Get a woman on-board – Twitter rocks Twittersphere for the wrong reasons

7 Oct 2013

Twitter’s board has stoked the wrath of the digital masses in certain circles because there is currently no woman on the board of the microblogging platform and CEO Dick Costolo is having a bit of a laugh about it – via the net, of course.

Writing for AllThingsD yesterday, Kara Swisher said she first wrote a piece two weeks ago about Twitter, and the lack of women on its board.

It was a timely move, on Swisher’s part, with the company about to reveal its IPO date of around mid-November.

Quite the comedian in the Twitter nest

The article on AllThingsD prompted a bit of a ‘fiasco’ – depending on what way you look at it – on Twitter’s part, especially in terms of reputation management, and communication at board level, and in relation to nurturing staff.

A board member (Costolo, in fact) of Twitter’s all-male, all-white board, decided to throw a little one liner out there. Apparently, Twitter’s governing body has to expand beyond “three Peters and a Dick”.

This board member was making the quip in reference to four of the members of the board.

Apparently he was referring to the inner circle on the board that encompasses Costolo; investor Peter Currie, also CFO at former Netscape; former News Corp COO Peter Chernin; plus the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital.

All just turkey babble?

Just yesterday, Costolo took it upon himself to say this:

Twitter IPO

And of course, an online war of words broke out following Costolo’s tweet.

Wadhwa is a fellow at Stanford’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance. At the minute he is writing a book on women in technology.

Now all of this debacle may be just a play on Twitter’s part to stoke up some media attention before its imminent IPO. And maybe Twitter is also planning to reveal a new CEO, who will be female, on the day it IPOs.

Either way, we will soon learn who will be ruling the roost at Twitter.

Women Invent Tomorrow is Silicon Republic’s year-long campaign to champion the role of women in science, technology, engineering and maths

Twitter image via Shutterstock

Carmel Doyle was a long-time reporter with Silicon Republic

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