Firms hotly pursue new wave of women in tech

Competition to attract women to join tech company boards intense in Silicon Valley

For months, technology companies have pursued Amy Chang. The calls were relentless, with several feelers a month, said Chang, the chief executive of Accompany, a Silicon Valley start-up. Even when she declines the overtures, the tech companies and their agents keep coming back, asking the same question: Will you please join our board?
 
“I turned down 15 to 20 first meetings” about joining a company board this year, said Chang, 39, who was an executive at Google for seven years before founding Accompany, which makes an executive-briefing app. “This whole thing is so crazy.”
 
Chang eventually agreed to one invitation. In October, she was appointed to the board of Cisco Systems, the behemoth Silicon Valley maker of networking gear. The role pays her a $75,000 annual retainer and gives her a grant of restricted stock worth several hundred thousand dollars. She is now the youngest of Cisco’s 11 board members by at least a decade, and one of four women.
 
Even by Silicon Valley standards, where recruiting wars are legion, attracting women to join tech company boards has become intense. While many companies still want the highest-profile women in the industry — think Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook or Meg Whitman of Hewlett Packard Enterprise — a new pool of candidates is also being hotly pursued. And those women are younger, tend to be ethnically diverse and have grown up in digital businesses for much of their careers.
 
The competition for these women is thriving as tech companies are under growing pressure to diversify their boards. While Twitter and other tech companies have taken steps to add more women to boards, the tech industry still lags others in gender diversity. Among Silicon Valley’s 150 largest companies, only 15 per cent of board seats were filled by women in 2016, compared with 21 per cent for companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, according to the research firm Equilar.
 
A lack of diversity permeates many parts of the tech industry — the overall work forces of companies like Facebook, Google and others strongly skew male — but boardrooms are a particular focus because they are power centers that can help spur broader changes. Board positions are often coveted for their prestige and big paycheques; median pay for directors at large public companies was $270,000 in 2015, according to Equilar.
 
Chang is one of the new generation of tech women who are now being courted to close that gap. Others include Stacy Brown-Philpot, the chief executive of TaskRabbit, a San Francisco start-up that connects people to cleaners, handymen and others who do household tasks. Brown-Philpot was appointed to her first public company board, HP Inc, in 2015.
 
Also in demand are Selina Tobaccowala, who runs the start-up Gixo, and Clara Shih, the chief executive of Hearsay Systems, who joined the board of Starbucks five years ago, at age 29, executive recruiters said.

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