1. I never claimed Marissa Meyer ran yahoo into the ground. It was a mess when she started, and from what I know of her shes no a sociopath, a computer scientist from Stanford who was one of the originals at google so...I don't know even know how to respond to that, except that I would ask you calibrate the cost of her so called lavish parties to that of any other multi billion dollar or hell, a first round wannabe startup who is way into their ego.
The assumption that you assumed the fact I mentioned she was criticized means Im accusing her of running it into the ground is far from the truth. Women like her, Sheryl Sandberg and Fiorna, Ellen Pao are WOMEN, who are brought into lead companies AFTER they are falling apart, and noone else knows what to do, THEN they call in a woman to fix it. In literally every case of every woman above, those were the circumstances in which companies bring in female CEOs, when their company is falling apart, so yeh the criticism they receive is even more unfounded because they take so much personal criticism about their bodies and emotions instead of the root causes of why they were even asked to come and help save the company in the first place.
Hmmm would be interesting to see more women starting their own tech firms instead of running the the rescue of drowning ones.
And give me a break about male CEOs. Men do not go out on the internet and make degrading sexual comments about male CEOs en masse by the millions the day they step into their role. All of these women above however, had entire websites dedicated to things like that. For you to not acknowledge that is just bigotry.
As far as Sociopaths as CEOs, while that personality does seem to overlap as a fit, I know people who are CEOs and founders of multiple forbes top 30 under 30, and in fact had brunch at ones house on Sunday where we talked about the book good to great and quiet (about introverts as good leaders and some of the best CEOs, just the least self advertising) soooo I really find your comment assuming anyone who is a CEO a sociopath offensive.
My best friend founded a multimillion dollar biotech company as a senior in biomedical engineering in college to solve a problem her dying grandmother experienced in the hospital, and now her technology is used in countries all around the world including ambulances fighting wars right now. She's one of the best people I know, advocates for her employees to produce life saving products and happens to be a very great friend and good person all around.
And please, the stories I hear from her about the truly sociopathic men that fit the stereotypic you are sweeping across all CEos, including good people trying to do great things, she has stories about them too. Dear god, you are out of your mind if you think the world could not benefit from some more younger ambitious female techs with good intentions and good work ethics in the field.
There are tons of stories like these, and some of the best tech firms out there were started by "rank and file" engineers just like her so...
I just don't even know what else to say about your presumptuous attitude about all CEOs being sociopaths. I can imagine they must become disenchanted with people like you who never turn down an opportunity to judge them as a person despite not knowing them as a person at all but farther than yet, you are making absolutely baseless claims in that regard. You are just plain wrong dude.
In regards to your last point, that is the million dollar question, why the precipitous dropoff of women in computer science in the 80s? Lots of people are still trying to understand that.
I never said Meyer ran Yahoo into the ground; I pointed out Yahoo was already on a downward trajectory, and I said she didn't do anything to help that.
I said Carly Fiorina ran HP into the ground. And she did. No, HP was not "falling apart* before she got there. She's the one who had the dumb idea of merging with Compaq, a huge and costly merger that didn't benefit HP at all, and turned it from a company making extremely high-value equipment (medical and test equipment) into a company making crappy commodity PC hardware. She also helped run Lucent into the ground before she went to HP.
>For you to not acknowledge that is just bigotry.
I never said anything about it either way. To call me a "bigot" because I don't address something to your satisfaction speaks volumes about your agenda. I only pointed out that there's plenty of horrible male CEOs, meaning that CEOs of both sexes are frequently bad. I never addressed random anonymous internet posters, nor do I care to. The internet is full of horrible, vitriolic people as we see right here from time to time, and I see little point in even paying attention to them.
>soooo I really find your comment assuming anyone who is a CEO a sociopath offensive.
I find your defense of CEOs to be highly offensive. In my observation, most CEOs clearly are sociopaths, and the profession as a whole has deservedly earned that reputation. And anyone who's an apologist for the profession is likely a sociopath themselves, or maybe a useful sycophant. Whoopee, you found one that you think might not be a sociopath. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
>I just don't even know what else to say about your presumptuous attitude about all CEOs being sociopaths. I can imagine they must become disenchanted with people like you who never turn down an opportunity to judge them as a person despite not knowing them as a person at all but farther than yet, you are making absolutely baseless claims in that regard.
