Looking for a Woman Board Candidate? There's a List for That

Achieving board diversity for tech companies just got a lot easier. Joyus CEO Sukhinder Singh Cassidy announced the launch of the BoardList, a database for female tech board candidates, at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen last week.

The BoardList already contains more than 700 executive women who have been suggested and vetted by powerful members of the tech community. Singh Cassidy is hoping companies—especially startups—use the database to improve the lopsided demographics of current tech boards; as of 2013, only 14.3 percent of board seats in the top 100 tech companies were held by women.

In the short term, the BoardList should virtually eliminate the “pipeline excuse” that many tech executives use to justify their male-dominated boards. Now, when someone throws his hands up and says he can’t find any qualified women for his board, Singh Cassidy can smile and say, “No problem—I know 700 qualified women, and here they are!” In other words: No excuses, tech execs. Play like a champion.

About the Author

Julianne Helinek is Take The Lead's blog editor and writer of the newsletter Take The Lead This Week. She thinks the women she knows are too talented not to be running the world, and she’s especially interested in bringing more men into the gender equality conversation. Julianne is an MBA student at NYU’s Stern School of Business. For more on feminism in the business school world, follow her on Twitter at @thefeministmba.