Mark Zuckerberg’s adult supervision
In the latest issue of the New Yorker, Ken Auletta has a profile of Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook. A lot of the article focuses on gender issues in business and technology.
Early this spring, Sandberg gathered twelve female Facebook executives in a bare, white-walled conference room to review the agenda for the company’s Women’s Leadership Day, which was scheduled for the following week. Each of them was expected to lead sessions encouraging all the female executives there to step up “into leadership” roles. “What I believe, and that doesn’t mean everyone believes it, is that there are still institutional problems and we need more flexibility in all of this stuff,” Sandberg told them. “But much too much of the conversation is on blaming others, and not enough is on taking responsibility ourselves.”
Yes, she continued, we could swap anecdotes about sexist acts. But doing so diverts women from self-improvement. She opposes all forms of affirmative action for women. “If you don’t believe there is a glass ceiling, there is no need,” she told me. She doesn’t even like voluntary efforts to keep positions open for qualified women. There’s a cost, she explained, in lost time, and a cost for women, because “people will think she’s not the best person and that job was held open for a woman.”
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