Twitter overhauls its board to be more than a 'country club of old white guys'
Meet the new and improved Twitter board: now with more women and fewer Peters.
After months of rumors, Twitter announced a long awaited shakeup of its dysfunctional board on Friday to help pave the way for a corporate turnaround and bolster the diversity of its top ranks.
On their way out: two of the three white men named Peter who have been longtime members of the board.
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On their way in: Hugh Johnston, vice chairman and CFO of PepsiCo, and Martha Lane Fox, an Internet entrepreneur.
Fox's appointment is particularly symbolic for Twitter, a company fighting to shed its image as predominantly white and male. One of its largest investors even went so far as to describe Twitter's board as a "country club of old white guys."
Not only is Fox the second woman on Twitter's board of directors, she has also been a fierce critic of a male-dominated Silicon Valley culture.
"All that's happened is that one bunch of very rich white men have transferred their money to another bunch of very rich white men and, worse than that, they are in a very small concentrated area of the world, in Silicon Valley," Lane Fox said in one interview in 2015.
"I still find that really baffling. The absence of women from the teams that are making the Internet, the product designers, the coders, the engineers, the absence of women in the venture capital community."
In his announcement of the new board appointments, Twitter cofounder and CEO Jack Dorsey stressed the need to improve the company's diversity to "represent the strong communities on Twitter."
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For those keeping track, Twitter's board now has two women, one Iranian-American and... five white guys. But hey, progress?
Previous reports had suggested Dorsey was courting a big name from Hollywood to fill one of the board seats -- Shonda Rhimes was mentioned on that list -- but that has yet to happen.
However, Twitter did succeed in landing yet another board member who never actually used Twitter.
Johnston tweeted for the first time on Friday to announce his appointment to Twitter's board. He is in good company: Marjorie Scardino, another board member, has tweeted just 14 times to date and Omid Kordestani, the executive chairman of the board, has tweeted 74 times.
Twitter may be fighting to achieve mainstream success and boost its sagging user growth, but perhaps it will start by trying to convince its board to tweet more.
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Topics X/Twitter
Seth Fiegerman was a Senior Business Reporter at Mashable, where he covered startups, marketing and the latest consumer tech trends. He joined Mashable in August 2012 and is based in New York.Before joining Mashable, Seth covered all things Apple as a reporter at Silicon Alley Insider, the tech section of Business Insider. He has also worked as a staff writer at TheStreet.com and as an editor at Playboy Magazine. His work has appeared in Newsweek, NPR, Kiplinger, Portfolio and The Huffington Post.Seth received his Bachelor of Arts from New York University, where he majored in journalism and philosophy.In his spare time, Seth enjoys bike riding around Brooklyn and writing really bad folk songs.
