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The CEO of Twitter Wants These Female Comedians to Use Twitter

katedries
Kate Dries
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Illustration for article titled The CEO of Twitter Wants These Female Comedians to Use Twitter

On Friday's Today show, Matt Lauer interviewed Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. While the conversation skimmed the surface of revealing any actual information – Twitter is so hip and cool! Sometimes people send mean tweets! Man everyone there is young! – Costolo subtly tried to smooth over the company's "woman problem" with one of his comments.

When Lauer asked Costolo who he wanted the most as a user on Twitter, using the phrase "who's the white whale?", this was Costolo's response:

I would say it's the collection of female comedians. It's Melissa McCarthy, it's Tina Fey, it's Amy Poehler. I should be able to use some of my pull from my Chicago improvisation days to get a few of 'em onto the platform — and I'll make that my goal.

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"If they join they should be @whitewhale!" Savannah Guthrie joked. Costolo's comments come a couple months after a New York Times article on their lack of female board members that got him caught up in a bit of a fight on his own social media platform, just a day after the company announced the appointment of their first female board member and the same day as a Reuters article on the lack of female board members in the top start-ups.

The Reuters piece reiterates what we already know: that most big tech companies have a dearth of women working for them. "The 10 top venture-backed start-ups, as measured by venture funds raised, shows that six do not have any women on the board, including Pinterest," it notes. "And none has more than one." Pinterest is mentioned because it's one tech company that does have a history of actively trying to diversify its workplace. What's the bottom line with most of these companies? Take it from Carol Bartz, formerly of Yahoo and now on the board of Cisco: "They're more comfortable with their VC boys' network and really don't want to rock the boat," she said. DON'T ROCK THE BOAT. But get those women who are already famous using Twitter.

Image via Kevin Winter/Getty

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katedries
Kate Dries

(In unrelated news, Matt Lauer's beard makes me feel weird.)