硅谷，这就是你需要的女老板名单
导语：The Boardlist旨在为CEO们提供更简便的系统，以寻找匹配他们需求的有资质的女性董事候选人。
本周，供职于硅谷多年的Sukhinder Singh Cassidy发布了一个新的数据库：The Boardlist，帮助那些初创企业的CEO们寻找有资质的女性，进入他们的私人董事会。这份名单由旧金山湾区的50多位知名科技产业业内人士和风险投资人共同提名，囊括了600多名女性领导人。
编纂这样一份名单的初衷，是希望它能够为一些渴望在创业初期为董事会引入多样性的公司提供有效资源。Cassidy说：“企业家们经常把所有经历都投入在商业运营之中，却没有获得顶尖人才的简便通道。”每当他们为填补职位空缺而征询意见时，却总需要花费大量的时间精力。The Boardlist旨在为CEO们提供更简便的系统，以寻找匹配他们需求的有资质的女性董事候选人。该数据库目前还在测试阶段，用户可以在不同的分类中寻找相关人才——比如专业领域的、产业方面的、公司经营与董事会事务等等。
Cassidy告诉WIRED：“在公司的早期发展中，寻找多样化的董事会成员，对于促进多样化的企业思维有巨大帮助。”
重大损失
到目前为止，科技领域中的女性角色仍然是稀缺的。大约一年以前，从Google开始，各大公司开始公布其员工的性别与种族构成数据。其后，Facebook、Pinterest、Twitter、Amazon和越来越多的知名企业也相继效仿。公布数据颇为“惨不忍睹”，而一年之后的今天，情况仍然没有太大的改善——特别是在管理层水平上。
对于初创企业也一样：作为视频购物网站JOYUS的现任CEO，Cassidy得出的数据则是，只有约1/4到1/3的私人科技公司拥有女性董事会成员。
许多人抱怨所谓的“渠道问题”，并表示雇佣有资质的不同种族、性别的员工之所以困难，主要是因为这些人太难找了。可是，如果没能把多样化放在首位，对企业来说是个重大的损失。一份来源于麦肯锡的可靠研究报告表明，拥有更多不同性别员工的企业更具有竞争力，那些盘踞在拥有性别多样化员工构架前1/4的企业总能获得比国民产业数据的平均值高约15%的金融回报。而这样的分析结果证明了Cassidy所说的，The Boardlist的确是一个相当有用的工具，尤其对那些渴望提高竞争力的企业来说。
公开信
两个月前，当Cassidy和其他59名女性共同发表一封公开信，意在批评新闻报道当中对科技女性所持的广泛的“负面印象”时，The Boardlist开始初步成型。
在信中，Cassidy写道：“这篇报道明确表示，硅谷的许多事例都可以证明女性完全没有贡献出其全部能量。但通篇都没有提到女性企业家们自身的经历。看过这样的报道后，人们可能会认为，女性员工不仅很难被发掘，她们本身就难以获得成功。”Cassidy称，如果更多女性领导人希望在这个行业中获得更大的成就，那么这篇报道就得被好好拿出来讨论一下了。
Cassidy表示，这封公开信获得了巨大的正面响应，而人们渴望突出科技领域拥有卓越成就的女性成员的想法，促使了Boardlist的诞生。Cassidy最初的工作，就是和一些CEO以及企业家们沟通，请他们推荐10到30名能够被列入自己名单的女性领导人。这些被提问到的推荐者们，还要提供一些相关细节，比如某一名女性领导人能为一个企业生命周期的哪一段作出最大贡献（早期、中期、晚期等等）并且需要描述其人最擅长的方面。
网络效应
目前，只有被邀请人才能使用The Boardlist，Cassidy表示，还有工作没完善。在今年年底，她希望数据库中能够收录至少2000名候选人。
她同样承认，到目前为止，这个工具还不包括种族多样化的拓展功能。她表示，数据库还没有针对民族分类进行进一步的分析。“但如果一定要给出一个假设，在女性创始人中，民族多样化是很小的。”她说道，“几乎全是白人和亚洲人，而我也不知道这样的比例是否会得到改变。”
如果说科技企业开始面临性别多样化挑战，那么种族多样化就早已经是一个更严重的问题。去年，USA Today的一份报告表明，顶尖大学中计算机科学与计算机工程的黑人与西班牙裔毕业生的比例，是最终获得科技企业录用人数的两倍。本月，Mother Jones计算表明，Facebook、Google和Twitter全部黑人员工的人数加起来也不过只能装满一架喷气式飞机。
另一个棘手问题则是网络效应。由于The Boardlist最初始于一个核心人群，继而向外发展，那些没有在最初进入到名单里的候选人们可能会经历一个艰难的阶段。Cassidy说道：“在这种情况下的一个挑战，就是人们可能只会去找第一个他们认识的人。但我想，这个工具的一个作用，就是使人们能够更多元化地认识不同的候选人们。”
尽管它可能还不完善，Cassidy首要目的就是使它成为第一——一个史无前例的产品。她说道：“今天，我首先要解决的就是，每个搜索结果页面都能显示出10名候选人。”
Silicon Valley, Here’s That List of Boss Ladies You Needed
SILICON VALLEY IS under intense pressure to increase diversity. And what better time for companies to address the issue than at the beginning?
