Two Women Now Take Charge of Windows

Since the emergence of the Internet, the tech sector, like the many other professions has been dominated by men. A report from nonprofit Catalyst indicates that women hold just above a quarter of the computing industry’s jobs, and that number has now declined over the past two decades. The executives of the industry also for the most part tend to be headed by men. A few exceptions to this gender biased tradition include:  Hewlett-Packard with two women CEOs Meg Whitman & Carly Fiorina; Then there’s Safra Catz, who is the president of Oracle. Sheryl Sandberg who sits at the helm of one of world’s most popular companies -Facebook, and who could forget Marissa Mayer who was recently appointed to take charge of a struggling Yahoo!.  However, none of Apple’s top five highest-paid executives are female. And although Intel does have a few female executives, none of them seem to play a role in engineering. So what could be a possible  reason behind this disparity?

According to a Carnegie Mellon study (2002), women tended to reject the “geek” tag significantly   more than their male counterparts and were more likely to say that they didn’t want computers to “become their life”; as reported by Alex Klein from thedailybeast.com.

Apparently, this had no impact on Julie Larson-Green and Tami Reller: the two ladies who now take charge of Microsoft’s Windows division, which is undoubtedly the brand’s most important business. Julie Larson-Green replaces the former software boss Steven Sinofsky, who resigned from the company recently after his crucial Windows 8 launch met with disastrous reviews and much internal tension. Larson –Green will assume the role of managing the Redmond, Wash.–based company’s giant software engineering team, while Tami Reller will head Windows’ business strategy.

It’s difficult to chart out the amount of influence the two women will wield in the industry. According to Forbes, Microsoft is the world’s biggest public software company, with twice as much the sales of its closest competitor- Oracle. According to its 2011 year-end earnings report, Microsoft’s Windows division brings in a staggering eighteen billion dollars a year in revenues. While Yahoo’s total revenues added up to $4.98 billion in 2011. Larson-Green and Reller now join the software industry’s most powerful executives club.

courtesy : http://women.siliconindia.com