ABSTRACT
When Marissa Mayer was selected to be CEO of Yahoo! in 2012, she became only the twentieth female CEO of a Fortune 500 company and, at age 37, the youngest. Although the engineering-dominated tech industry has long been a bastion for men, Yahoo!’s choice to go with this specific woman as its new leader made perfect sense for a number of reasons. First, in recent years, women have become the leading users of technology. Women, for example, perform more Web searches than men. Women, too, spend more time on social-networking sites and they shop online more than men. Women are more likely than men to carry a smartphone or tablet. Consumers drive technology now. The days when businesses provided the most revenue are over, a fact that many companies, such as Research In Motion (RIM), the maker of the BlackBerry, learned the hard way. 1
