Girls In Tech

The UC Berkeley Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology hosts the Innovator Lecture Series, a weekly, hour-long lecture where Silicon Valley leaders share their experience and pearls of wisdom to engineering and business students.  Tomorrow evening’s lecture will feature Marissa Mayer, who will be discussing her decade’s experience at Google as well as the future of search. Mayer did her undergraduate work in Symbolic Systems and graduate work in Computer Science, both at Stanford University, specializing in artificial intelligence. Today she leads Google’s product management efforts in everything related to search: web search, images, news, books, products, maps, Google Earth, Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Health, GoogleLabs and even more. Not a single Google product is released to the public without her seal of approval.

Browsing through the semester-long list of speakers for the Lecture Series, I noticed one glaring oversight: out of the eleven individuals chosen for this distinguished speaking position, only one is a woman. Does that mean that women constitute only 9% of the powerful tech innovators? My my, that glass ceiling is looking mighty shiny today.

One of our missions at Girls in Tech University is to change these numbers. Young women in college shouldn’t feel discouraged by the ubiquity of men in the industry they wish to call their own. This isn’t a pity party!  We’re quickly starting to see more and more women gain momentum and really rise to leadership positions in which they excel.

The intelligent, motivated ladies passionate about new technologies are out there; with the right resources, a network of serious innovators, and a dash of empowerment, we can exceed our own expectations and change the face of the industry like Mayer has.

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Event Details:
A. Richard Newton Distinguished Innovator Lecture Series
Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 5:00pm
UC Berkeley Bechtel Engineering Center

The WebCast of Mayer’s talk will be available to stream online here after the event.