Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer tries to stay far away from the gender-based stereotypes plaguing the tech industry.
“I never play the gender card…The moment you play into that, it’s an issue,” Mayer told Medium for an article centered on Yahoo’s two-decade legacy and Mayer’s hand in turning the company around. “In technology we live at a rare, fast-moving pace. There are probably industries where gender is more of an issue, but our industry is not one where I think that’s relevant.”
Mayer’s comments go against the consensus from Silicon Valley players and tech employees that name lack of diversity, gender-based discrimination and harassment as persistent problems in the industry.
While gender is certainly an issue when it comes to workplace diversity, it’s even more pronounced when climbing through the ranks. Women only make up 11 percent of all executive positions in Silicon Valley companies, and often deal with hostile work environments, where sexual harassment and innuendo are rampant.
Mayer has been lauded for her hands on approach in leading Yahoo’s transformation from a struggling ad-based model to a tech giant once again. She’s also garnered respect and praise for breaking into the fairly exclusive, male-dominated club of company executives, and even more so, tech CEOs.
She is one of 24 women CEOs at S&P 500 companies, and just one of four female CEOs in the tech industry’s S&P 500 companies — Xerox’s Ursula Burns, Hewlett Packard’s Meg Whitman, Oracle’s Safra Catz, and Virginia Rometty at IBM, according to a report from Catalyst, a business research and strategy firm.
Like other tech companies, including Google and Twitter, looking to diversify and shed the “brogrammer” stereotype, Yahoo employees are overwhelmingly male and white. Women make up 37 percent of of all Yahoo employees, according to the company’s diversity report released last year. Only 15 percent work in tech worldwide, while another 23 percent hold leadership positions.
Those figures are echoed throughout the industry and have led companies to make deliberate efforts to boost racial and gender diversity, weed out harassment and discrimination. For example, Google launched an initiative “Made With Code” to get young girls interested in coding, alongside independent efforts that ramp up outreach efforts through programs like Black Girls Code and Code2040 to make the industry less homogenous.
This article originally appeared on thinkprogress.org on March 2, 2015. Reprinted with permission.
About the author: Lauren C. Williams is the tech reporter for ThinkProgress with an affinity for consumer privacy, cybersecurity, tech culture and the intersection of civil liberties and tech policy. Before joining the ThinkProgress team, she wrote about health care policy and regulation for B2B publications, and had a brief stint at The Seattle Times. Lauren is a native Washingtonian and holds a master’s in journalism from the University of Maryland and a bachelor’s of science in dietetics from the University of Delaware.
