As of today, Twitter hired their first Female board member, Marjorie Scardino. Scardino has worked in both the U.S. and London and was the CEO of the large education company Pearson, in addition to her time on the board of Nokia for 12 years. I was shocked to find out that Twitter has never had a woman on its board, and it reminded me of the segment in Misrepresentaiton on women in top level jobs. The company was criticized for its all-male board about a month ago by The New York Times, and Scardino has been hired in what sadly appears to be a desperate attempt to mitigate much deeper issues of sexism in the company's almost 8-year existence. An article from The Guardian notes that "about 49% of publicly traded tech companies have no women on their boards." Twitter and other tech companies should be embarrassed and need to acknowledge the many brilliant and capable women who are denied entry into the tech sphere. Scardino's wealth of knowledge and experience in the media and tech worlds should not be undermined by Twitter's efforts to keep criticisms at bay.
http://jezebel.com/twitter-adds-a-woman-a-real-live-woman-to-its-1477107906
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/05/twitter-board-hires-dame-marjorie-scardino
That's depressing. Another interesting dynamic of the gender divide in Silicon Valley is that unlike other areas, where you have women at lots of lower levels but few or none at the top, there's just an overall shortage of women at all levels -- there aren't enough women to promote because they're being blocked at the lower levels too. I have a (female) friend who interned at Square last fall so I thought it was really interesting when I was reading up on the company and came across this article: "Jack Dorsey's Square has 13 interns - and not a single one is female," which was a response to Dorsey tweeting a photo of an all-male conference table of his interns for the summer (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/03/jack-dorseys-startup-square-female-interns_n_1647553.html). Definitely key what you said about denying women entry to the tech sphere itself - not just the executive positions.
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