Don't Cry for Us, Silicon Valley

Despite the media's anxiety about fallen female executives, women are actually advancing in high technology

by Sarah Lacy

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There are so few women running technology companies that when one steps down, it's inevitable that we women in Silicon Valley will be confronted by hand-wringing over the lack of female leadership in the tech sector.

The soul-searching resurfaced on July 29, when Patricia Russo stepped down as CEO of telecom equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent (ALU)—much as it emerged in the wake of other recent executive exits: Diane Greene, ousted in July as CEO of virtualization software maker VMware (VMW), and Meg Whitman, who left e-commerce giant eBay (EBAY) earlier this year. Let's not forget the high-profile departures of Carly Fiorina from Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) in 2005 and Carol Bartz, who left Autodesk (ADSK) in 2006.

It doesn't help that in most of these cases, the executive left on a low note. Fed up with choppy results, HP's board replaced Fiorina with Mark Hurd. Whitman overpaid for Internet calling provider Skype and couldn't quickly find a way to reverse eBay's growth slowdown. After presiding over one of the few great software success stories of the decade, Greene exited after a couple quarters of less-than-stellar results left the stock price down some 60% from its peak. And Russo could no longer withstand calls for her departure amid slumping demand and a transatlantic merger that failed to deliver promised benefits.

Core of Female Executives and Entrepreneurs

Greene's fall from grace was the final straw for the San Jose Mercury News, which on July 11 published a page-one story that screamed, "Female CEOs at Top Firms Now Zero," lamenting the disastrous state of female leaders in the Valley. Right around the same time, Newsweek ran a 1,500-word article on the emergence of hip, tech-savvy, and sexually empowered "girl geeks" who are taking tech by storm.

Which is right? Both are. The fact is, there is a dearth of women at the CEO level in techdom. But make no mistake: There's a solid core of female leadership right near the top of such companies as Oracle (ORCL), Google (GOOG), and Hewlett-Packard that will no doubt set the tone in tech for years to come.

What's even more exciting to me is the base of newly empowered and scrappy women working their way up at the startup level. You've never heard of scores of them, but these women you have: Tina Sharkey at Johnson & Johnson's (JNJ) BabyCenter; Caterina Fake, who co-founded Flickr and sold it to Yahoo! (YHOO); Mena Trott, co-founder and president of blogging powerhouse Six Apart; and Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning, which lets users build their own social networks. And no, Google's no longer a startup, but there's good reason to keep an eye on Marissa Mayer, the company's vice-president for search products and user experience.