Columnist Vivek Wadhwa spotlights women he believes would do an exceptional job on the board of Twitter and other tech companies.
Technology companies have few — if any — women on their boards. They say this is because there is only a small pool of technical women to recruit from.
Twitter, which recently filed for an IPO, has no women on its board of directors. As do most Silicon Valley companies, it has an almost all-male management team and an all-male investor group. And it is unapologetic.
In response to criticism I made about the lack of diversity on the Twitter board, CEO Dick Costolo chose not to address the issue. Instead, he launched apersonal attack on me and tweeted that “the whole thing has to be about more than checking a box & saying ‘we did it!’ ”
Corporate America is more professional but makes the same excuses: There are not enough qualified women and it wants to do more than check a box. This is how CEOs account for the dearth of women on boards — as of 2012, only 14 percent of the S&P 1500.
Is there really a shortage of women who are qualified to be on technology-company boards? It depends on how you define the qualifications. If the requirement is that board members must have strong technical skills, then yes, there surely is a shortage. The pipeline is very weak, and fewer women than men are entering computer science. This criterion is however disingenuous or dishonest. Look at the composition of the Twitter board as an example. As Connie Guglielmo reported in Forbes:
See full Article: http://wadhwa.com/2013/10/16/washington-post-its-time-for-tech-companies-to-fix-the-gender-imbalance/
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