Twitter's not alone - 8 other Silicon Valley IPO companies have no women on board
- Lauren Hepler and Shana Lynch
- Silicon Valley Business Journal
Of that group, four have one female board member. Redwood City’s OncoMed Pharmaceuticals had the most with two.
Of the three remaining Valley
companies waiting to launch, only one has any women on its board— textbook
rental site Chegg, which bought on Facebook VP Marne Levine as part of its IPO
announcement.
The remaining two, which lack any women board members, are pharmaceutical
company Relypsa with eight board members and Barracuda Networks, a security and
networking company, with 10.
Twitter’s monoculture board
created PR problems Oct. 5, after Duke University researcher and entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa noted the
company’s diversity problem in a New York Times article.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, a former stand-up
comic, made
light of the issue, tweeting back with an insult. He called Wadhwa the
Carrot Top of academics, comparing him to the much maligned prop comedian..
Costolo then told Wadhwa, who has a book coming out this year on the topic of
women in tech, that bringing women onto the board can be an exercise in tokenism
— just “checking a box.”But would adding women to Twitter’s board really constitute empty theater?
The majority of the Twitter’s users are female. That means the company’s board is missing out on the first-hand perspective of its largest user segment.
A white paper on the topic by
entrepreneur and investor Cindy
Padnos also found that women-operated, venture-backed high tech companies
average 12 percent higher annual revenues. They also use on average one-third
less capital than male counterparts' startups.
Lauren Hepler covers economic development, sports, and hospitality for the Silicon Valley Business Journal. She can be reached at 408.299.1820
Shana Lynch is Managing Editor at the Business Journal. Her phone number is 408.299.1831.
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