A New York Times' report was released last week that looked at Twitter's board members (remember, the company is set to go public soon), and it criticized the board for being made up of "all white men." So, who's the person who took the blame for its lack of diversity? Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.
One of the sources in the NYT article, Vivek Wadhwa, is a fellow at Stanford’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance. He called Twitter's case "male chauvinistic thinking," and labeled it as "the elite arrogance of the Silicon Valley mafia, the Twitter mafia." Costolo, of course, heard about the article, and when a follower tweeted him with a recommendation for a female hire, Costolo shot back. And Wadhwa seems to be what pissed Costolo off the most.
As you can see above, Costolo calls Wadhwa the "Carrot Top of academic sources." Which set off a chain of tweets from followers and Wadhwa himself—to which the subject (a lack of woman on Twitter's board), Costolo never really offers a solution for.
Then Wadhwa steps in:
A little weird to see Costolo break and resort to calling Wadhwa "carrot top" of all things, but this seems to be coming from a difference of perspective. One, Costolo thinks Wadhwa just wants him to hire a woman just for the sake of hiring a woman, and Wadhwa believes that that is Costolo's responsibility: to make sure he has a diversified board. What isn't disputable, though, is that it has been known for a long time that women and minorities face an uphill battle for jobs in the tech world. Who do you agree with in this debate?
[via The Verge]
