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
For the last decade, the gathering of the global elite at Davos has been a safe space for Sheryl Sandberg. This year, though, fresh off a bruising 2018, the Facebook COO arrived in the Alps on the defensive, apologising over and over again for Facebook’s privacy and ethical slip-ups.
Over the last few months, the Sheryl Sandberg brand has taken a beating, and news about Facebook’s misdeeds—and her reported role in them—is unrelenting. Questions about privacy, Russian election hacking, unsavoury opposition targeting dominated the end of 2018, and the New Year began with new reports of questionable data collection practices that led Apple to ban some of Facebook’s internal apps.Through it all, pundits dissected Sandberg’s “fall from grace,” employees blamed her for the company’s woes and a stunning stock slide, and critics called for her resignation. Corporate feminism fell out of favour, #MeToo exposed the weaknesses of “leaning in” and Sandberg’s own fallibility cast her feminist empowerment side-project in a newly harsh light.
But there are signs that Sandberg’s reputation is on the mend. It helps that Facebook doesn’t seem to be suffering any: fourthquarter results were better than expected and the stock is up. “I still look up to her,” said Annie Hsieh, an engineering manager at Square Root, an Austin-based tech company. Like more than a dozen women interviewed by Bloomberg, Hsieh said she doesn’t think Sandberg acted to the highest moral and ethical standards, but she also knows how hard it is to make it to the top in the tech world.
Sandberg, for her part, started off the New Year on an image rehabilitation tour. On January 20th, she made her first public appearance in the new year at the DLD conference in Munich.
From there, she went to Dublin and then Davos, where she atoned again and again.
That includes Facebook. Sandberg directly oversees the parts of the business 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 managementatthe UniversityofColoradoBoulder’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.