Marissa Mayer wants sexism talk toned down
When Marissa Mayer was 18, the Wisconsin teen was sure she was going to be a doctor.
But then the future CEO of Yahoo, soon to enroll at Stanford University, read the stories.
In the early 1990s, Stanford Medical School was struggling to overcome a significant sex scandal. Two women accused cardiologist Mark Perlroth of professional misconduct and sexual harassment. And Frances Conley, professor of neurosurgery, announced her resignation because of what she called “pervasive sexism” and gender insensitivity at the school.
The scandal had a profound impact on Mayer, who went on to study symbolic systems and computer science instead.
“It really colored my view,” Mayer recently told the annual Stanford Directors’ College, a program for corporate directors and senior executives. “You’re going to go there for med school? No way. You’re going to go somewhere else where they don’t have this problem.”
The irony is that a college-bound teen today would read the headlines and make the opposite decision — that she would want to be anywhere but in the world of technology, where men hold the vast majority of engineering jobs and sexism seems pervasive and incurable.
The problem is that Mayer’s view of Silicon Valley seems frozen in early-’90s amber, ignoring every-
thing that’s happened since, from Ellen Pao’s failed lawsuit against prominent venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to the resignation of Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick as CEO because of a toxic culture he helped create that ignored or tolerated sexual misconduct.
Instead, Mayer defended Kalanick at the conference, calling him an “incredible leader.” She also suggested that Kalanick could not have been aware of the misconduct because the company was growing too fast.
“I don’t think he knew,” Mayer said.
I know Mayer’s been busy selling Yahoo to Verizon, a deal that closed this month. But how could she have missed the report of Kalanick sending a memo to Uber employees in 2013 in which he detailed exactly when and how they should have sex with each other at a company party in Miami?
“Do not have sex with another employee UNLESS a) you have asked that person for that privilege and they have responded with an emphatic ‘YES! I will have sex with you’ AND b) the two (or more) of you do not work in the same chain of command. Yes, that means that Travis will be celibate on this trip,” he wrote.
Kalanick didn’t just know about misconduct at his company. He wrote the playbook for it. Among those reading attentively, it seems, was Ed Baker, a vice president whose misbehavior at the 2013 party was reportedly a factor in his exit.
The way Mayer sees it, the recent barrage of stories about sexism in Silicon Valley is just making things worse; they will deter women from pursuing technology as a career, just as the ’90s Stanford scandals convinced her not to study medicine.
“I worry about the 18-year-old girl right now who’s reading these articles and is thinking: ‘Do I really want a career in tech? Is this what I really want to be a part of ?’ ” Mayer said.
It’s a rather curious argument, not to mention deeply flawed. The way Mayer sees it, if we talk too much about sexism in Silicon Valley, women won’t want to join up. So what’s the alternative? Bury the issue and let women find out for themselves that tech firms can be hostile to female employees? That’s a little like saying: Please stop talking about date rape. Otherwise, women might not want to go out. Blaming the victim — especially when they are brave enough to speak out — is not the solution.
Mayer is a data fiend. She once had designers test 41 shades of blue to determine which one to use. Yet despite the overwhelming evidence — the numerical kind that Mayer has long said she prizes decision-making — she seems to think that sexism is not that big of a problem in Silicon Valley.
Yet she always has had a complicated relationship with feminism. As a top executive at Google and one of the few women to ever run a major Silicon Valley firm, Mayer, by virtue of her success, serves as a role model for women hoping to break the gender barrier in technology. At the same time, Mayer has said she does not consider herself a feminist, and once described herself as “gender oblivious.”
She has shown some glimmers of awareness. In 2008, she told KQED that “a lot of studies show that if you fall below 20 percent of the workforce being women, things become really imbalanced and unhealthy inside the corporate culture,” and that Google, where she then worked, aimed to have women as 25 percent of its technical workforce. Nearly a decade later, women hold 19 percent of Google’s technical jobs. Yahoo, which Mayer ran for five years, fares even worse: Only 17 percent of its tech workers are female. As she rose in the ranks, Mayer never hit her 25 percent goal.
“We do need to modulate the volume a little bit because there are huge companies that are really good places for women,” Mayer said, citing Google and Yahoo, the same companies that have fallen short of her benchmark for healthy working environments. “We’ve got a couple of small firms that are really dysfunctional. You don’t want to color an entire generation.”
How can a woman who ran a major technology firm be so limited in her worldview?
As one of the few women engineers and leaders in technology, Mayer has had to endure enormous scrutiny and criticism —some of it fair, some of it not— especially in the news media.
Mayer said she just learned to tune it out.
“I have gotten pretty good at ignoring the press,” she said. “A colleague once told me: ‘It’s really damaging to read press about you and who you work for, because it can change how you think. You’re in the job because of you and your experience.
“Your actions are misunderstood, misinterpreted, misfiltered through reporters who don’t have all of the information,” she continued. “If reading articles makes you think: ‘Oh, that’s truly a mistake’ and you back off a good idea too quickly, that’s bad. If reading an article that says ‘Wow, that was a genius move,’ it makes you less likely to abandon something. That’s bad.”
In other words, Mayer copes with criticism by ignoring the noise. But that works only so well. By isolating herself from the media, Mayer may block out the criticism. But she also blocks out others’ lived reality, including the horrible treatment women not named Marissa Mayer have had to endure in Silicon Valley.
Ask yourself this: Would Kalanick have resigned from Uber had it not been for the coverage of former engineer Susan Fowler’s blog post detailing how her manager propositioned her for sex on her first day of work?
If Mayer were paying attention, perhaps she wouldn’t be so effusive with her praise of Kalanick.
Mayer says she doesn’t read the press because it might change how she thinks. Yet that’s exactly what she said she did two decades ago as she faced a major life choice.
Something in the data doesn’t add up here.