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By Jessica Roy 5/14/12 11:26am

XX in Tech

According to this survey, Sheryl Sandberg is one lucky lady. (flickr.com/financialtimes)

Survey Says: Number of Women in Top U.S. Tech Jobs Has Declined Since 2010

New York may have double the female founders, but that statistic refers primarily to fledgling startups. What about the ladies leading large technology companies?

According to a new report by technology recruiting company the Harvey Nash Group, the number of women in top-tier IT positions has decreased since 2010. “Nine percent of U.S. chief information officers (CIOs) are female, down from 11 percent last year and 12 percent in 2010,” reports Reuters. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 5/02/12 11:58am

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NBCU

NBCUniversal’s Lady-Focused Ad Network Nabs Every Female Startup Founder You Know For Its New Digital Board

On quick glance, the list of people named to the digital advisory board for Women at NBCU–NBCUniversal’s lady-friendly ad network–contains roughly every female startup founder and techie maven known to Startupland. At least it sorta feels that way.

As PaidContent reports, the digital board includes TaskRabbit founder Leah Busque, IfWeRanTheWorld founder and CEO Cindy Gallop, Rent the Runway founder and CEO Jennifer Hyman, Google’s Marissa Mayer, One Kings Lane cofounder Alison Pincus, Twitter’s VP of media Chloe Sladden, New York City’s Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne, LearnVest founder and CEO Alexa Von Tobel. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 4/18/12 2:32pm

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sherylmarissa

Are You a Sheryl or a Marissa?


There are some women who like to situate themselves on the Charlotte to Samantha personality spectrum. Ladybeat prefers our role models a little GOOGlier, as in Marissa “Employee no. 20″ Mayer and former Google VP and current Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Thus, we were intrigued to discover their divergent attitudes toward an acceptable hour to leave the office.

Ever since we saw Ms. Mayer give a talk at the 92nd Street Y a few weeks back, her words about burnout have been echoing in heads–you know, in the empty space, where our work-life balance is supposed to be. According to Ms. Mayer “burnout,” is a figment of your imagination. What you experience as the occasional paralysis due to treating your laptop/iPad/Blackberry like a life-partner and waking in a state of panic at the length of your to-do list, she says is merely a matter of finding the one thing that keeps you going and working that into your schedule. Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 4/06/12 8:12am

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(etsy.com/shop/cellsdividing)

Etsy Announces $50K in Hacker Grants for Women

There is only one woman in Hacker School’s current class of 20–but a generous pool of grants from Etsy could literally change the ratio. Etsy is offering $5,000 grants for up to ten female developers who want to attend the summer session of Hacker School, the immersive programming class hosted quarterly in New York. The hope is that the grants will allow women to move to New York if necessary to attend Hacker School (and then come work at Etsy afterward).  Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 3/29/12 9:30am

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Marissa Mayer on Misconceptions That Hold Back Women in Tech and Why She Doesn’t ‘Believe in Burnout’

For a lifelong perfectionist overachiever, 36-year-old Marissa Mayer (known in some circles as Google employee no. 20), is rather adept at projecting an aura of  relatability. Pro-tip: it never hurts to pepper your tales of 130-hour work weeks with verbatim quotes from High Fidelity. Of course, as the longtime friendly public face–sweeter than the acerbic Mr. Schmidt, less aspy than Larry–of a $212 billion company like GOOG, she’s had some practice.

That easy demeanor was on full display at the 92nd Street Y Tuesday night, when Ms. Mayer stopped by for an hour-and-a-half Q&A session with Bloomberg Businessweek editor Josh Tyrangiel, who pointed out that her latest job title, “VP, Local, Maps & Location Services,” made it sound like she worked at AAA.