This week Silicon Valley veteran Sukhinder Singh Cassidy unveiled The Boardlist, a database to help startup CEOs find qualified women to appoint to their private boards. The list includes more than 600 female leaders compiled by more than 50 high-profile tech industry insiders and venture capitalists (both men and women) in the San Francisco Bay Area1.
The thinking is that the list could act as a resource for companies who are looking to bring diversity into their boardrooms at earlier stages in their development. Entrepreneurs who are focused on growing the company are often too busy with business operations and don’t have easy access to acquiring great talent, Cassidy says. Soliciting references to fill those spots are often ad hoc and time-consuming efforts. The Boardlist aims to provide an easier system for the discovery and matching of CEOs and pre-vetted female board candidates, letting users of the database (which is in beta for now), dig into categories like functional expertise, industry, company stage, and board experience.
“There’s a big opportunity early in a company’s life cycle to get diverse candidates in the board room and promote diversity of thought,” Cassidy tells WIRED.
Losing Out
The story of the paucity of women in technology is familiar by now. About a year ago, beginning with Google, companies started to release data on the gender and racial makeup of their workforces. Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Amazon and other big-name companies followed suit. The results were dismal, and a year later, the needle still hasn’t moved by much—especially at the management level.
And the same holds for startups: Cassidy, currently CEO of video shopping site JOYUS, estimates that between only about a quarter to one-third of private tech companies have a woman on the board.
Many blame the so-called pipeline, saying it’s difficult to hire diverse candidates because qualified candidates are hard to find. But in failing to make diversity a priority, organizations are losing out. Considerable research has shown that companies with more gender diversity outperform their competition—according to McKinsey, companies in the top quarter for gender diversity are 15 percent more likely to have financial returns above their national industry medians. That makes the Boardlist a real tool, as Cassidy says, for businesses aiming to improve performance.
The Letter
The Boardlist started coming together around two months ago when Cassidy and 59 other women published an open letter that, among other things, criticized what Cassidy called the domination of “negative signals” in press coverage about women in tech.
“The narrative rightly identifies that many of the issues in the Valley that demonstrate women are not yet contributing at their fullest potential here,” Cassidy wrote. “But absent almost entirely in this coverage is the experience of women entrepreneurs themselves. Looking at the press, one might think women are not only hard to find, but struggling to succeed.” If more women leaders hoped to progress in the industry, Cassidy argued, that piece of the story needed to be a big part of the conversation.
The response to the open letter was overwhelmingly positive, Cassidy says, and the idea of highlighting the accomplishments of such highly credible women in tech set the stage for Boardlist. Starting with her initial network, Cassidy reached out to CEOs and entrepreneurs and asked them to nominate 10 to 30 female leaders to start the list off. Those who nominated candidates were also asked to provide details about what stage in a company’s life a candidate might be most suited for (early, mid, late, public) and a description of where they excel.
Network Effects
At the moment, access to The Boardlist is still invite-only, and Cassidy says there’s work to be done yet. By the end of the year, she hopes to include more than 2,000 candidates in the database.
She also acknowledges that the tool’s utility so far doesn’t extend to racial diversity. She says the list hasn’t been analyzed yet to determine the ethnic breakdown of its candidates. “But if I had to give you a hypothesis … ethnic diversity is very low among female founders,” she says. “It was predominantly white and Asian, and I don’t know that I would expect that ratio to change.”
If the tech industry has struggled with gender diversity, racial diversity has been an even more serious problem. Last year, a report from USA Today found that top universities turn out black and Hispanic computer science and computer engineering graduates at twice the rate leading technology companies hire them. This month, Mother Jones calculated that all the black employees from Facebook, Google, and Twitter could fit onto a single jumbo jet.
Which points to the other knotty problem of the network effect. Because The Boardlist started off from an initial core network and grew outward, candidates who weren’t plugged in from the start could have a harder time making the list. “One of the challenges in this environment is that people go to the first person they know,” Cassidy says. “But I think the way this tool fits in is it gets you beyond that one-degree of separation for candidates.”
Though it may not be perfect, Cassidy says the top priority now is putting the product out there in the first place—a product that hasn’t existed before. She says, “Today, my first order of business is that I want there to be ten candidate results on every page.”
1CORRECTION 3:00 PM ET 07/16/15: Due to an editing error, this article incorrectly stated that The Boardlist included more than 600 female leaders, endorsed by 800 of their peers. It has been corrected to show that there were over 50 people who contributed to the database. (There were 800 endorsements in all, because some female leaders were endorsed more than once.)
来源：wired
The Boardlist
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