CEO and co-founder Melanie Perkins of Canva raised $85 million this week, led by Mary Meeker’s venture capital firm, raising her company valuation to $3.2 billion – one of the most valuable female-led technology startups in the world. She saw the need for something like Canva while tutoring other college students on how to use traditional design software.
First female chief ranger Yellowstone National Park’s 147-year history, Sarah Davis will be the 18th chief ranger of the vast 2.2 million acre park. In her new role as chief of Resource and Visitor Protection, she will manage over 275 employees in “Yellowstone’s Resource and Visitor Protection division who perform law enforcement and emergency medical services, search and rescue, wildland and structural fire, dispatch, fee collection, special use permitting, trails, corrals, and backcountry operations.”
In September, Microsoft Reactor transformed into a Girl Geek X wonderland in San Francisco — showcasing a mix of creative and tech pursuits of girl geeks. Popular demos included Microsoft girl geek Kitty Yeung’s programmable garments (her dress lights up when she spins!), HoloLens…
Win together means working and succeeding as a team — a team with different viewpoints and comprised of people with diverse backgrounds. In Aurora’s mission, we talk about delivering the benefits of self-driving technology broadly, which means serving a diverse population. We need a diverse team building our technology.
The energy was high and excitement higher with over 150 curious female technologists in the audience, seven inspiring SurveyMonkey leaders on stage…
“As an English major at UC Berkeley, how did I wind up at my first two or three jobs in tech, on an engineering team? I knew how to build websites since high school, but it was just a hobby. I never had these expectations for myself. I did not realize this until later: that was an exception but at the time, I thought that was normal. It’s much harder to come from a humanities degree into an engineering team in today’s competitive market. What I can do today is help share these stories at Girl Geek X…”
“Years ago, someone told me you should always keep a business card behind your driver’s license, because you should build your network before you need it,” Sukrutha Bhadouria told an audience of 400 women at Oracle’s second annual Girl Geek Dinner. “Make a friend tonight—you never know when you’re going to need one.”
“What’s not to love about a big institution like Goldman, coming out loud and proud that they are going to find more investment opportunities?” said Sarah Friar, one of the most prominent female executives in the tech industry. The foray has been set up with profit as the central goal, something that will work to the firm’s benefit, she said. “Honestly, I don’t care whether it’s good PR or not. Whatever the genesis of the idea, they are putting time to work, money to work and people to work.”
Democratic Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (left) and Ilhan Omar (center) at the Capitol on January 4, 2019.
The media’s catty coverage of women politicians’ “likability” creates a maddening chicken-or-the-egg scenario: Are Warren, Pelosi, and Clinton inherently unlikable people (even if, hmm, they have somehow managed to win elections) or are they just dogged by so many sexist stories about their voices and health and capability for warmth or even their age (in the case of the rotten “go away, grandma, time for someone new” argument against Pelosi, consider that she is a full seven years younger than Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley), that they are just branded as unlikable, again and again, on the national stage?
