Female CEOs in Tech — A Dying Breed or a Growing Flock?

Silicon Valley is buzzing about women CEOs in tech, although whether there are more—or fewer—CEOs seems to be in question.

Last week, USA Today ran a piece highlighting how many more opportunities there are for women in technology and profiled several women CEOs in top tech firms. On the very same day, the San Jose Mercury News ran a piece entitled “Female CEOs At Top Silicon Valley Tech Firms Down To Zero.”

Is this an issue of perception, accounting, or semantics?

The Mercury News posits that with the departure of VMware‘s Diane Greene all is lost for women in the C-suite in tech. Calling it an “ouster” and referencing the shock waves it sent through female managers in other tech companies, the picture the article paints is pretty dire.

From the article: “It’s certainly a moral blow for women who see her as an aspirational model whenever someone who is widely admired leaves a very visible position,” according to Nicole Woolsey Biggart, Dean of the Graduate School of Management at the University of California-Davis, which conducts an annual survey of women executives and directors at the state’s biggest public companies.

But the USA Today article names many women at the top in the tech industry, Eva Chen (Trend Micro), Marrisa Meyer (Google) and Selina Lo (Ruckus Wireless) among them. This piece makes the tech sector sound like a paradise for women who aspire to run their own companies. Pointing to everything from more females choosing engineering degrees in college, to business online being marketed to and creating more opportunities for women, tech certainly seems like the next big industry for female CEOs.

The math on this seems to go both ways as well. USA Today cites data which suggests that there are more women in senior positions in tech than on the Fortune 500 list while The Mercury News points to a UC Davis study citing small numbers of women at the top.

Perhaps the discrepancy comes in defining what makes a firm the top in tech. Search and development companies like Google and Yahoo! may be the current titans of this industry, but tech has far more diverse options for growth than nearly any other. What about smaller firms that provide vital services like Trend Micro? Gina Bianchini is the CEO at Ning, which isn’t exactly Google; however, with the increased attention to the ever-broadening uses for social networks and social media, it’s hard to discount the importance of having her in that position. Ning’s granddaddy site, the visionary Facebook, has Sheryl Sandberg as its COO.

Tech is still a relatively new industry, which makes the death knell sounded by The Mercury News at the loss of one CEO a little premature. Women haven’t exactly reached parity in any industry. Only time will tell whether Greene’s departure was a harbinger of doom or simply another routine departure from the C-suite.