Valley needs female CEOs like Mayer

Editorial

As sad as the sale of internet pioneer Yahoo is to Silicon Valley, the loss of one of the valley’s rare female CEOs is more disheartening: One more role model to show girls they can fit in a tech career slips out of the CEO spotlight.

Marissa Mayer stumbled in her struggle to reinvigorate Yahoo, a goal many thought from the start was impossible. She succeeded, however, in raising the profile of women in tech. And the more women girls see at the top of the field, the more likely they’ll be willing to forge into what now is a male-geek-dominated career.

Silicon Valley is facing a workforce shortage in the coming decades, and the obvious place to look for aspiring software engineers and inventors is the roughly 50 percent of today’s students who are female.

Girls and young women now see tech as a career for guys, just as men see, say, kindergarten teaching as a women’s job. Even women who start out studying computer science and related fields often end up on a different career path.

So it’s a shame the valley’s Big Three of women CEOs — Mayer, Hewlett-Packard’s Meg Whitman and Oracle’s co-CEO Safra Catz — is on the verge of being reduced to two.

When Mayer came to Yahoo in July 2012, the company was in disarray. It had had four CEOs in three years. By the time Mayer arrived on the scene, Yahoo faced a rocky path trying to develop game-changing new products.

The likes of Google, Apple and Facebook make billions, but 90 percent of startups in the tech industry are failures — most of them headed by men. And as Mayer discovered, the only thing harder for a CEO than making a startup successful is breathing life into a fading giant. Think Netscape, Silicon Graphics, Atari, and on and on.

Mayer bet heavily that the purchase of Tumblr (for $1.1 billion in 2013) and invigorating Yahoo’s content team, hiring Katie Couric and other highprofile journalists, would dramatically increase revenue. The gambles didn’t pay off, and on Monday, the news broke that Verizon was the winning bidder for Yahoo’s internet business at $4.8 billion.

Within minutes of the announcement, critics hammered Mayer, saying she had a tendency to micromanage and didn’t come close to changing the way people approached search on mobile, as she’d promised.

Don’t feel sorry for her. Like male CEOs, she has a golden parachute ($55 million) if Verizon sends her packing as expected. The bigger question is whether she’ll be given another shot at leading a major tech firm.

She certainly should. She was a rising star at Google when Yahoo tapped her. And failure doesn’t doom men in the field. Steve Jobs and others experienced massive failures in their careers. Silicon Valley culture is supposed to celebrate failure as something to learn from and move on.

Men typically have these opportunities. Women should, too. Girls will be watching.