Mayer’s Appointment puts Aspirants in Computer Technology on the Front Foot
In today’s age, where women still struggle to climb the corporate ladder even when they deserve to be at the top, the appointment of Marissa Mayer as the CEO of Yahoo would definitely encourage them not to give up. Marissa Mayer, who started her career as Google’s employee number 20 and the company's first female engineer held key roles as an engineer, designer, product manager, and executive in Google Search, Google Images, Google News, Google Maps, Google Books, Google Product Search, Google Toolbar, iGoogle and Gmail. Mayer’s rise to the top is a great achievement considering the fact that only few women have been honored as CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
Besides being a woman, Mayer is a computer scientist and seeing a computer scientist that too a young female computer scientist in such a high-profile position would attract more girls to the field of computer science software engineering than countless government or private initiatives or entreaties by parents, teachers, and industry leaders.
As per the findings of the US National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, and Scientists and Engineers Statistical Data System, women like Mayer is a definite minority. There are four times as many men working as science and engineering managers as there are women. The situation is even worse for engineering managers, where men outnumber women by 125,000 to 8,000. In medical and health services, however, there are more than twice as many female managers than male managers. In such a scenario, Mayer who has been ranked number 14 on the list of America's most powerful businesswomen of 2012 by Fortune magazine and who is among the eight finalists for Time magazine’s Person of the Year award would inspire more and more girls to take up careers in computer technology.
Though it is said that there is much power in visualization, nothing is more convincing than seeing something happening right in front of one’s eyes. And Mayer’s appointment as the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company would convince girls that success could be definitely achieved.
When IEEE and IEEE Computer Society conducted the 2011 Women in Computing survey to find out how IEEE can better serve women in software engineering , the most significant issue that came to the forefront was the work-life balance rather than the female under representation in the field. Mayer might serve as a role model on that front too, considering the fact that she is married and recently became a mother.
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