15-30% Window

The Social Justice Warriors stay very busy finding things to be outraged about. The most recent is the idea that senior tech industry leaders don't follow enough women on Twitter. First World Problems doesn't even begin to cover the farcical thinking. Guess What: Top Women in Tech Follow Mostly Men on Twitter, Not Other Women by Lukas Mikelionis reports on the absurdity and points out that the problem is not distinctively about men. Top tech industry women also fail to follow women.

I am not interested in the SJW argument. It is just another corporate shakedown scam by activists to extract lucre. Sooner or later companies will learn the lesson Rudyard Kipling summarized in his poem, Dane-Geld. It seems to make sense to pay nasty people to stop saying nasty untrue things about your company but it never works.

It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: --
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.

What caught my eye in the article was the proportions. As you might be aware, I have repeatedly reported the intriguingly pervasive 15-30% number. In just about every field, you can expect about 15-30% of the field leaders to be women. Regardless of field, history etc. There are exceptions but they are few and far between. What is magical about 15-30%? Nothing. It is just a product of the individual decisions (major, field, industry) combined with familial structure decisions (single no children, married no children, married with children dual income, single bread winner, etc.). To be at the very top of any field, you have to devote large volumes of hours over long periods of time to develop and demonstrate the levels of accomplishment necessary. The disproportions arise from the cumulative decisions that either enable or subvert that level of invested hours.

So what are the proportions of women followed by senior tech industry female executives?

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki follows 296 accounts: 120 men, 37 women, the rest are brands and news organizations. That is 24% female

HP CEO Meg Whitman follows 298 accounts: 58 men, 19 women, the rest are brands and news organizations. That is 25% female

Apple Senior VP Angela Ahrendts follows 146 accounts: 64 men, 21 women, the rest are brands and news organizations. That is 25% female

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer follows 343 accounts: 239 men, 65 women, the rest are brands and news organizations. That is 21% female

Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg follows 17 accounts: 5 men, 10 women, 2 brand accounts. That is 66% female

Sandberg is the outlier here. All other female tech industry leaders follow on average 24% - Squarely in the middle of that 15-30% range.