Indian IT Is A Boys Club Like Silicon ValleyBut There Is More Hope

This is a piece I wrote at for Times of India which compares and contrasts Indian IT to Silicon Valley. Sadly, Indian IT is as sexist as the Valley is. But the tide is rising in India.

When I moved to Silicon Valley from Pakistan, I did not expect that people would be so surprised my cofounder Sabika Nazim is a woman said Faizan Buzdar, CEO of Convo. He was also in disbelief at the public battles I have had to fight with Silicon Valley moguls over their lack of gender diversity.

I had been researching the success of Indians in Silicon Valley and documented that this group, which constitutes 6% of the working population, started 15.5% of its companies. This is an amazing feat, given the disadvantages that immigrants always have.

I had considered Silicon Valley to be the perfect meritocracyuntil I moved there. I was surprised to learn that there is a powerful boys’ club that provides arrogant young males with adulation, funding, and support. This might be tolerable if, as some people say they do, women lacked aptitude for technology. But the opposite is true. Women are in many ways better than men; their exclusion is holding back innovation and economic growth.

Few, if any, of the executive teams of top firms have women as technology heads. Virtually all of Silicon Valleys investment firms are male-dominated. The boards are even worse. Twitter, for example, didnt have a single woman board member went it went public last October. When I expressed my disgust at this in The New York Times, its CEO Dick Costolo ridiculed my academic credentials. Fortunately, there was so much outrage at his unprofessionalism and insularity that he had to back down and add a woman board member.

Companies with the highest proportions of women board directors outperform those with the lowest proportions by 53%. They have a 42% higher return on sales and a 66% higher return on invested capital. As well, a board that reflects a companys user base is more likely to understand the companys market needs and to develop better strategies. Take Twitter, the majority of whose users are women. Being a boys’ club has been costly to its shareholders, as evidenced by its dismal post-I.P.O. performance.

Silicon Valleys greatest strength is that it accepts failureincluding its own. It also encourages dissension and learns from its mistakes. I have received strong support in my battles and have had more than 500 women help me crowd-create a book titled Innovating Women, which shares lessons and encourages women to help better the world. This book will be released in September.

Technology companies have been reeling from the criticism about their gender gap and are working towards reducing it. Just in the past few weeks, Google, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Facebook have all released gender-diversity data. The numbers are not good, with the female percentage in engineering being in the teens. But the companies have admitted the problem and are now holding themselves accountable.

Indian boards are no better. The majority of publicly traded Indian companies922 of 1,462have no women on their boards. Women hold barely 5% of board seats in India, in comparison with 17% in the United States. Indian industry too is needlessly holding itself back.

Indian I.T. companies have a bigger management problem. Look at the executive ranks of Infosys, Wipro, TCS, Tech Mahindra, and the others, and you will hardly find any women. This is surely hurting Indian I.T.

But there is good news at the lower ranks. Unlike in the U.S., where, because of the boys’ club, the proportion of women studying computer science fell from 37% in 1987 to 17% in 2012, Indias numbers of female I.T. students are increasing. According to NASSCOM, I.T. Services gender-diversity ranges from 24-32%; in BPM this is 34-42%; 1 million of Indias 3.1 million I.T. workforce is female; and women now represent 38 to 40% of entry-level recruits.

This will give India a major advantage in the future.

An assortment of technologies is advancing at exponential rates and convergingin fields such as robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), computing, synthetic biology, 3D printing, medicine, and nanomaterials. These advances are making it possible for entrepreneurs to solve humanitys grand challengesincluding energy, education, water, food, and health.

In these rapidly evolving fields, the boyswho dominated technology in the social-media erahave no advantage. Those with experience and educationin fields as diverse as science, technology, engineering, education, health sciences, and arts and humanitieshave the edge, because they can work across disciplines and see the big picture. Women dominate many of these fields, and they match boys in mathematical achievement. And if you combine a cross-disciplinary education with a womans maternal instinct, empathy, and a desire to do good, you have an unbeatable combination. Thats why women entrepreneurs are best placed to solve humanitys grand challengesand to save the world. And that’swhy it’s important to teach and inspire them.

Innovating Womenwill be released on September 2 but you can preorder it now:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LFVJT6E. I expect it will inspire thousands of women to rise to their potential, and hope it will accelerate change.

About Author

Vivek Wadhwa is Vice President of Innovation and Research at Singularity University; Fellow, Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance, Stanford University; Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at the Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University; and distinguished visiting scholar, Halle Institute of Global Learning, Emory University. He is author of ”The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent”–which was named by The Economist as a Book of the Year of 2012. Wadhwa oversees the academic programs at Singularity University, which educates a select group of leaders about the exponentially growing technologies that are soon going to change our world. These advances—in fields such as robotics, A.I., computing, synthetic biology, 3D printing, medicine, and nanomaterials—are making it possible for small teams to do what was once possible only for governments and large corporations to do: solve the grand challenges in education, water, food, shelter, health, and security.

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