Oh gee, those poor, poor, multi-millionaire/billionaire CEOs!! Won't someone think of the billionaires!
yeh well my friend is the CEO of a company and its evaluated at millions of dollars but shes salaried less than an entry level engineer and has a tight budget. She had student loans and $300 in her bank account when she started her company. Her dad was a carpenter in Brooklyn and her mom a school teacher. She gave up her personal paycheck for 2 months to keep from laying off her best employees when she was in between funding rounds. An evaluation is way different than an individuals salary.
Maybe a primer on how funding works will help, not all multilmillion dollar companies mean the ceos are millionaries, most of them gave up everything and risked everything and some dropped out of college to pursue something they wanted to do.
yes there are a bunch of pompous CEOs out there and I deal with them too as a women working in a tech male dominated environment. Believe, I'm not any more stoked about this than you are and it is certainly damaging to the idea that other personalities could contribute positively in the same realm of influence and level of decision making.
I understand you have observations but the top 5 CEOs advertised on tech crunch everyday are not neessarily reflective of the literally hundreds of thousands of CEOs in this country.
I know 3 CEOs, two of them their companies are evaluated at 10million, and one at over 100million, and they both are salaried and the higher paid one rents an apartment, and hise wife took his house, sued him for all his money, takes her boyfriends on vacations with his salaries while he works 20+ hour days and rearranges all of his work travel so he can spend 3 days with his daughters no matter who it is that wants to meet him, he doesnt sacrifice time with his daughters.
He hasnt had a vacation in 5 years because he works so much and buying a house isn't an option for him right now. He still has to go before boards of investors to ask for a raise and the market in tech is super competitive, even with the evaluation it could all go under and the pressure is high. From what I see being good friends with these people they are not spending their friday nights at lavish parties, they are sleeping or working late or every now and then binge drinking the stress away, which is not a life i envy to be honest, but I don't consider them sociopaths.
I think your idea that all CEOs are sociopaths who run companies into the ground with lavish parties and that there is no relationship between the standards and engineering ideas they founded and the companies and the culture they set for all the rank and file engineers are all unfounded. I absolutely believe CEOs who are non sociopathic females who dont bring bikini models to launch parties might actually result in a more culturally inviting environment for female engineers, though I can't really tell form the data is that is the root cause of why women are lacking so I don't know if that would solve it.
I do know that Sheryl Sandberg wrote a pretty great book about women in business called Lean In, and it is positive and focuses on what women can do to improve themselves working in business and tech instead of waiting for men to fix all the problems, and overall it is is a very positive attitude about taking ownership of your own destiny instead of waiting for a man to give it to you and I think if you read the book the word "sociopath" would not exactly be the term that comes to your mind in regards to her, os Marissa Meyer for that matter if youve ever heard her speak or interact with people or teach on her operable business standards and principles...
I'm not really offended I guess. Youre definitely not even close to the top of the list of people who have said remarkably offensive things to me, I just think youre wrong.
I think CEOs are the easy bad guys. Everyone needs someone to point to and say hey its all your fault.
Thats what modern media has done to us. We just bully humiliate make assumptions and criticise everyone in leadership positions. I don't think what the trending instagram hashtag is or CNN headline is necessarily an accurate representation of these hardworking brilliant people, but thats just my opinion. You are obviously welcome to your own.
I'm not saying we should pity CEOs, I'm just saying as a whole in society we quickly jump to blame people, and female CEOs DO objectively (google analytics man) get it worse than men and gets far more personal jabs about their bodies and sexual comments I've never seen male CEOs publicly endure.
>yeh well my friend is the CEO of a company and its evaluated at millions of dollars but shes salaried less than an entry level engineer and has a tight budget.
