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 teamthat consists entirely of older white men.
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.)
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.
He went on to argue with multiple users, including Wadhwa directly, that the issue needs to be about more than "checking a box."
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:
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:
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