Curtain Is Rising on a Tech Premiere With (as Usual) a Mostly Male Cast
The New York Times
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter’s financial filing for its Wall Street debut was chock-full of juicy tidbits, from the name of its richest founder to a list of its escalating losses. But one revelation was particularly startling: Just a single woman among its top officials.
The board? All white men. The investors? All men. The executive officers? All men but for the general counsel, Vijaya Gadde, who has had the job for five weeks.
“This is the elite arrogance of the Silicon Valley mafia, the Twitter mafia,” said Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at Stanford’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance who is writing a book on women in tech. “It’s the same male chauvinistic thinking. The fact that they went to the I.P.O. without a single woman on the board, how dare they?”
Even as women make significant headway in fields from law to business, and technology zooms along as one of the fastest-growing sectors of the economy, its doors remain virtually closed to women. Just 5.7 percent of employed women in the United States work in the computer industry, and only about 2 percent of women have a degree in a high-tech field, according to Catalyst, a prominent research firm studying women and business.
And despite tech executives like Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook and Marissa Mayer of Yahoo, and grass-roots efforts to attract women to the field — like Girls Who Code, a software engineering training program — Twitter’s male-dominated cast shows how stubbornly difficult it has been for women to make their way to positions of power and influence in tech.
The reasons are many. The tech industry has an image problem — think geeky man alone at a computer — that repels girls from pursuing it. A sexist engineering culture often dissuades young women in the field, as does the small number of women role models. Venture capital tends to be an old boys’ club.
Having women executives matters not just for purposes of equality, business analysts say, but for product development and the bottom line. More women use social media than men, according to a study last month by the Pew Research Center; men and women use Twitter roughly equally. Twitter earns revenue from advertising and women are the chief consumers.
Studies have all found the same thing, according to groups who advise and advocate for women in tech, including Astia and the Anita Borg Institute: Diversity benefits research, development and innovation, the heartbeat of Silicon Valley. It also increases profit, something Twitter sorely needs.
“People who build technology should represent the people who use it,” reads one of the mottos of the National Center for Women and Information Technology, another such group.
Yet women rarely fill the technical and engineering positions at Silicon Valley companies, which carry the most prestige and are most likely to lead to corner offices. Tellingly, Ms. Gadde, the only woman of high enough rank to appear on the public offering filing, is a lawyer, not an engineer — and until Aug. 30, her position was held by a man, Alex Macgillivray, who unexpectedly resigned.
Twitter has several women vice presidents in business, not technical, roles: Katie Jacobs Stanton in international market development, Chloe Sladden in media, Janet VanHuysse in human resources and Jana Messerschmidt in business development.
Twitter by no means stands out in Silicon Valley as being particularly unwelcoming to women. It spends money and time on initiatives like Girls Who Code, where its chief technology officer, Adam Messinger, is on the board. Still, Twitter’s entire staff reflects the gender imbalance at the highest levels. Significantly less than half of its engineers are women.
Twitter declined to comment on the issue Friday. But in an interview in March, Mr. Messinger said hiring more women engineers was a priority.
“Half our customers, more or less, are women, and we want to have empathy for our customers, and part of that is having a wide variety of opinions in-house,” Mr. Messinger said. “It’s also something a lot of people here think is the right thing to do.”
But, he added, “There is definitely a supply-side problem.”
Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief executive, has prioritized finding a woman to be on the board, but has found it difficult, according to two people with knowledge of his plans who were not authorized to speak about them publicly.
“Everyone is trying for diversity, both gender and ethnic diversity, on boards and in operating positions,” said Rick Devine, chief executive of TalentSky, a Silicon Valley recruiting firm. “The issue isn’t the intention, the issue is just the paucity of candidates.”
But some people in the tech industry rolled their eyes at the pipeline excuse.
“Here is the thing about these companies: When something is a priority, they move fast and break things,” said Rachel Sklar, co-founder of TheLi.st, a digital media company for women in business. “In a year they knew they were going to go public, knowing this was an issue, in the era of ‘Lean In,’ it was not a priority.”
Even if the pool for board-qualified women in technology is shallow, Twitter’s business overlaps with other industries like media, entertainment and advertising. Its most recently appointed director, for instance, was Peter Chernin, former president of News Corporation.
Across Silicon Valley, start-ups tend to have all-male boards, largely because board members are the venture capitalists who invested in the company, 89 percent of whom are men, according to the National Venture Capital Association.
It is often when tech companies first face the pressures and demands of being a public company that they recruit women to their boards. Facebook and Zynga, for instance, added their first women directors after going public.
Not that the public companies fare much better. Ms. Sandberg; Ms. Mayer; Virginia M. Rometty, I.B.M.’s chief; and Meg Whitman, Hewlett-Packard’s chief, are exceptions to the rule. At Google, which made a point of hiring and promoting women when it started, the percentage of women in senior positions has shrunk in the last several years.
The rate at which women leave the tech industry is double the rate of men, according to “Women Technologists Count,” a report released last week by the Anita Borg Institute. The reasons include lack of promotions, time away from their families and aversion to company cultures.
Women tend not to join start-ups during the high-growth, pre-public offering period, often because the workplace environment is unwelcoming or they perceive it to be that way, said Poornima Vijayashanker, founder of Femgineer, which advises women on careers in tech, and the first woman engineer at Mint, the finance start-up acquired by Intuit. Then, when they do join, they often pursue roles in product management or customer support, even though hard-core engineering or finance roles are more likely to lead to top positions.
“Women need to become more technical,” Ms. Vijayashanker said. “It’s not enough to just learn how to code. They have to really cultivate their technical careers.”
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