One of the biggest news stories in the tech world today is that Mary Meeker has joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a venture capitalist group that has backed everyone from Google to Zynga to Amazon. "Meeker analyzes technology trends and gives research-dense, high energy presentations at conferences like O'Reilly and TechWeb's Web 2.0 Summit," wrote Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb after the news was announced. "How prominent is Meeker? Sarah Lacy, who has covered the Silicon Valley VC market for years, puts it this way at TechCrunch this morning: 'As an analyst, Mary Meeker was as famous in the dot com glory days as [Kleiner's John] Doerr was as a VC, so it's appropriate and seemingly a long time coming that the two would wind up as partners.'"
Meeker is a big deal. And her work at Kleiner Perkins will inevitable have a huge impact on which start-ups get the backing they need to develop some traction in a crowded market.
As this powerful woman dominates the news today, I thought it would be interesting to repost this old article from one of the Smithsonian's blogs that asks what role the media plays today in portraying women in science and technology.
This post was originally published on the National Museum of American History's "O Say Can You See?" blog. It is republished here with permission. It was written by Arthur Molella, the Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Director at the National Museum of American History's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.