Recently, tech leaders Apple and Google passed Coca-Cola as possessing the most well-known and second most well-known trademarks in the world.1 Information technology (IT) companies’ shares now represent 16 percent of the total capitalization of shares on U.S. securities markets and in that, as well as in other respects such as employment, are growing.2 In rough terms, IT’s market capitalization is equivalent to 16 percent of 127.2 percent of $18.86 trillion (estimated 2016 U.S. gross domestic product), or $3.84 trillion.3 That valuation, for one industry alone, exceeds the total gross domestic products of France ($2.59 trillion) and the United Kingdom ($2.65 trillion), and rivals Germany’s. U.S. IT’s market capitalization trails only Japan’s and China’s GDPs.4 Information technology deems itself “the emerging center of the world,” and rightly so.5
Yet tech is the most backward of major industries in promoting women to leadership positions or positioning them for future ascension into executive positions. Even lower down in the ranks, the number of women tech companies employ has declined from 37 percent of employees in 1995 to 24 percent today (2016), with prognostications that the number will decline further, to 22 percent or lower in the next decade.6
Higher up, in leadership ranks, as revealed in compensation tables that companies file with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), women account for only 5 percent of the most highly paid tech company executives (see chapter 1). The underrepresentation of women—and the lack of diversity overall—is stark and noteworthy.
Furthermore, despite awareness of the issues involved within the industry, the situation does not improve. Jodi Kantor of the New York Times titled her 2014 in-depth study “A Brand New World in Which Men Ruled: Instead of Narrowing Gender Gaps, the Technology Industry Created Vast New Ones.”7
By way of comparison, women constitute 19.2 percent of directorships in large corporations generally, 19 percent of Congress, 21 percent of Fortune 500 general counsels, and 26.4 percent of college and university presidents.8
In information technology, of those women in executive positions, a supermajority of them have law degrees (JDs) or master’s degrees in business administration (MBAs), leading one to question the headlong push for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education for women. Or, at least, educators should consider modifying the STEM emphasis in ways more conducive to assumption of leadership roles.
I had originally planned to title this book The Boo List and the Paradox, referring to what had attracted me to the subject in the first place, namely, that while only 5 percent of senior executives in tech are female (the “boo list”), compared with 25 percent for U.S. public companies generally, twelve large IT corporations have had female CEOs (the paradox). But the present title helps in better answering the question early reviewers posed: “Who is the audience?” Throughout, the book emphasizes that the audience is the industry and companies within it. In contrast, the books on the market today, especially emerging over the last two decades, are all first and foremost advice and “how-to” books for aspiring women. A recent leader in that regard, featured on the cover of Time no less, was Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In (2013).9 Chapter 8 lists many of those “how-to” and advice books for women.
A second set of books on diversity in information technology aims at educators and academic institutions, telling them what they should do to encourage and train girls and young women. Chapter 6 reviews certain of those.
But few authors—maybe none—have written extensively about a third subject, what the industry and individual companies within it might do.10 Those who do write about the area have given the industry a free pass. It’s high time for observers, pundits, and scholars to turn the spotlight on the corporations themselves. With the illumination so provided, finger pointing—indeed, a significant amount of finger pointing—is in order. What can and should the industry and companies within it be considering, evaluating, and possibly adopting to solve this social and economic problem, one with significant ramifications for tech businesses and their shareholders?
A question that seemingly always arises is, Why women? Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique appeared in 1963.11 Germaine Greer published The Female Eunuch in 1970.12 Bella Abzug, “Battling Bella,” reached the House of Representatives in 1970.13 Soon after, once the women’s movement had taken root, leaders of business and corporate boards made statements and promises on the equality of women in their organizations, promises that nearly fifty years after have only partially been fulfilled in some instances, and not at all in others. The issue has been with us for a half century, but another group of leaders and spokesmen, uniformly men, continue to ask the “Why women” question, over and over again.
