Like many others, I am disappointed in Marissa Mayer, Google’s twentieth employee and first female engineer, who was recently named Yahoo’s latest CEO. During the controversy surrounding her announcement that she is pregnant (she revealed it a day after she was hired) some past comments of Mayer’s have surfaced: “I don’t think I would consider myself a feminist . . . I certainly believe in equal rights . . . I don’t I think have the sort of militant drive and sort of chip on the shoulder that sometimes comes with that,” she said in an interview. She’s also said in the past that she was “gender-oblivious” growing up. (Watch this interview for a very annoying story about her totally not even realizing that she was the only woman in her upper-division computer science classes at Stanford in the early ’90s!)
All in all, this is a huge bummer. Mayer has an amazing opportunity to address not only the staggering gender inequality that exists in the tech world, but in the corporate world in general; so far, she’s managed only to perpetuate negative stereotypes about feminists.
I barely knew who Mayer was while I worked a 6-month stint as a temp at Google shortly after I graduated from college. But I did watch her interview Lady Gaga while I was an employee there (views of the video of this interview have skyrocketed since Mayer’s new position was announced: it now has over 2 million). The anticipation in my corner of the Googleplex was great: even though our office was made up almost entirely of red-badged temps (as opposed to white-badged full-time employees), the Gaga interview was available to all employee levels. Almost all of the 65-deep army of women that made up my team of Recruiting Coordinators — glorified administrators whose sole purpose is to schedule interviews for potential Google employees — waited outside the auditorium hours in advance to get a seat and see Gaga.
I followed suit, waiting in the vast courtyard on Google’s main campus, working from my company-issued laptop and waiting for the push into the building. Google security guards were everywhere. In the company-wide email announcing Gaga’s visit, we had been warned not to forward the email or post anything about it on social media, for the sake of Lady Gaga’s security. (Soon after Gaga’s visit, a girl on my team was let go and the management gave all of us a stern warning about confidentiality. It was rumored that she was fired for forwarding the Gaga email to her mom.) Clearly, Gaga’s visit was a big deal.
But watching Gaga and Mayer interact was painful. Mayer was clearly nervous: she stumbled over the introduction, used her hands a lot, and laughed too much. At times she tried to barrel through the program, but Lady Gaga interrupted her for one reason or another and Mayer stopped, laughing awkwardly. She wore a long-sleeve shirt under a conservative dress, her blond hair cut into a simple bob. Gaga, on the other hand, was confident, relaxed, and funny. She wore an outrageous blond and black cinnamon-swirl wig, a skin-tight black dress with angular shoulder pads, and heel-less platform knee-high boots. Her sunglasses never came off. She looked great. She joked about how tall her chair was and wiggled around trying to adjust her short skirt.
“I really encourage people to look into the darkness and look into places you would not normally to find uniqueness and specialness because that’s where the diamonds are hiding,” Gaga said at one point, cocking her head, and staring through her sunglasses at Mayer. “I think that’s a wonderful message,” Mayer replied, after shifting her eyes to her own hands, which were clapping. The best and worst moment of the interview was when Mayer reveals that she actually dressed up as Lady Gaga for Halloween one year. “Oooh, which me?” Gaga asks. Mayer put up a picture of herself in a black dress, blond wig, and red and black feather boa. “There’s poker chips on my hat . . . like ‘Poker Face‘,” she said.
The whole thing was awkward. The two couldn’t seem to figure out a rapport. One good guess why: Gaga is all about girl power, while Marissa Mayer is anything but. To be sure, Lady Gaga has had her own tenuous relationship with feminism. In one interview she talks both about the double standard in pop music and claims that she is not a feminist because she loves men. Then there’s this really weirdly-edited interview, wherein she talks very carefully about feminism and how we should “make women’s rights trendy” (please ignore the typing sound effects and the fact that she says “twendy”) and goes back on what she implied in the earlier interview (that to be a feminist means that you can’t love men). Gaga’s views on feminism have clearly changed throughout her career; she’s managed to learn and grow as she becomes more experienced and presumably more exposed to what it means to be feminist in the first place. Mayer, however, still seems hellbent on insisting that she’s still just that Stanford student who doesn’t notice that she’s the only girl in the computer lab.
Mayer has been hailed as Google’s most glamorous employee: she had a rock-star wedding, has been featured in Glamour and Vogue, has a taste for designer clothes, lives in a penthouse atop the San Francisco Four Seasons with a custom Chihuly sculptural ceiling, and is consistently described as stylish and glamorous by the media. While Mayer is indisputably wildly successful, I can’t shake the feeling that all that glamour is something that got forced onto her — because, honestly, she’s just not that glamorous.
And she shouldn’t have to be. The problem with Mayer is that she seems to resist any opportunity to own her womanhood, to speak out about it without apologizing for it. The whole “glamour” bit just seems like others’ attempts at shaping her into something that fits on the pages of Vogue. Sitting in the audience that day, watching Gaga and Mayer with hundreds of other young women who, by whichever path brought them there, were working in tech, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit embarrassed. Was Marissa Mayer who we were supposed to look up to? Was she Google’s answer to Lady Gaga? If you asked the young women in the audience, the majority probably would have told you that Gaga was the stronger woman of the two.
Lady Gaga said something:
“If you’re on an island, stranded, and all you have is sticks and leaves and pineapples, you’re gonna make a boat out of sticks and leaves and pineapples,” she said. “I view glamour and celebrity life and these plastic assumptions as the pineapples. And I spend my career harvesting pineapples, and making pies and outfits and lipsticks that will free my fans from their stranded islands.”
Mayer’s career isn’t just about her fans, of course. But we’re still waiting for our share of Ms. Mayer’s pineapple pie.
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