Marissa Mayer: I Am a Software Girl

I Am Not a Feminist. I Am Not Neurodivergent.

Marissa Mayer didn’t say AI is Death, destroyer of worlds or even AI needs ethical guardrails.

Instead, she said it’s the sun—life-giving, bright, shiny, endlessly giving. Thus, the former Google engineer and CEO of Yahoo, who has worked on artificial intelligence for 25 years, christened her startup Sunshine. It’s devoted to AI-empowering family and social life with photo sharing, contact managing, and event planning.

As I spoke with Mayer in Sunshine’s candy-colored digs in Palo Alto, I was so stunned by her boosterism that I ended up mirroring it. “By gum, you’re right!” I said, all but slapping my knee. Intelligent machines are our bosom buddies. Anthropic’s Claude had that very morning given me canny insight into a personal matter.

What delighted me less about Mayer (pronounced MYE-er), as an alpha female in Silicon Valley, was her disdain for feminism. She first voiced it in 2013, to widespread criticism from the liberal sisterhood that likes to have the alpha females of Silicon Valley with us in solidarity. If I’d expected her to back off this position, I was wrong. She dug in. “I started learning about feminism as a teenager,” Mayer told me. “It was something more militant, more hardened, less based on merit. It didn’t resonate with me.” Then she used the word “shrill.”

Oh boy. Had Mayer, after leaving Yahoo in 2017, decided to “prioritize family” and become a full-on tradwife influencer—or joined JD Vance’s crusade against child-free cat ladies? Only as she went on did I understand. Her bafflement by feminism, and gender more generally, began to add up. As a computer scientist at Stanford and the 20th hire at Google, a quarter century ago, she’s above all a geek. For Mayer, geekery supersedes gender.

It must be said that Mayer is lovely. Even on a Wednesday at the office, she dresses as if for a Southern bridal party. The topics of fashion, art, design, film, color, prime numbers, and photography supercharge her. And she’s galvanic when she talks consumer tech…..

Continue reading this piece at Wired.