Google Inc has hired Morgan Stanley chief financial officer (CFO) Ruth Porat to serve in the same role as the Internet search leader and its Silicon Valley peers are under fire for hiring and promoting too few women.
The appointment announced on Tuesday fills a void that opened earlier this month after seven-year veteran Google CFO Patrick Pichette announced plans to retire.
Porat, 58, is to become Google’s highest-ranking female executive when she starts her new job on May 26. Her last day at Morgan Stanley is to be April 30, ending a 28-year career at the New York investment bank.
Photo: Bloomberg
Google and other Silicon Valley heavyweights, including Apple Inc and Facebook Inc, are trying to add more women to their payrolls. The push began during the past 10 months after the companies released data revealing that women filled just 15 to 20 percent of jobs in the high-tech industry, which tend to pay the most.
Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm that has financed Google and other prominent technology companies, is embroiled in a San Francisco trial that is airing embarrassing allegations of sexual discrimination. In the past week, sexual discrimination lawsuits have been filed by women who formerly worked at Facebook and Twitter. Porat’s departure from a top job on Wall Street serves as the latest reminder of the technology industry’s allure, as its products reshape culture and enrich the companies creating them.
Google, which started in 1998 in a Silicon Valley garage after raising US$100,000, now has a market value of nearly US$400 billion. Morgan Stanley, founded in 1935, has a market value of about US$72 billion.
Porat received compensation valued at US$10.1 million from Morgan Stanley in 2013. Pichette received compensation valued at US$5.2 million in the same year.
Porat, Morgan Stanley’s chief financial officer since 2010, won Wall Street’s respect for helping the bank regain its financial stability after sinking into deep trouble along with much of the rest of the financial services industry during the Great Recession.
Her investor-friendly attitude has fed speculation that Google might be more apt to return some of its US$64 billion in cash to shareholders, either through dividends or by buying back stock.
Porat has California roots and connections on Google’s board of directors.
Although Porat was born in England, her father was a physicist who spent 26 years working at Stanford University, where she earned an undergraduate degree in economics and international relations in 1979.
She also sits on Stanford’s board of trustees with two Google board members, K. Ram Shriram and John Hennessy.
Stanford president Hennessy is Google’s lead independent director.
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