"This is particularly glaring at a time when there is clear evidence that companies with diverse boards perform far better than the companies with more homogenous boards."
Wow - California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), the CA teachers pension fund, wrote Facebook a letter expressing their disappointment over the lack of diversity on the Facebook board. HUGE.
Why is it huge? Because suddenly this isn’t about social good, it’s about MONEY. The Money CalSTRS has put into Facebook - and the money it sees Facebook as giving up by not having a woman’s voice on its board.
This is going to put Sheryl Sandberg in a bit of a tough place with respect to her call on women stepping up on one hand and her seeming not to care about whether she has a seat on Facebook’s board. See this from the New Yorker feature on Sandberg from last July:
Among the hottest new companies— Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Groupon, Foursquare—none, as Kara Swisher reported in the blog All Things Digital, has a female director on its board. PayPal has no women on its five-member board; Apple has one of seven; Amazon one of eight; Google two of nine. When I asked Mark Zuckerberg why his five-member board has no women, his voice, which is normally loud, lowered to a whisper: “We have a very small board.” He went on, “I’m going to find people who are helpful, and I don’t particularly care what gender they are or what company they are. I’m not filling the board with check boxes.” (He recently added a sixth member: another man.) The venture-capital firms that support new companies have even sharper imbalances; Sequoia Partners lists eighteen partners on its Web site, none of them women.
And
[Pat] Mitchell, for example, wonders why she hasn’t insisted on becoming a member of Facebook’s all-male board. When I asked about this topic, Sandberg said, “Our board is tiny. It’s not an issue for my life.” When told of Sandberg’s answer, Mitchell affectionately said, “I’m going to have to sit with her and revisit this.”
I suspect the revisiting will happen soon.
For the record, here’s Facebook’s current board:
Facebook’s board currently includes Mr. Zuckerberg, technology executive Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist Jim Breyer, Washington Post Co. CEO Donald Graham,Netflix Inc. CEO Reed Hastings, former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
This is an amazing development - suddenly the biggest news in tech, the Facebook IPO, is focused on women, and the ratio. Wow.
California Pension Fund Challenges Facebook Over Diversity on Board [WSJ]
A Woman’s Place Can Sheryl Sandberg upend Silicon Valley’s male-dominated culture? [New Yorker]
