Zynga Appoints First Female Board Member Ellen Siminoff

Zynga has appointed Ellen Siminoff, its first female director to its board.

Siminoff, who is currently the president and CEO of Shmoop University, will also join the audit committee of the social games company.

Over the past year, the company has added a number of board members, but no women, despite the fact that they make up one of the company’s core player demographics.

Prior to her role at Shmoop, an educational publishing company, Siminoff served as President and CEO of Efficient Frontier, and was a founding executive at Yahoo, where she held a variety of roles. She also currently serves on the board of directors for Journal Communications, Mozilla, Solarwinds and U.S. Auto Parts Network.

Siminoff joins Jeffrey Katzenberg, Reid Hoffman, Sunil Paul, Bing Gordon, Stanley Meresman, Owen Van Natta, John Schappert and Mark Pincus.

No word on whether Siminoff plays Zynga’s games herself, but in a statement, she said she admires the company’s ability to bring people together.

“Zynga is truly about deep connections between people and the company has built a significant, engaged player community around the benefits of play and social,” Siminoff said. “I admire this vision and I look forward to working with Mark and my fellow directors to leverage Zynga’s tremendous success and extend its consumer facing platform for play even further.”

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