Actually, a close examination of the information technology field reveals that there are several paradoxes:
Some of the Silicon bravado is over-the-top. As one entrepreneur and board director described it,
Silicon Valley is entrepreneurship on steroids. Companies scale here like nowhere else. . . . Everything is magnified. . . . Many personalities (on boards and in the C-suite) are bigger than life. . . . In Silicon Valley, people are encouraged to swing for the fences and to “dent the universe,” as Steve Jobs used to say.5
The most intriguing paradox of all, though, may jump out at you. No fewer than twelve large cap, prominent information technology companies have or have had female CEOs:
With women in the ascendancy, the pathways for women to board positions and upper management should multiply, the theory goes. Commentators refer to this as the “trickle-down effect” or the “talent rationale.”7 Many feel that “female CEOs . . . will be particularly sensitive to women’s concerns.”8 A 2015 Pew Research Center survey found that 71 percent of women “believed that having more women in leadership positions in business . . . would improve the quality of life for all women.”9 Having a woman at the top should correlate well with an increase in women directors and managers. The theory has intuitive appeal. Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright supported the theory with the much-acclaimed statement, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”10
Although the sample is small, the overall record of women as CEOs of large companies (not in information technology) confirms the theory. The evidence in support of the trickle-down theory, across a spectrum of companies and industries, seems robust:
At Avon Products, [with] Andrea Jung as CEO, four women were directors. The same was true at Sara Lee, with Brenda Barnes as CEO and three women directors. . . . PepsiCo, with Indra Nooyi as CEO, had three women among ten directors. Marion Sandler, as CEO of Golden West Financial, presided over a board with four women directors.11
And the trickle-down trend continues. Thanks to its CEO Sheri McCoy (now departed), Avon Products now has seven women on an eleven-person board. With women CEOs, the following corporations have three or more female directors on their boards: General Motors, DuPont, International Business Machines, PepsiCo, Xerox, Hewlett-Packard (before the split), Frontier Communications, and International Game Technology.12
The further case is that a trickle down would replicate itself among the executive ranks, and not only in boardroom seats, should a woman become the CEO of a corporation.13 Anecdotal evidence supports this claim as well. “For example, since Susan Ivey became CEO at tobacco company Reynolds American [RAI], the company has appointed 19 women to officer positions and four of the top seven corporate officials [were] women. Four of the seven highest officials at the company are women.”14 Moreover, Ms. Ivey’s successor as RAI CEO, who also is a woman, Susan Cameron, has followed in Ms. Ivey’s footsteps.15
In information technology, the evidence, such as it is, is mixed. A tendency exists for some women in leadership roles not to give a leg up, or a hand, to other women lower down in the organization, believing that subordinates should “do it themselves.” Moreover, certain of the female senior managers have been outspoken about beliefs of the latter sort. For example, on one hand, while Patricia Russo was CEO of Alcatel-Lucent, she saw to it that three other women joined her on the board of directors. In stark contrast, Carleton Fiorina, for six years CEO of tech giant Hewlett-Packard, took no interest in advancing the careers of female subordinates, making a point of publicly proclaiming her stance.
On the Today Show, Ms. Fiorina proclaimed to the interviewer and the audience that her gender had never held her back. “I have spent a lifetime believing that the most important thing is to focus on what’s inside the package.”16 Ms. Fiorina vehemently denied the existence of any such thing as a glass ceiling, stressing that “a competitive industry cannot afford sexism.” Ms. Fiorina flatly refused the title “role model for women.”17 She told a New York Times reporter, “I hope that we are at the point that everyone has figured out that there is not a glass ceiling.”18 Confirming the views that she expressed, there is no evidence of any trickle down whatsoever during Ms. Fiorina’s six years at the helm of HP.19 “Few women broke into the management ranks under [Carleton Fiorina]: no trickle down occurred.”
Yahoo! under CEO Marissa Mayer seemed to have resembled HP under CEO Carly Fiorina. Shortly before taking the Yahoo! position, while Ms. Mayer was the highest-ranking woman at Google, she openly proclaimed, “I’m not a girl at Google, I’m a geek at Google.”20 Then at Yahoo!, when she had become CEO, Ms. Mayer ended work-at-home and telecommuting arrangements that women employees found to be especially valuable when they had child-rearing responsibilities. At nearly the same time, Ms. Mayer had built a childcare center for her own child adjacent to her office. Commentators labeled it “one of the most tone-deaf decisions in recent memory.”21
In contrast, at Reynolds American under CEO Susan Ivey, a trickle down (a robust trickle down at that) took place. The difference is not due to any specific factor (increased mentoring, elimination of information asymmetries). The difference is due to tone at the top.22
Hypothetically at least, then, with women at the helm of a number of information technology corporations, females should have an average or above average representation in management and on boards of directors. They most decidedly do not.
Why not? Is it because, as many in the industry maintain, that as a group women lack the educational background and aptitude to enter the industry in the first place, and thereafter to climb upward through the ranks? Is the underrepresentation of women because, perceiving themselves as “masters of the universe,” those in charge of Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley institutions believe themselves too busy to deal with diversity issues or to elevate those issues to a higher place on their agendas? Or is it because CEOs and other opinion makers in the Valley exalt themselves as having Teflon shields that will insulate them from any negative consequences or blowback emanating from their decided lack of attention to the diversity issue?
A principal factor, one somewhat removed from the CEO suite, that is said to dominate Silicon Valley and information technology companies is the prevalence of what author Katherine Losse has termed “an unrepentantly boyish company culture.”23 Ms. Losse joined Facebook in 2005 as customer-relations manager, at a time when Facebook had fifty employees, all but one of whom were male. On her first day, she confronted a bevy of “young, plain looking guys in T shirts, gazing at their screens, startled—if not displeased—to see a strange new woman in the office.”24 The surrounding Facebook workroom resembled the firehouse wall of forty or fifty years ago: “Much of the graffiti in the room featured stylized women with large breasts bursting from small tops that tapered down to tiny waists, mimicking the proportions of female videogame characters.”25
On the cover of its inaugural issue, in 1972, Ms. magazine featured Wonder Woman on the cover. Wonder Woman’s appearance heralded the dawn of a new day in which, increasingly, women would be able to enter business, the professions, sports, and most or all other pursuits. In those callings, women would be able to scale heights the likes of which they had never been able to scale before. Yet, historically, Wonder Woman had only one weakness. She would lose her strength if a man were to bind her in chains. Women have gone on to climb many of those rock faces standing before them, perhaps not in the numbers they would have wished but with increasing frequency nonetheless.
Information technology stands in marked contrast to all of that. Have the men who hold the reins of power tied aspiring Wonder Women in chains, or is there some other explanation for this paradox in information technology? In 2017 Wonder Woman returned to the motion picture theaters, taking a place among the leaders at the box office. Can Wonder Women throw off those chains that have held them down in the IT industry and at the companies that populate its ranks?