Female CEOs on the Rise, Reviving Tech’s Look at the Glass Ceiling
It seems that females are finally appearing in the front row in the corporate landscape, with IBM’s first female CEO reviving an industry’s look at the glass ceiling. The computer giant has been running as a male-dominated company till now, but the tide is changing. IBM has appointed Virginia Rometty has its new Chief Executive Officer, and this move is both symbolic and potentially game-changing for the computer company as well as for the technology sector.
“I think it’s great news and part of a long steady road to Damascus as far as women leading technology firms,” said Nancy Koehn, a historian at Harvard Business School who recently wrote about the company’s centennial in a piece for the Harvard Business Review titled “IBM at 100: How to outlast Depression, war, and competition. This is a big, important public bet the company’s making, and it won’t go unnoticed.”
In addition to Koen, several other industry experts, and leadership and recruitment experts are quite optimistic, and in fact glad about this news.
“The cool thing about this particular appointment is that it’s very visible,” said Todd Thomas, associate professor of leadership, DeVos Graduate School of Management at Northwood University in Midland, Mich., and author of the Leadership Matters Now blog. “I think it shows there might be some activity going on in large companies about identifying female talent in the leadership pool, and also a willingness to adapt to different leadership styles.”
As of now, the number of women in tech scene is relatively low at about 25 percent. In fact, among all Fortune 500 technology firms, only 11 percent of executives are females. But the good news is that we have got some interesting facts about 500 Startups’ female founders, noting the benefits of having a woman at the helm.
User data suggests that a growing number of women are joining and founding startups, and these women are changing the way companies relate to their consumers. It’s believed that female founders are focused on the personalization of consumer data to create a community of passionate power users behind their company. When it comes to evaluating consumer data, women being able to understand what other women want is a huge asset. Check out our complete coverage here.
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