Ah, so you're doing the silly thing called "equivocation". I never said all business owners were horrible people; it should be pretty obvious that I'm railing against mega-millionaire/billionaire CEOs of large and highly valued companies. It's just like complaining about politicians; most of the ones in Washington can be assumed to be evil sociopaths, with a few notable exceptions, but that doesn't mean that every local mayor or city councilman across the nation is a bad person (quite likely the opposite). Power corrupts absolutely, and the more power people have, generally the worse those people are. I've known plenty of small-business owners who were very decent people; I'm not complaining about them at all. These people are nothing like Carly Fiorina or Travis Kalanick.
>not all multilmillion dollar companies mean the ceos are millionaries
I'm quite aware of this. A $1M company is not even remotely a big company. One engineer can easily cost $150-250k in fully-loaded costs, more in SV. So of course a CEO isn't going to be ultra-rich here, in fact such a company is likely to not even have a "CEO", but rather simply an "owner". It's the companies valued in tens of billions of dollars and up where you have the horrible CEOs with $200M golden parachutes. This is elementary economics. Giant companies have far higher revenues and profits which their executives can skim.
>I understand you have observations but the top 5 CEOs advertised on tech crunch everyday are not neessarily reflective of the literally hundreds of thousands of CEOs in this country.
I apologize that I over-generalized and didn't cite a valuation or something, but I thought it was pretty obvious that I'm not complaining about business owners across the board, just the richest, most powerful ones. They're the ones I see with the worst behavior. Of course, with their greater size comes greater visibility, but you'd think that as a class maybe they'd take this into account and act better, but apparently not.
>I think your idea that all CEOs are sociopaths who run companies into the ground
I think at the upper end, and in American companies in particular, this is very often the case. No, I don't believe it to necessarily be the case for some person with a little $1M company with a handful of employees; that's a totally different situation. Now there are some real jerks even at that level, but there's jerks everywhere, but at least the small company execs/owners can't hurt that many people with their actions the way someone like Carly can with massive layoffs and totally ruining the culture of a formerly-great company (ask any old-time HP engineer what they think of her), or worse getting involved in politics or influencing politicians to pass bad laws and policies which favor his billionaire buddies and screw the lower classes.
>I think CEOs are the easy bad guys. Everyone needs someone to point to and say hey its all your fault.
CEOs (again, the very rich ones, not some small businessperson), combined with their politician cronies, are at the top of our socioeconomic hierarchy. They basically run our society, they write the laws, the control the enforcers, and they have all the power, and benefit the most from their positions in society. So yes, it really IS all their fault. In any hierarchal organization, the failure of the organization is always the fault of the leaders and those who control all the power.
>and criticise everyone in leadership positions.
Why shouldn't we? Again, they have all the power. The people at the bottom have nearly none.
As for why women are lacking in this profession, that's another discussion from our little argument here but personally I think it comes down to culture: American culture does not assign much prestige to STEM workers (like it does for doctors and lawyers and executives), parents and society steer young girls away from it ("math is hard!"), and recently it's gotten a rotten reputation for poor treatment of women (thank CEO Kalanick and his cronies for part of this, plus plenty of other tech companies). Smart young women in college have a lot of options available to them these days, such as in medicine, so perhaps they're steering clear. Has anyone tried interviewing a bunch of college women who are in other "hard" majors/career tracks, and asking them if they ever considered STEM/tech and why they didn't go that route, and instead chose medicine/law/finance/etc.? I've worked with a fair number of female engineers, and one thing I'll point out is that in my experience, most of them were not white American women, they were Asians of some sort (some East Asian, some Indian/Bangladesh/Pakistani). So why is it that those Asian cultures seem to have more women interested in these jobs than the supposedly "more liberal" American and European cultures? I'm not a sociologist, but I think it's definitely a cultural problem, and that's not something you're going to fix by encouraging girls to major in CS; by that age, you're already too late.
>female CEOs DO objectively (google analytics man) get it worse than men and gets far more personal jabs about their bodies and sexual comments I've never seen male CEOs publicly endure.
