REUTERS/Adnan Abidi Facebook's Chief Operating Officer (COO) Sheryl Sandberg attends an interactive session organised by the ladies' wing of industry lobby group Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) in New Delhi July 2, 2014.It's still not a great time to be a woman in Silicon Valley. Especially if you're looking for an executive leadership position.
Silicon Valley knows it has a diversity problem. In the past year, a number of tech companies - including Apple, Google, Facebook, and Yahoo - released reports about their own gender and racial diversity statistics.
A recent report from law firm Fenwick & West LLP shows that women hold just 11% of executive positions at Silicon Valley companies. The report compared that number to the S&P 100, in which 16% of executives are women. The report also says only 9% of executive officers in Silicon Valley are women.
"Most of the companies that released data publicly acknowledged that the numbers reveal ample room for improvement, and many of them committed to increasing the number of women and minorities in the workplace," the report says.
Women at Silicon Valley companies also hold a small percentage of positions as directors (10%), committee chairs (8%), and committee members (10%). Just 16.7% of Silicon Valley companies surveyed have a woman who is a top corporate/business development executive. The average percentage of women on a Silicon Valley company's board of directors is 15.7%, compared to an S&P 100 company's 20.9%.
The numbers speak for themselves, and they're pretty dismal.
The report concludes: "We hope that such data, and the information in this survey, and the many resources to which it refers, will spur and inform additional thought and discussion among the participants and leaders in the Silicon Valley ecosystem on how to create and sustain a more diverse workplace."