When I was embedded at Google for a good part of more than two years reporting a book, I sat in quite a few meetings conducted by Marissa Mayer, the prominent executive who’s just announced that she’s leaving to become the C.E.O. of Yahoo. I was struck that she possessed a quality that’s been in short supply at Yahoo in recent years: clarity. Engineers would troop to Mayer’s office with novel ideas for another Google venture. Not only did she have a clear thought about whether the idea was good, but as an engineer she could explain why it would fail or succeed; and as a Google employee going back to 1998, she could provide historical context. As the Google executive in charge of user experience—that is, determining what best served search users—she had an acute sense of things engineers can’t easily measure, like design. Even when she rejected an idea, as she usually did, she did so in a comforting way that said she welcomed more ideas, more effort, from the young engineer. I don’t know that Mayer can produce a happy ending to the Yahoo saga, but a defeated culture like Yahoo needs both encouragement and leadership.
Obviously, Silicon Valley needs more female C.E.O.s. It is hardly a revelation that the area immediately south of San Francisco is a male bastion. There are many reasons for this: social connections, traditional expectations, the matter of who the men and bankers who already have power feel comfortable with—as well as something Marissa Mayer understood, which might go under the shorthand of, “boys grow up playing video games, girls play with dolls.” And science and math have come to be defined as largely male preserves—whether or not, in terms of aptitude and aspirations, that is actually the case. Increasingly, women in the Valley are practicing what Facebook C.O.O. Sheryl Sandberg has long preached: that women have to “lean in” and be as assertive as their male peers.
Women like Marissa Mayer sometimes felt the lash of sexism. For years, too many men at Google grumbled, as they might not about a man, “Marissa Mayer is a publicity hound.” She was a rarity at Google: an engineering executive unafraid to speak with the press. She became an ambassador for the company. She testified before Congress about the importance of content—and was unfairly resented for this as well. Yahoo desperately craves someone with the clarity and toughness of an engineer, and with the flair of an ambassador.
Photograph by Paul Zimmerman/Getty Images.