Unfortunately I'm sure that's true, but it's not just female execs, it's women everywhere. You just see it a lot with CEOs because they're high-profile. There's a lot of shitty men out there.
With your caveats in place, I think we agree. And equivocation was just to provide an alternative reference point before I realized you were pointing out the upper echelon. In general, I still think its worth pointing out because what you did was over generalize, and while with the caveats here I agree with you, whether accidental or not, the media and the commentors on high profile forums really need to stop over generalizing things to make a point.
It is a horrible habit and one encouraged by mainstream media. Criticising people in power is a great thing enabled somewhat by western democracy, european socialism, and great places like this and other on the internet, but the over generalizing is hurting not only the United States but our ability to gain traction en masse as people on effective action versus aggregate ignorant responses to emotional appeals, which are harder and harder to track who has the most influence in.
For example, note the article last week on HN about how so many people have concerns about AI, which have evolved into worries and now very emotionally charged political opinions, but there is a huge mismatch between understanding what AI is, what different forms of it are, the concept versus the level at which it exists in reality, the challenges, the inherent differences between AI and the brain, how little we know about the brain, and the ways in which it can be employed. I literally can't tell you how many people believe in the next 3 years everyone will be reading the newspaper on the way to work in self driving cars and that this is just right on its way to happening and in 8 years we will all be over run by robots.
Having the facts and educating the masses as more Tech Ceos and tech ideas influence society at a fundamental level of oepration is crucial in the next 10-50-100 years, and keeping CEOs of corporations making this technology is a priority too, but I don't think demonizing them off the bat from the get go and assuming everyone in those positions is a sociopath is either data based, accurate, or productive moving forward as a society.
By over generalizing, stereotyping and demonizing anyone who fits into a mainstream stereotype (tree hugging liberals, evil republicans) I argue that we as people are giving our ideas, definitions, and opinions away to be swayed by mass media instead of scrutinizing core issues and communicating an empowered (not just emotionally strong) response with effective action.
That being said, I actually really like the idea of what you said regarding asking other intelligent females why they chose other paths despite there being some obvious cultural influences/good initial guesses such that it does not offer as much prestige as being a lawyer or doctor.
I also agree with you, of the few other women I interact with at work and my technical school, most are Asian or Indian based ethnicity. I would say in the countries they come from, providing concrete and measurable value measured by income is encouraged over more abstract forms of valuation (being an Art History major) because of globalization and the countries need to catch up in realms of measureable competition with first world countries.
In addition, theres probably not many work visas lying around for art history majors, and less of a chance for people working in other countries who desire to experience western work world and benefit from it to actually accomplish that.
The work visa issue in the tech force is a whole different story but not too hard to figure out/find out about.
At the end of the day, all women in general, not just looking at ones already in high performing roles (doctors, lawyers versus engineers) humans tend to operate on incentive, and as a 26 yr old female who is not entirely hideous and is able to have a decent conversation with a human being, I can tell you for myself it is way too easy to underperform, get shoved into auxiliary roles, marketing roles, front facing roles, sales roles, marry one of the many men to choose from in the industry and thats after going through years of emotional isolation from being a minority in all of my classes and struggling to maintain healthy boundaries with friends because they were mostly guys and I was one of the only girls around, and one of the only girls around with shared interests.
I have actively and deliberately avoided being in these roles but the number of times I've been asked approached about it or given the opportunity, highly encouraged or crticisized for not engaging in these less technically developing roles is really high and not even close to being on par with my male colleagues. "oh youre an ambitious female in a tech job, lets have you spend 80% of your time being the poster child for a female in tech, instead of actually being a female in tech"
good intentions pave the way to...umm I don't want to sell hell but "unintended socioeconomic repercussions"
Being and staying a highly technical female engineer and staying in core disciplines development (aka for me GPU kernel dev, Graphics programming ...etc I was Electrical Engineering with Computer Science minor) and shaking off all the men who want to put you in the kitchen because your the best thing on their team department or even company since sliced bread is not just not easy but emotionally burdensome sometimes.
