Shortly after Twitter released its IPO paperwork on Thursday, The New York Times highlighted a troubling statistic: one — that's the number of women listed at the top of the company.
Twitter has no female investors, no women on its board and only one woman on its top executive team — the company's general counsel — who was hired just over a month ago. It's certainly not unheard of for tech companies to have a disproportionate number of men in higher-up positions: Facebook, for example, didn't appoint its first female board member until the month after it went public, and Apple is somewhat infamous for having a leadership team that consists entirely of older white men.
See also: Will Twitter Ever Be Mainstream?
Even so, Twitter has come under fire from some critics. The Times quotes one in particular, Stanford professor and columnist Vivek Wadhwa, who describes this as "male chauvinistic thinking." He adds, "The fact that they went to the IPO without a single woman on the board, how dare they?"
On Saturday, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo decided to weigh in on the issue through — what else — a series of exchanges on Twitter. First, he took a swipe at Wadhwa, comparing him to Carrot Top, a much maligned comedian. (If that sounds like a random comparison, consider that Costolo used to be a standup comedian himself.)
@rich1 Vivek Wadhwa is the Carrot Top of academic sources.
— dick costolo (@dickc) October 5, 2013
That tweet set off a flurry of critical responses from other users, which prompted Costolo to clarify that he wasn't brushing off the subject of hiring women, but rather the way it was framed by Wadhwa.
@anildash huh??? I was making fun of his propensity for silly hyperbole. I didn't say anything about the topic or even reference it!
— dick costolo (@dickc) October 5, 2013
He went on to argue with multiple users, including Wadhwa directly, that the issue needs to be about more than "checking a box."
@anildash Well, that's exactly it. The whole thing has to be about more than checking a box & saying "we did it!"
& you DO concur. SO MUCH!
— dick costolo (@dickc) October 5, 2013
@wadhwa you're not seeing my point. you give people an easy out by just checking a box. The issues are much bigger than checking any 1 box.
— dick costolo (@dickc) October 5, 2013
That said, multiple reports suggest that Twitter has made it a "top priority" to add a woman to its board of directors by the time it goes public.
For now, Costolo's efforts to address the issue only seemed to do more harm than good:
Sorely disappointed to see @dickc respond defensively to criticisms of industry sexism. Why not just lead, as Twitter does on free speech?
— Anil Dash (@anildash) October 5, 2013
The responses also serve as a reminder that comments made by Costolo and Twitter's other top execs on the social network will be scrutinized much more as the company goes public. Farhad Manjoo at the Wall Street Journal put it best:
Twitter adding new Risk Factor to S1: Our business might suffer once CEOs realize that Twitter gives them an easy way to royally step in it.
— Farhad Manjoo (@fmanjoo) October 6, 2013
Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty