Twitter appoints Dame Marjorie Scardino as first female board member

Twitter has appointed former Pearson CEO Marjorie Scardino to its board following a backlash over its lack of female talent.

Scardino, who was previously a Nokia board member, is the first woman on Twitter’s board.

She joins former Netscape chief financial officer Peter Currie, former News Corp chief operating officer Peter Chernin and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Fenton on the board.

@twitter Thank you. There couldn’t be a more exciting time in Twitter’s history to join!

— Marjorie M Scardino (@marjscar) December 5, 2013

Scardino, 77, signed up for a Twitter account yesterday.

Her first tweet for the followers read: “@twitter Thank you. There couldn’t be a more exciting time in Twitter’s history to join!”

After its floatation last month, the social media site was panned by entrepreneurs for its “male chauvinistic thinking”.

Vivek Wadhwa, a Stanford University academic and entrepreneur, told the New York Times: “This is the elite arrogance of the Silicon Valley mafia, the Twitter mafia. It’s the same male chauvinistic thinking. The fact that they went to the IPO without a single woman on the board, how dare they?”

To this, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said: “The issues are much bigger than checking any one box.”