Melody Meckfessel, Google Engineering Manager, Is A Woman You Should Know

Melody Meckfessel is joining the ranks of fabulously inspiring women in tech.

Meckfessel is "a part-time wine maker and a single mother," as well as an engineering manager at Google. Cade Wetz at Wired interviewed Meckfessel about her work at Google, and what it's like to work in such a male-dominated profession. According to the New York Times, women earn just 18 percent of computer science degrees, and an April 2013 NPR report found that only 20 percent of American programmers are women.

Meckfessel, whose LinkedIn profile shows that she has worked at Google for at least nine years, told Wetz that in her early career she had two wardrobes -- the jeans and hoodies she'd wear to work to fit in with the other engineers, and the feminine clothing that she wore the rest of the time.

She also told Wired that changing her sartorial tastes was only one way she fit in in a male-dominated industry.

“I began working at startups in my early twenties, and then I worked at bigger software companies, and I’ve now been at Google,” she said in the same interview. “Over the years, I was generally the only woman in room, and I adapted, in many ways, to be one of the guys.”

Kelly Studer, a friend and colleague of Meckfessel's at Google, told Wired that Meckfessel earned her place at Google based on merit. “She’s not on a crusade to prove that women deserve to be in that place. She just knows she deserves to be in that place.”

Here's to more women finding their place -- and being themselves in it.