Marissa Mayer Was Dubbed A Stanford Campus Icon For Being A Blonde In Computer Science Classes

Alyson ShontellSep 1, 2013, 18:36 IST

REUTERS/Stephen LamUnlike some of her other C-level peers, Marissa Mayer says she is "blind to gender" and the glass ceiling. This blindness may have caused her to take a 2-week maternity leave (some feel she should taken off a few months to set an example for other women). It may have also caused her to issue a work-from-home ban at Yahoo (many felt the move was harsh for stay-at-home moms). The most obvious example of her gender blindness may come from a recent Vogue profile by Jacob Weisberg. (We're not talking about the photoshoot, in which the CEO is sprawled upside down on a lawn chair, although that did turn heads.) Instead, Vogue referenced an experience Marissa Mayer had at Stanford University, where she majored in Symbolic Systems. The campus paper dubbed her a university icon for being a blonde in upper-level computer science classes. Mayer's reaction wasn't anger or embarrassment. Vogue details the experience here: 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."

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Marissa Mayer Was Dubbed A Stanford Campus Icon For Being A Blonde In Computer Science Classes