Facebook, Under Fire For Lack Of Female Directors On The Board, Maybe Needs A List

There are plenty of options for adding women directors to Facebook’s board.
By Connie Guglielmo (Contributing Writer, Forbes)

Facebook, preparing an initial public offering that could value the social network as high as $100 billion, has plenty of options for adding women directors to its board, say women tech executives who have offered up candidates CEO Mark Zuckerberg might consider.

At the top of the list: Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s own chief operating officer. Facebook, which filed for its IPO in February, has since been criticized by activist groups and shareholders for the lack of diversity on its board – most notably, the lack of a single women among its all male, all white directors.

Those seven directors include Zuckerberg, venture capitalists Marc Andreessen, Jim Breyer and Peter Thiel, Donald Graham, chairman and CEO of The Washington Post Co., Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix Inc. and Erskine Bowles, president emeritus of University of North Carolina and former White House Chief of Staff.

Facebook isn’t the only tech company without a women on its board. Longtime tech company Adobe Systems Inc. doesn’t have any women directors, and neither do some of the companies that went public in the past year, including Pandora, Zillow, Zynga and Splunk. Meanwhile, Apple, Groupon and LinkedIn have only one woman board member.

» Read the full article at Forbes.
Photo credit: Hannah Swithinbank on Flickr.

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