBC site there is a link to the source: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/13/154. As you can see there it's good old ANSI C, i.e. it's not just a bunch of bytes taken from PE.

July 26
send a green star

Leigh E.

12:50AM PDT on Jul 26, 2012

I think if we look hard enough we can find derogatory evidence against women AND men ANYWHERE. I have an idea, LET'S STOP LOOKING and try to get along together. I'm fed up being classed as a trash male just because of a handful of idiot men and a certain class of women that look into everything as being sexist.

Give it up.

Alicia N.

6:40PM PDT on Jul 22, 2012

noted