Quinn: Why so few women at the top in valley? By Michelle Quinn Mercury News

• Numbers: Women executives and directors
• Download a copy of the UC Davis study of women business leaders (PDF)

Women in Silicon Valley have a problem.

They are MIA in the board rooms and executive suites.

I’m talking single digits, folks. According to a recent study, among the top 103 public companies here, women make up 6.5 percent of board directors and 8.8 percent of company leadership teams.

Women fare somewhat better in California overall, where they make up 8.8 percent of board directors and 11.7 percent of managers identified by their companies as executive officers, according to the study released Thursday by the University of California-Davis.

So what’s the problem with Silicon Valley, which considers itself a meritocracy?

How is it that Netflix, TiVo, Yahoo and Apple - all consumer companies with presumably plenty of female customers - have no female board members? If it was strictly about business experience and coding ability, then why is Al Gore on Apple’s board? Obviously, he’s got serious juice in some corridors. But what other corridors are companies here overlooking?

It’s been a mixed year for women in Silicon Valley and the tech world. The Hewlett-Packard pretexting debacle took down a couple of prominent women, such as Pattie Dunn, the non-executive chair of the board, and Ann Baskins, vice president, general counsel and secretary. Nancy Heinen resigned from her job as Apple Computer’s chief counsel and secretary in May, shortly before Apple’s June disclosure of irregularities in its stock options grants.

And Carol Bartz stepped down as chief executive of Autodesk after 14 years at the helm.

On the upside, Safra Catz keeps Oracle running as the company’s chief financial officer and co-president. And last week Susan Decker, chief financial officer at Yahoo, was named to Intel’s board. And there’s Meg Whitman, president and chief executive of eBay.

But why so few?

You’ve heard all the theories, I’m sure.

The Pipeline Theory: Girls go ``yuck’’ when faced with math and science, limiting their options too soon, which contributes to the shortage of women in technology fields.

The Opt-Out Plan: Many talented women climbing the ladder pull the rip cord at critical career junctures to have children or downshift to jobs with less responsibility. And they don’t or can’t re-enter or ramp back up.

The Individual Contributor Syndrome: Women focus laser-like on doing their jobs but fail to schmooze or work in groups, all of which would help build up their base of support when they want to move up. (Note to self: Take off the earphones at work.)

And there is, of course, straight-out bias. Maybe the way meritocracy is defined around here is flawed. It’s like kickball all over again. We’re not getting picked, so we’re not getting better at it.

Ellen Siminoff, president and chief executive of Efficient Frontiers, disagrees. ``Women have an equal shot to get to the top of a company,’’ says Siminoff, a former senior vice president at Yahoo. Sure, to succeed in Silicon Valley, ``you have to have a pretty good understanding of technology. It doesn’t mean you have to be an engineer.’‘

Personally, I am partial to the ``The Despot Decides’’ theory. The person in charge of a company is the Sun King, the company his fiefdom. He radiates influence with grand pronouncements, little asides or even raised eyebrows. He tends to favor people he feels comfortable with . . . usually male.

The chief executive also holds the power to change the number of women in leadership and on boards by saying Make It So.

That’s what seemed to happen at Hyperion, based in Santa Clara, one of the few local public companies cited in the study as having women in more than 25 percent of their executive and director positions.

When Godfrey Sullivan, Hyperion’s chief executive, was recently looking for a new chief financial officer, he told recruiters he wanted candidates ``from all walks of life.’’ And he knew that edict would mean a longer search.

``You have to have a belief in diversity to overcome the normal search process, which will only reinforce today’s norms,’’ Sullivan said. ``We could have gotten 10 traditional CFOs in here.’‘

It took six months before Hyperion found Robin Washington, senior vice president of finance and corporate controller at PeopleSoft. Though she had not previously served as a CFO at a public company, Hyperion hired her. ``You have to take a little chance,’’ Sullivan said.

The time might be right for changing people’s thinking, says Kim Jones, vice president of global education, government and health sciences at Sun Microsystems. ```The valley is taking off again. It’s getting hard to find good people again. It’s about reminding people there’s a great pool of talent out there we can draw on.’‘