Business and technology will not thrive without greater participation from women, says Safra Catz, the co-chief executive officer of Redwood City-based Oracle.
“We need everybody, the folks that are most interested and the best,” she told reporters at a May 9 conference in Tel Aviv marking the launch of the company’s new cloud ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) platform for businesses in Israel. “We can’t afford half of the population deciding they’re not interested and they’re not going to do it.”
The Israeli-born Catz recently emerged as last year’s highest-paid U.S. female executive, according to Bloomberg, which reported that she was awarded a 2015 pay package of $56.9 million. That figure included $10.5 million in equity awards tied to her September 2014 promotion from co-president and chief financial officer to co-CEO (alongside Mark Hurd) in addition to annual stock grants and a $1 million salary.
Catz is one of a handful of women leading tech companies in Silicon Valley; other CEOs are at the helm at IBM, HP, Yahoo and YouTube, and Sheryl Sandberg is the COO of Facebook. She is one of only 20 women leading S&P 500 companies, which works out to 4 percent. In Israel, the situation is hardly better, with women CEOs leading only 6 percent of the companies on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, according to a 2015 study.
“When I was younger, I did not completely understand this whole ‘women’ issue because I was in advanced mathematics classes myself and I was typically the only woman and it never really bothered me. I didn’t notice,” said Catz, who joined Oracle in 1999.
“Then, when I was going to Wall Street and to law school, it didn’t occur to me too much to be involved in women-only events. I was wrong,” she continued. “It’s actually extremely important, because it turns out that people in general often are uncomfortable when they’re the only one of a certain type and, as a result, they drop out before reaching their highest potential.”
Oracle, which has a market cap valuation of $164 billion, is building a tech-focused public school on its main campus in Redwood City to help encourage girls to study STEM subjects: science, technology, engineering and math.
Oracle — which offers companies software, infrastructure and platforms to help them run their businesses — invested heavily in research and development even through the dotcom bust, Catz said. This, she added, prepared them to get into cloud computing before the term even existed.
Not only did it devote billions to creating its own new technology, but Oracle was savvy about buying up other technology, she said.
As with many multinational tech companies, Oracle has found Israel to be a fertile ground for acquisitions, most recently shelling out $500 million for Ravello, a Ra’anana-based cloud-computing company. When asked to discuss Oracle’s acquisitions pipeline, Catz stopped to consider what has or has not already been announced — an indication that another announcement is in the works.
But Oracle has its critics, most recently over its lawsuit against Google concerning its Android operating system. The trial began May 9 in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.
Because Google used Java, owned by Oracle, to create its popular Android mobile-operating system, Oracle is suing for upwards of $9 billion in damages, saying it was a copyright infringement.
Though some argue that the suit could upend the culture of codesharing that has underpinned the digital economy, Catz, who is testifying in the trial, disagreed.
“Exactly the opposite is true,” she said. “It actually encourages innovation, and innovation requires investment.”