Anywhere I work, it takes all the men who are interested in me men about two years for it to slowly kick in as if this is an algorithm they have to develop inside their head and debug until an output comes out, that I'm actually not at work husband shopping. Men have said this to me quote above like...its some kind of novel.
The saddest part is alot of these men actually want high performing women to be housewives, so if you even get to the already thinned out demographic of being a female engineer in a highly technical role in a male dominated environment, now you have conservatively 1/10 men at your company who would rather you be having their family and staying at home, and unlike other men, they have the money to do it and support you. While this is not the path I have or plan to take, I have seen many women take this path, and by many I mean the many of the few who end up in highly technical roles.
If you look at stats, even more alarming than the high performing women who choose to go to to other careers outside of STEM, are the ones who leave the workforce all together to be full time moms. No opinion or judgment on that, raising humans is not trivial and every person gets to decide how they do that within reasonable bounds of law, but to pretend its not a significant factor is delaying addressing the issue.
Google health insurance allows females to freeze their eggs to give birth later, and to me thats just an initial example of goign in the right direction towards technology development in healthcare and the business around it so that women don't have to feel like raising children and working is a choice they have to make. Some women pull it off, but it could be easier, alot easier and alot healthier, and we could increase the time range at which women could have healthy kids safely by alot. I hope to see biotech focus on women reproduction and kids going forward to help address this issue as well.
I think at the end of the day for high to low performing women, its very easy to not be high performing or highly technical. There's not enough incentive at the individual level, and too many easy ways out, even if at the other end we can see the cumulative benefits on many fronts cultural ,technical, impact, integration, design etc that could be had from having 50/50 in the tech force.
I hope this doesn't sound too snide, but it looks like it's a generational thing. [creaky old man voice :-) ] Back in my day, we believed in equality for women. Nowadays, all these young adults want women to stay at home, barefoot and pregnant. [old man voice off] Seriously, this study is rather disturbing, but does make sense. As someone a little over 40, and part of the Gen-Xers, I've been wondering for quite some time what all the hoopla about sexual harassment at work was about, because I never saw anything like it in the various different companies I worked at, big and small, except for one weird incident at a very small company in a rural area right out of college (and that was a manufacturing company, and the incident was involving non-college-educated hourly workers). I've said many times I thought it might be generational, but was always told "you don't know about it because you're not on the receiving end", even though many times these stories involve actions that are more overt and really are visible to other employees, and involve a culture of harassment (as Fowler described at Uber, with inappropriate stuff right in a meeting). And the whole "brogrammer" phenomenon is something that came well after I entered the workforce. So this article really makes sense to me and confirms my suspicions: the Millennials are more traditionalist than my generation, and also more susceptible to sexist behavior. So I'm sorry you've had to deal with that crap, but it does seem like things are getting worse in this society in these ways.
Very interesting post. I will say that's really weird that a bunch of men want to marry you and then turn you into a full-time housewife. Personally, as a divorced man (where the marriage ended largely because of finances) one of the biggest things I've been looking for with dating prospects is someone who's professional and has their own paycheck roughly equivalent of mine, so I don't have to take care of someone again. (I also seem to be a little beyond the age of having kids, as I'm just over 40.) The last thing I want is a housewife, and all the economic uncertainty that comes with having only a single earner in the household.
I do think the stuff about why women leave the workforce is important, but I think it should also be investigated on the male side too for comparison and contrast. Do women actually want to leave the industry more than men? Perhaps it's similar, but they're just more successful at it. Speaking personally, I frequently wish I could leave the industry. I like technology, but honestly I hate the industry. I really hate the open-plan work spaces more than anything, and they've become the norm everywhere. I also don't appreciate having so little of my work mean anything, and spending all my time on projects that end up in the trashcan. I'm tired of coworkers who never comment their code, and the lousy quality of code in general. I'm tired of horrible IT systems and policies. Finding a job that doesn't have these problems is possible, but not even remotely easy. And the jobs are usually located in terrible places too. I frequently wish I had gone into some kind of medical field, where there's more job stability, the pay's decent, there isn't pressure to work 60-80 hours/week, and you can work just about anywhere you want.
