Marissa Mayer on the Rise of Women Technology Leaders

Business Lab

[Sponsored] From 1999 to 2012, Marissa Mayer was one of the most public faces at Google, where she helped to build the company’s core search and advertising platforms. From 2012 to 2017 she steered Yahoo! through its final years as an independent business. In other words, she’s spent a long time at the center of the Silicon Valley whirlwind.

In this special episode, Business Lab host Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau asks Mayer how conditions for women technology leaders have changed during her career. The conversation quickly turns to the thinking behind Mayer's 2013 decision to put an end to Yahoo's fairly permissive policy around working from home and how she dealt with the blowback from that decision on social media and the technology press. Mayer sys that if a leader is trying to foster a stronger culture inside their company, they can’t worry too much about what everyone outside the company is saying about them.

Mayer goes on to speak about her new company, Lumi Labs, where she says engineers are looking for everyday consumer applications for the latest artificial intelligence techniques. And ultimately the conversation returns to the question of how technology companies can move closer to gender parity, and why the drive to recruit more women into technical roles has to come from the very top.

This episode is sponsored by (ISC)2. With more than 140,000 global members, (ISC)2 is the world's largest non-profit membership association of certified cybersecurity professionals. It offers a portfolio of credentials that are part of a holistic programmatic approach to security.