Depth of SV gender gap revealed

Depth of Silicon Valley boardroom gender gap revealed by new data

Enlarge

Fenwick & West LLP

A breakdown of how far behind Silicon Valley's SV 150 public companies are on board gender diversity, when compared to the nation's largest public companies on the S&P 100.

Lauren Hepler

Economic Development Reporter- Silicon Valley Business Journal

Email  | Twitter  | LinkedIn  | Google+

To say that Silicon Valley tech firms merely lag other industries on board diversity misses the point. It's the scale of the shortfall that matters.
New data shows that large, public Silicon Valley companies are about half as likely to have a woman on the board as top-performing public companies overall.
Mountain View law firm Fenwick & West LLP compared the S&P 100 Index and the SV 150 list of the Valley's biggest public companies (measured by revenue) in tech and life sciences.
They found that 98 percent of large public companies included in the S&P 100 Index now have at least one woman director. Only 56 percent of the 150 public tech and life science companies on the SV 150 can say the same. Eight companies — giants like Hewlett-Packard and Apple Inc. — are part of both of the S&P 100 and the SV 150.
Fenwick & West analyzed 18 years of public filings on boards and corporate management, which covered the 1996-2013 proxy seasons.
It's also worth noting that the S&P 100 generally includes bigger companies worth much more money than those on the SV 150. Research indicates that diversity may help the bottom line.
S&P 100 companies average 170,000 employees and have an average market cap of $98 billion. The range is much wider on the SV 150, spanning from Apple's $165 billion in 2012 revenue to Jive Software's $114 million haul.
Other interesting gender gap data points included in the new report:
—Of the Silicon Valley companies analyzed, 40 percent have one woman director, 12.7 percent have two female directors and 4 percent have three women on the board.
—For the S&P 100, the breakdown is as follows: 13 percent of companies have one woman on the board, 47 percent have two, 22 percent have three, 14 percent have four and 2 percent have five women directors.

• Page 1
• 2

|View All