A Striking Absence of Women Twitter, the popular social networking company, recently drew unwelcome attention to itself and the technology industry when it revealed in the filing for its initial public offering that none of the seven people on its board was a woman. One academic accused it of "male chauvinist thinking;" Twitter's chief executive, Dick Costolo, seemed to only make matters worse by referring to that critic, Vivek Wadhwa, as the "Carrot Top of academic sources," alluding to the over-the-top standup comedian Carrot Top. That a high-flying San Francisco company has an all-male board should come as no surprise. About 49 percent of publicly traded information technology businesses have no women on their boards, compared with 36 percent of the 2,770 largest public companies in the country, according to GMI Ratings, a research firm. With prominent exceptions like Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook and Marissa Mayer of Yahoo, the technology industry is largely a men's club. The absence of women in positions of power undermines the progressive image the industry has long tried to project, and it can't help with its customer base, which in the case of social networking services includes slightly more women than men. In posts on Twitter, Mr. Costolo acknowledged that companies like his need to do a better job attracting women, but also argued that critics like Mr. Wadhwa were engaging in "hyperbole." Twitter in fact has several women in senior management and supports a program that encourages girls to become software programmers. Even so, the industry's maleness is remarkable, not only in the boardrooms but in the overall work force. Women made up 15 percent of those employed in software programming and other computer jobs in the 1970s, rising to 34 percent in 1990, according to the Census Bureau. But since then, in spite of two big booms, women's share of computing jobs has fallen to 27 percent. That decline stands in contrast to the gains women have made in other fields like life and physical sciences and mathematics where they are approaching parity with men in total numbers, though they still lag in leadership roles. Technology boardrooms seem curiously hidebound in other ways. Twitter's board, for instance, is dominated by technology specialists, even though it is a media company that derives much of its value from people's urges to broadcast their thoughts. It has just one media executive on its board, Peter Chernin, a former president of the News Corporation. And no director has political experience, even though world policy makers (the new Iranian president and the pope among them) use the service. As to the shortage of women, some tech executives say there simply are not enough qualified women to go around. This seems to be little more than an excuse for inaction. "What they are saying is we can't find anybody who is a woman but in every other respect is like us," said Nell Minow, a corporate governance expert and a founder of GMI Ratings. Of course, that person doesn't exist. Ms. Minow's company has created a database of nearly 700 women and other minorities around the world it considers qualified to be board members in corporations based on their experience running big businesses and large organizations. Companies like Twitter are very young - the first tweet was posted in 2006, after all. As they mature, these new technology companies will have many chances to prove their commitment to diversity. The question is whether they will seize them.