Women in tech still look up to Sheryl Sandberg
She oversees parts of Facebook that have been most embroiled in scandal but the company has faith in her
that have been most embroiled in scandal, such as policy and content operations, but the company says if there’s a problem, they believe in Sandberg’s ability to address it.
“She has done a lot for women in tech, we shouldn’t forget that,” said Gillian Tans, the CEO of Booking.com. “It takes 3 to 4 times the effort for a woman to achieve the level of success that many of us who are here have achieved. Yet it takes one misstep to fall off your pedestal.”
“She has crossed a boundary,” said Nancy Wang, a Senior Manager of Product Management at Amazon Web Services. “But we have to look at someone holistically. What she has done for women in tech, that’s something you can’t take away from her.”
It helps to understand how rare Sandberg’s accomplishments are. Women make up about a quarter of the computing workforce but just 11% of leadership roles, according to a study by Mckinsey and Company. Among those leaders, no one has the power or portfolio of responsibility that Sandberg does. At Fortune 500 companies with COO positions, only 10% are filled by women.
So while there are plenty of examples of powerful men logging all manner of successes and failures, Sandberg has come to stand-in for all women in technology. Her very existence has opened up streams of funding, according to Lisa Falzone, now CEO and co-founder of Athena Security.
“You have to have more successful women that people can point to so VCS will give more women money,” said Falzone. “If they’ve never seen a woman be successful before, they’re not going to invest in women.”
Ironically, the solution, according to Stefanie Johnson, an associate professor of management at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business, is more Sheryl Sandbergs, not fewer. If there were more women in positions of real power, more junior workers wouldn’t feel like they had to hold on to their one hero. Then the world could experience women with a variety of leadership styles just like we do with men.