Although not a primary subject for this book, there are a number of reasons to encourage diligent efforts to include more females on promotion ladders and in senior positions:
There are many more reasons given for increasing the number of women on boards of directors, in the C-suite, and in senior management.17 One reason that is unquantifiable but ubiquitous is the promise that boards of directors and corporations have held out to women for a larger and more meaningful role in corporate affairs, promises they have made but not always fulfilled for decades now. As Eleanor Roosevelt said years ago, “A woman is like a tea bag, you never know how strong it is until it’s in hot water.” It’s time corporations, especially in the tech industry, live up to the promises they have made and to find out just how right Mrs. Roosevelt was.
A further question is, Why women? in the sense of a field for study. Twenty years ago, when I began studies on diversity in corporate governance and management, I intended to explore multiple aspects of the diversity question: nomination, election, and appointment of African Americans and Latinos, as well as of women. I sent a phalanx of law students out to research aspects of SEC filings, including proxy statements and compensation tables. The students found the task difficult, if not impossible. They could not, for instance, readily identify who was African American from either first names or surnames, while they could identify females from their first names. I then truncated the diversity studies to the subject of women as corporate directors or senior managers. Later, students in my diversity seminar such as Dan Garcia have researched the subject of Latino directors of public companies. By and large, though, while recognizing the immense importance of the subject, I leave it for another day.
I wrote the first treatise in the United States about legal and business aspects of corporate leadership, Corporate Governance (1993).18 I have authored several other law/business books about corporate governance.19 For a number of years, I co-taught the corporate governance offering at the University of Melbourne School of Law in Australia as well as from time to time here at the University of Pittsburgh. As a consultant, I have conducted a number of daylong governance workshops for boards of publicly held companies. On the subject of women’s role in corporate governance, I have authored two of the best-known books: No Seat at the Table: How Governance and Law Keep Women Out of the Boardroom (2007),20 and The Last Male Bastion: Gender and the CEO Suite in America’s Public Companies (2010).21
Women on corporate boards and in executive positions have become front-burner issues in many countries on the Pacific Rim. The issue has acquired much currency in Europe since Norway adopted a 40 percent quota law in 2003.
The book is an attempt to marry extensive scholarly and hands-on involvement with corporate governance with what I know or can learn about one particularly pressing problem, namely, the dearth of women in leadership roles in an important industry, information technology. The focus is on what companies could do. That is the audience, as opposed to women themselves, or educators and educational institutions, or academics who regard themselves as experts in the field.
Reviewers, especially academic ones, wish to see tome-like treatises, laden with statistics, studies, critiques of other studies, and long narratives based upon interviews. Those were the books of the 1980s and 1990s. They were by academics at leading institutions such as Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, or the University of Minnesota, to name a few. Laudatory as they may be, those books have not moved the needle. The number of women in tech and in leadership roles in information technology companies has not advanced. Indeed, as journalist Jodi Kantor of the New York Times has pointed out, evidence exists to maintain that the number is declining. Most of all, though, 200,000- and 300,000-word treatments have become obsolete. The Internet has rendered them so. Any deeper one wishes to go, or any ammunition one wishes to gather for counterargument, is available with a few keystrokes. It’s “in the cloud,” accessible via the Internet.
In her latest book, Stanford professor Deborah Rhode chronicles the progress that corporations have made on the diversity front, noting that we now “confront second generation problems of equality that involve not deliberate discrimination but unconscious bias, in-group favoritism, and inhospitable work-family structures.”22 Information technology, however, remains largely mired in first-generation problems, those of the pinups on the firehouse wall era. Rampant objectification of women, inhospitable and hostile environments, inequalities in pay for comparable work, tokenism, imposition of stereotypes, and other evils of the past still bedevil information technology companies.
I wish to thank my assistant, Patty Blake, for her help in getting the manuscript to the publisher. I also wish to thank Eric Lowe, University of Pittsburgh, JD 2013; Katie Hopkins, JD 2014; Chad Ostrosky, JD 2016; and Michael Roche, JD 2017, for research assistance in preparation of the book. Above all, I wish to thank Linda Tashbook, a reference and international law librarian here at the University of Pittsburgh, for her help and support along the way. Many individuals at New York University Press lent a hand in preparing the manuscript for publication, including Clara Platter, Amy Klopfenstein, Betsy Steve, Ciara O’Connor, and Dorothea Stillman Halliday.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, January 5, 2018