Twitter Appoints Debra Lee, Adding Diversity to Its Board

17 May Twitter Appoints Debra Lee, Adding Diversity to Its Board

On Monday, Twitter said that Debra L. Lee, chairman and chief executive of BET Networks, was joining its board.

SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter has a new board member who fits the company’s mantra of diversification.

On Monday, the social media company said that Debra Lee, chairman and chief executive of BET Networks, was joining its board. BET, a subsidiary of Viacom, is a media and entertainment company aimed at African-Americans; Ms. Lee, 61, is African-American.

As part of the announcement, Twitter also said that a board member, Marjorie Scardino, would become the company’s lead independent director.

Twitter has been under pressure to diversify its company and board. Until 2013, the San Francisco company’s board was all-male. It was all Caucasian until last year. That has attracted criticism for a lack of representation of the diverse ethnic groups that use Twitter. Ms. Lee is the first African-American, and the third woman, to serve on the company’s board.

Twitter has shaken up its board since Jack Dorsey, a Twitter co-founder, returned as the chief executive last year. Omid Kordestani, a former Google executive, joined Twitter as executive chairman last year. Last month, Twitter appointed Hugh Johnson, vice chairman and chief financial officer of PepsiCo, and Martha Lane Fox, an Internet entrepreneur, to the board.

Mr. Dorsey has pledged to continue the appointments of ethnically diverse candidates in prominent positions. In December, the company named Jeffrey Siminoff, previously head of diversity at Apple, as the company’s vice president for diversity and inclusion.

Ms. Lee’s appointment also breaks with the prevailing representation of Silicon Valley tech companies, which are disproportionately white and male. Facebook, Google and Twitter, among many others, have all come under fire for not doing enough to hire minority employees into engineering and technical positions, as well as executive appointments.

Ms. Lee, who has been a Twitter user since 2012, on Monday tweeted that she was thrilled to be joining the company’s board, saying the service has “transformed the media and the world like few other things in history.”
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