Where Are the Women Executives in Silicon Valley?

Though it won’t be news to anyone who has worked in Silicon Valley, a new study confirms that tech companies are woefully behind in including women among their board members and highest-paid executives — not to mention the engineering ranks. Of California’s 400 biggest public companies, technology companies have some of the lowest percentages of women directors and executives, according to the annual Study of California Women Business Leaders by the University of California, Davis, and Watermark, a Bay Area organization that tries to increase the number of women business leaders. “This is a place where technology companies are way behind,” said Marilyn Nagel, chief executive of Watermark. The software and semiconductor sectors have the lowest percentages of women among the five highest-paid executives in a company, with 4.4 percent and 2.7 percent, according to the study. On average, fewer than one in 28 of the highest-paid tech executives is a woman. Only 5.2 percent of directors in the semiconductor sector are women and just 7.7 percent have more than one woman director, compared with 40 percent of companies in all other industries. Just over 9 percent of directors in the software sector are women.