Marissa Mayer Suffers From Gender-Blindness

At Stanford, she majored in Symbolic Systems, which combines philosophy, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and computer science. Once, reading The Stanford Daily, she was laughing over a column about campus icons—the local man who abuses passersby, the guy in the sandwich shop who always gets your order wrong. “And there was literally a line in there that said ‘the blonde woman in the upper-division computer-science classes.’ And I was, like, I’m a woman in the upper-division computer-science classes—I should know this person! I really had just been very blind to gender. And I still am.”

Mayer also explains that any of her success was just a product of working hard and not any attempt at ladder-climbing:

“I didn’t set out to be at the top of technology companies,” she insists. “I’m just geeky and shy and I like to code,” she says. “Once, Eric Schmidt [then Google’s CEO] pointed out to me that at Google, when you want to have an impact that’s bigger than just you, you move from being an individual contributor to managing a team. . . . And I was like, Oh, right, it would be nice to have an impact that’s bigger than just me. It’s not like I had a grand plan where I weighed all the pros and cons of what I wanted to do—it just sort of happened.”

Other words used to describe Mayer: “underdog” “talented” “extremely driven” and “aggressive” (Henry Blodget, Business Insider) and “happy” and “optimistic” (David Karp, Tumblr founder).

Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer: Hail to the Chief [Vogue]

Image via Mario Tama/Getty