Article by Douglas Hanna 

From looking at the corporate management of many web hosts, it seems that men far outnumber women in the web hosting industry. When you talk to people who work at these companies, they tend to agree that men outnumber women quite a bit in the web hosting industry. This seems to be true in many technology related industries, and the exact reasons are unclear.

In the web hosting industry, women seem to hold positions in marketing, human resources, and related fields more often than tech-orientated positions. This could be for a variety of reasons from the fact that fewer women get computer science and related degrees (according to the USA Today, women only receive 12% of all doctorate degrees in engineering) than men to something less measurable such as the possibility of greater discrimination against women in the web hosting industry.

I spoke to Hillary Stiff of Virginia-based Cheval Capital, an investment-banking firm that deals primarily with web hosting companies and ISPs and whose clients include Rackspace and Endurance International Group among other companies. She mentioned how of the more than eighty deals her company had conducted in the past; women ran only one or two that she could think of. Out of the roughly thirty companies that Cheval Capital had listed on its Weekly Opportunities list, a woman runs only one.

When I asked Ms. Stiff if being a woman had helped or hurt her in the web hosting industry, she said that it hadn’t helped her or hurt her at all besides it being easier to find her at industry conferences. She added that there doesn’t seem to be much, if any, gender bias in the industry and that like many industries, if a particular woman can show she is competent, the issue of gender becomes nonexistent.

In certain companies, though, women excel just as far, if not further than their male counterparts. Lunarpages, a leading California-based web host has several women in management positions. Amy Armitage who is the self described “Miss Chief of Marketing & Business Development” has seen a lot of success at the company and become one of their top executives since joining the company six years ago. She said that personality, likeability, warmth, efficiency, organization and communication skills, among other things like industry knowledge are particularly important in her particular role.

Tracie Thompson, Lunarpage’s Assistant Manager of Customer Service said that being a woman, and more specifically, a mother has helped her in her role by teaching her the importance of patience and remaining reasonable, even in the worst of situations. She told me that the patience she has developed as a mother and the ability to empathize (which women are typically better at than men) with customers has helped her tremendously.

Ms. Armitage made it clear to me that Lunarpages makes promotion and acknowledgment decisions based upon work ethic, commitment, and willingness to learn and step up as well as technical accuracy, not gender. However, she did tell me that Lunarpages is “a very chick friendly place and we [women] are slowly taking over the place.”

Ms. Armitage’s views of women in the web hosting industry are more cynical than Ms. Stiff’s. She thinks the management teams of many web-hosting companies are quite sexist and discriminate against women. However, despite this, she thinks women are still gaining ground in the web hosting industry and thinks that as time goes on, there will be more women in influential positions in the web hosting industry.

Lunarpages also has other women executives including several senior staff members with technical jobs. Lee Coleman, their Director of Technology works mostly with men, but says she is respected because of her performance and abilities and her gender has not been an issue.

Jean McCarthy, Senior Director of Marketing at Massachusetts-based FatCow Web Hosting made an interesting point. She said that senior managers (who are often older than younger managers and are less likely to have grown up “on the Internet”) might have previously shied away from hosting because they weren’t too comfortable with overall technology and because most hosting businesses at the time were still start-ups. She thinks that as the Internet and other forms of technology become a bigger part of everyday life, non-technical women will be less intimated by working for a company that delivers a relatively technical product like web hosting.

Ms. McCarthy believes that women of all ages are starting to realize they (too) have the ability to understand the product or service and more importantly, the customer, and that women can apply their skills in many companies, including hosting companies. She thinks that women may have to speak out more to be heard, but believes that once women prove themselves, their gender is rarely an issue again.

As web hosting companies grow larger, they will need to hire more specialized employees, particularly those who work in fields like marketing, product management, finance, human resources, or public relations – all fields that women are quite common in, if not more likely to be in than men. As companies hire more people for these types of positions, there should be more women joining the upper ranks of web hosting companies.

All of the women I spoke to agreed that there was room for women in the web hosting industry and that they are gaining ground. Ms. Stiff of Cheval Capital said that “the industry is relatively new and there is a lot of room for good people with fresh ideas and energy.” I couldn’t agree more.