Google’s Alphabet seems be missing a W

Google’s new corporate structure, Alphabet, was announced on Monday to much fanfare and comment from the business media.  When the new org chart (see below) emerged of Alphabet’s myriad of companies, it struck me that Goggle’s Alphabet seems to be missing a W.  There is a distinct lack of women in control of the subsidiaries.  Only Susan Wojcicki, as the CEO of YouTube is listed. However, YouTube isn’t one of the 9 core companies of Alphabet as it is a part of Google.  

This same gender bias infiltrated the Google Image search tool earlier this year when the only female representation on the first page of results when searching for CEO was “CEO Barbie”, which was a mock image produced by the satirical magazine, the Onion.   

Google would be the first to admit it has a problem with diversity and gender.  In April 2014, the company released figures showing that only 30% of their workforce was women.  When this figure was broken-down further, only 21% of the executives and 15% of technical roles were female.  Some saw the releasing of these statistics as a brave move, highlighting the gender and diversity gap in major tech multinationals.  This led to Google allocating $150M in funds to promote diversity across its 57,000 strong workforce, including more half of the Googlers taking this unconscious bias workshop.  Lack of women, Black and Hispanic employees is endemic across the technology sector, and Silicon Valley and has led to a strew of similar diversity programmes from tech companies such as Intel and Apple.

A study by the NGO Catalyst showed that there are only 23 female leaders of Fortune 500 companies.  Depressingly, the figures for emerging tech unicorns also makes for sober reading as a recent Tech Crunch analysis revealed only 2 had female CEOs out of 83 companies. 

So why aren’t there more women CEOs?  Emily Peck, in her HuffPost article, supported by evidence from a MIT study, states that there is “systematic male bias” in start-ups where male dominated investors positively select male founders to invest in. This suggests that more women-investing-in-women schemes are greatly needed.  A Weber Shandwick survey showed that globally, 32% of men aspire to be a CEO of a large company compared to 23% of women.  In North America, the difference is even more dramatic with a startlingly low 9% of women wanting the top job, suggesting the confidence gap between men and women is even more pronounced.  Others suggest that if you look at the women at the helm of Fortune 500 companies, several, such as Marissa Mayer at Yahoo or Mary Barra at General Motors, were appointed when companies were in trouble or requiring a turnaround.  In the past, this situation has creating a “glass cliff” phenomenon resulting shorter leadership tenures for female CEOs. 

In my opinion, the role and make up of boards has a large part to play in the gender gap in CEO and leadership positions.  A recent Fortune magazine article showed that unicorn start-ups had 60% all-male boards with female representation at a paltry 6.2%.  In the Fortune 500, boards have 16.9% women board members.  Since ultimately the decision to hire CEOs rests with the board, companies wanting to promote diversity should start by improving representation at that level, leading to more women taking leadership positions in successful companies, not just the troubled ones.

 Back to Google, their pre-Alphabet board had 3 women represented (Diane Greene, Ann Mather and Shirley Tilghman) out of 11 board seats, or 27%, which is higher than the industry average but not truly reflecting equality or the company’s customer base.  Further development of the Alphabet corporate structure gives the company the opportunity to find that missing W, placing more women on their board to allow for the trickledown effect of promoting women into leadership positions.