To give the Upper East Side crowd some idea of Ms. Mayer’s celebustatus in Silicon Valley, Mr. Tyrangiel pointed out that a YouTube loop of her unusual laugh, which sounds kinda like a guffaw being sucked through a vacuum, has been viewed a quarter of a million times. “They’ve also made it into a ringtone!” Ms. Mayer noted gleefully. But Mr. Tyrangiel needn’t have worried. In line for tickets, one heavily-perfumed older woman ticked off a list of influential projects Ms. Mayer has helped define since she started there in 1999: Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 3/07/12 7:15pm

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Jalak

Jalak Jobanputra, RTP Ventures New Managing Director, Talks About Russian Billionaire Leonid Boguslavsky’s $120 M. Fund

A few weeks ago we told you that RTP Ventures—the U.S. arm of ru-Net, the $700 million fund founded by Russian billionaire Leonid Boguslavsky—was on its way to naming “two splashy new hires” to join senior managing director Kirill Sheynkman. Although word got out early, as of this week, both hires have been officially announced, as well as the size of the U.S. fund: $120 million.

Battery Ventures alum Murat Bicer is RTP’s managing director in Boston and Jalak Jobanputra, the former director of emerging market mobile investments at  Omidyar Network, will be RTP’s managing director in New York, joining Mr. Sheynkman at the firm’s Third Avenue office in Midtown.

“Kirill started first investing Leonid’s money on the cloud computing and infrastructure side and I joined to look at more the consumer internet,” Ms. Jobanputra, who blogs at The Barefoot VC, told Betabeat earlier this week. Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 1/31/12 2:34pm

XX in Tech

(http://iridescentlearning.org/)

‘Technovation Challenge’ Is Like a Hyperacclerator for High School Girls

Here’s a women in tech story: 50 high school girls will participate in a 10-week mobile app competition sponsored by Google in New York.

The students will form teams of five and meet after school with coaches in a curriculum rigorous enough that it reminds us of a Startup Weekend or even TechStars: they’ll also head to Google on Tuesdays to learn about “the business side of app development” from a panel of professional women mentors and guest speakers. The teams will build their apps using Google’s App Inventor and present their products and business plans (startups?) to a panel of VCs at a pitch night in late April.

The competition is called Technovation, and the winners will head to San Francisco to compete for a national title.

By Adrianne Jeffries 12/05/11 11:19am

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nytm board jalak

Five Women Are Running for New York Tech Meetup’s Board; Last Year There Were None

Is it just us, or has the New York Tech Meetup gotten more female-friendly since it was taken over by a Girl Scout? Last year New Work City-based user experience designer Whitney Hess was briefly the only woman last year running for a spot on the board of the New York Tech Meetup—the largest tech organization in New York City—before she dropped out without comment, leaving 17 men in the race for two board seats in the newly incorporated nonprofit.

But this year? There are at least four women vying for one open seat in addition to Ms. Hess: Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 10/21/11 2:23pm

XX in Tech

via Vogue and a scanner.

Rachel Sterne Gets the Vogue Treatment as the ‘Kate Middleton’ of New York Tech

Exactly a year after Anna Wintour sprinkled her glossy fashion dust on Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Vogue has decided to switch its gaze from women in New York politics to women in New York tech.

After taking a gander at Silicon Alley’s female founders, investors, and stalwarts, the magazine opted to profile New York City’s social media-savvy chief digital officer (or “head nerd” in 4 Times Square parlance) Rachel Sterne for being “the face of a new era of digital governance.”

The feature, which isn’t available online (Bad, Conde! Stop that!) says, “Sterne is part of a new generation of bright, attractive women who are turning Silicon Alley into less of a boys’ club.” We’d quibble with Vogue‘s  notion that women judged on their relative attractiveness makes it less of a boy’s club. But hey, it’s Vogue, which means we get references to Ms. Sterne’s “willowy, six-foot frame” and “striking figure.” Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 7/26/11 12:40pm

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learnvest istock

It’s All About the Branding: LearnVest Debuts Personal Finance Manager for Women

We knew something was up when news leaked last month that LearnVest had raised a multi-million round which the women-focused personal finance blog was trying to keep quiet. ”We had not given that to TechCrunch by any means,” a slightly harried-sounding PR rep for LearnVest told Betabeat at the time when we called to ask what the heck a content site needs that kind of money for. Sources hinted that LearnVest was building “something like Mint.com for women” and today LearnVest announced My Money Center, which aggregates bills, loans, credit cards, bank accounts, 401K and more into an interface that resembles an email inbox, as well as the complementary LearnVest Advice Center with expert advice and financial planning courses. For women. Read More