In Brief

New Study Finds Super Chill Start-Up World Just As Sexist As Stuffy Corporate World

Dow Jones VentureSource did a study women’s presence in the structure of less traditional workplaces like, say, the start-up environment at companies like Twitter, FourSquare and Dropbox. What they found was…not especially encouraging if you’re into stuff like gender parity in the workplace.

MediaBistro reports:

The survey analysed more than 20,000 companies, and Glam Media, a lifestyle content creator which runs a number of websites, was singled out for high praise amongst all startups, as 29 percent of its 28 executives are female.

Which contrasts somewhat sharply with Twitter, which has the heady total of one female executive within its roster.

Yep. One. And that would be Katie Stanton, former special advisor to the U.S. Department of State and, since July 2010, Twitter’s head of international strategy…

Twitter certainly isn’t alone in this shameful display. Foursquare has no female executives at all, and Dropbox only has one. Except… Foursquare has 100 employees, and Dropbox has just five.

Twitter has 1,300+.

Booooooo. How is it that even in the start-up world, for apps where (as MediaBistro points out) the majority of users are female, is it still so hard to have an executive staff makeup that at least somewhat resembles the gender ratio in real life? Especially since, as the Dow Jones study found, having more female executives is a net good for these companies. It’s odd to see this patterns reproduced in the looser, newer and highly adaptive world of tech start-ups. It’s certainly a thorny problem to untangle, and the causes behind it don’t seem to be clear to anyone, including the authors of the study. What do you think?

[H/t MediaBistro]

TAGS: glass ceiling | Start-Ups | women in the workplace

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