HISTORICAL FACTS

Women in the History of Computing Technology

"Here is the interesting thing that I wonder about. You look at the tremendous success of Facebook. To my mind there is not a lot of commerce going on in these social networking sites. eBay is a community anchored in commerce. It is a commerce site that built a community around it. What has not been proven is if the reverse can happen and people will go to community sites to do commerce."

Meg Whitman

Meg Whitman

Meg Whitman is an American business woman, best known for serving as a President and Chief Executive Officer of eBay from March 1998 to March 2008. Her highly successful tenure at eBay becomes the reason for her to be named the 8th best performing CEO of the past decade by Harvard Business Review and one of the 50 faces that shape the decade by The Financial Times. Currently she is a billionaire and a Republican candidate for Governor of California in the November 2010 election.

Margaret Cushing “Meg” Whitman was born on Long Island, New York in 1956. The daughter of Hendricks Hallett Whitman and Margaret Goodhue, she attends Cold Spring Harbor High School in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Determined to become a doctor, she continues her education at Princeton studying physics and mathematics. After spending a summer selling advertisements in a magazine, however, she changes her mind and switches to economics, and earns her B.A. degree in this subject with honors. In 1979, she also obtains an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Married to Griffith Harsh IV, a neurosurgeon at Stanford University Medical Center, Meg Whitman has lived in Atherton, California since March 1998.

Whitman begins her business career in 1979 working as a brand manager at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio. She, however, does not stay at that job for a long time and moves to San Francisco in order to join Bain & Company’s office there. Initially hired as a consultant, she works her way through the ranks to achieve a senior Vice President position.

Meg Whitman

In 1989, Meg becomes vice president of strategic planning at the Walt Disney Company. In 1991, she joins Stride Rite Corporation before being named president and CEO of Florists’ Transworld Delivery in 1995. In January, 1997, she accepts a job at Hasbro’s Playskool Division as a General Manager. Her work there includes overseeing global management and marketing of two of the world’s best known children’s brands, Playskool and Mr. Potato Head.

Whitman joins the fledgling start-up eBay in March, 1998 when it has just 30 employees and its revenues amount approximately to $4 million. It is her expert guidance that later makes the company king of the dot-coms. EBay, which was initially an online market for a limited number of different types of used stuff, turns into a large forum for selling over 18,000 categories of both new and used merchandise in 27 different countries all over the world. Under Meg’s tenure, by 2002, it transcends all possible scenarios of failure and dissolution to become one of the most successful online businesses of its time. In 2008, the company has already grown to 15,000 employees and $8 billion in annual revenue.

For her success at eBay, Meg Whitman is repeatedly named one of the top 5 most powerful women in business by Fortune Magazine.

Whitman resigns her post as a CEO of eBay in November, 2007, but remains on the Board and as an Advisor to new CEO John Donahoe until late 2008. For her professional achievements, in 2008, she is inducted into the U.S. Business Hall of Fame. She further serves on the board of directors of the eBay Foundation, Procter & Gamble, and DreamWorks SKG until early 2009. In October, 2001, she is appointed to the board of Goldman Sachs.

On September 22, 2009, Meg Whitman announces her plans to run for governor of California in the 2010 election. Her candidacy is endorsed by high-profile Republicans such as Mitt Romney, John McCain, and former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.


The main objective of the Women in Computer Science website is to promote the breadth of the field of computer science and high technologies and outline the numerous opportunities it creates for young people and women in particular. The information presented on it serves solely to meet this objective.