Nearly 80 percent of California software companies have a female director, according to a new study out Tuesday by UC Davis and Watermark, a Bay Area non-profit.
When it comes to gender diversity of company boards, software is behind utilities but ahead of energy, consumer, hardware, health care, real estate and other sectors, the study said.
But when it came to the C-suite, the software industry ranked among the lowest, with just 29 percent of firms with female, high-paid executives.
Over the past five years, the Bay Area, where the tech industry is based, has made some improvements when it comes to gender diversity in leadership. As Reuters pointed out:
Out of the 223 largest publicly traded companies headquartered in the Bay Area, more than one third had either zero or just one top position held by a woman, the study found.
Still, that represents a big improvement from five years ago, when almost two-thirds of Bay Area companies had either zero or one top position held by a woman.
Yahoo has three female directors, putting it in the top 25 firms in the state, along with eBay, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Autodesk, Google, Netflix and Zendesk.
For the first time, Watermark, a Bay Area women in business leadership group, created an index of 25 firms that have 30 percent or more women among directors and its highest-paid executives. Yahoo, Zendesk and Arista Networks ranked on that list.
Separately, a new study by Gallup and commissioned by Google, found that among parents and students themselves, people tend to think boys are more interested in computer science than girls. As Google wrote in an analysis with the survey:
Inequitable access to learning opportunities and ingrained stereotypes may hinder some students from participating, particularly females and underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities.
Above: Marissa Mayer, Yahoo s CEO. (John Green/Bay Area News Group)
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