Twitter CEO Dick Costolo isn’t about to “lean in” and listen to criticism of the microblogging service.
Costolo got into a testy exchange over the weekend with Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at Stanford’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance, who criticized the lack of women in Twitter’s top ranks.
The CEO fired off several tweets in response to Wadhwa’s comments in Saturday’s New York Times, which noted that Twitter’s board and C-suite were all white and all male with the exception of general counsel Vijaya Gadde — who joined just five weeks ago.
“This is the elite arrogance of the Silicon Valley mafia, the Twitter mafia,” Wadhwa told the paper. “It’s the same male chauvinistic thinking. The fact that they went to the IPO without a single woman on the board, how dare they?”
Costolo’s immediate response: “Vivek Wadhwa is the Carrot Top of academic sources.”
He didn’t stop there and went on to tweet that Wadhwa had a “propensity for silly hyperbole.”
When other Twitter followers weighed in to defend Wadhwa, Costolo elaborated and said that fixing gender bias in the boardroom entails “more than checking a box & saying ‘we did it!’ ”
Wadhwa’s rebuttal: “Dick, you are one of the most visible companies in tech. If you won’t take the lead and fix the imbalance, who will?”
Like Facebook, which was famously criticized for its “frat house” culture, Twitter is taking some heat ahead of its planned $1 billion initial public offering for being perceived as part of the Silicon Valley boy’s club.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg further fueled the debate with her bestseller “Lean In,” which urged women to “lean into” their careers rather than pull back when confronted with the demands of family and motherhood.
On Sunday, Wadhwa followed up on his feud with Costolo by penning a piece for blog TechCrunch.
“Here is the harsh reality: Silicon Valley is a boys’ club — a fraternity of the worst kind,” he wrote. “It stacks the deck against women. It leaves out blacks and Hispanics. And it provides unfair advantage to an elite few who happen to be connected.
Costolo on Monday had yet to respond to the latest volley.