This morning Kara Swisher does a public service by counting the number of women on the boards of the biggest, most prominent web 2.0 companies: Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Groupon and Foursquare.
How many?
Zero.
We have to agree with Kara that this is pretty outrageous, and embarrassing for the concerned companies. She correctly points out that this is largely due to the fact that VC very much remains a boys' club, and VCs are the ones who get the earliest and most board seats. But many of those companies are gearing up to go public or could go public, and so have added outside board members. And none of those were women.
We should also congratulate Kara's timing, as Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's COO, has just come out with a great TED Talk on why there aren't more women at the top of society, and what they can do about it.
