Tech Companies Slowly Making Progress Adding Women to Their Boards

A Bay Area firm is slowly chipping away at technology’s most exclusive boys’ club: the boardroom.

TheBoardlist was created a year ago today to fix the gender gap on tech companies’ boards. In that time, it’s played a role helping more than 30 women fill open board seats at tech companies. The group maintains a database of women qualified to serve as directors at tech companies in different stages and specialties. The candidates are nominated by theBoardlist members.

But moving the needle won’t be easy, and not only because of the longstanding gender biases that have led to the current imbalance. Waiting for board seats to open up means gender parity at the director level will take a long time. As it stands, women comprise just 7 percent of board members at venture-backed tech companies, according to theBoardlist.

To help promote progress, theBoardlist says it’ll start issuing quarterly reports on female board representation to keep the tech industry accountable. In the second quarter, it says, 22 board seats were filled by women, 13 of them theBoardlist candidates.

“The perception that there’s not enough talent exists, and that’s one of the things I wanted to get rid of,” theBoardlist creator Sukhinder Singh Cassidy told Quartz last year when she started the effort. “In fact the talent does exist, it’s just about how to find it, how to discover it.”