Well. Our picture of Sheryl Sandberg has just gotten a bit more complicated, has it not?
Until not that long ago, she was Sandberg the feminist icon. As chief operating officer of Facebook and author of “Lean In,” she encouraged women to belly up to the table, to know their worth, to march into negotiations with smiles on their faces and steel sheathing their nerves and eyes implacably trained on the C-suite. When her husband, David Goldberg, died in 2015, her inspirational appeal only grew, and she became an authority on personal growth as well. She openly shared her grief. She showed us how to talk to the bereft. In the book she co-wrote, “Option B,” she explained how to find meaning after loss and rebuild a broken self.
She was a feminist leader, corporate path-breaker and spiritual superempath all rolled into one. A Gloria Steinem-Amelia Earhart-Oprah Winfrey Thanksgiving turducken.
But now, we are seeing (not for the first time, but perhaps without the benefit of the full Photoshop experience?) Sandberg the shrewd, intensely political chief operating officer — a woman who, according to a recent story in The New York Times, worked to minimize findings that the Russians had taken up residence on Facebook in 2016 in order to sow disinformation in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election.
This was not the intrepid Wonder Woman we’d been reading about. This was a person who was easily rattled and consumed with both her reputation and her company’s. When Facebook’s security chief, Alex Stamos, told the board that the company had yet to contain Russia’s meddling, the board lit into Sandberg, who in turn screamed at Stamos the following day for humiliating her. (“You threw us under the bus!” she reportedly said.)
Possibly worth noting: Sandberg’s conference room at Facebook is called Only Good News.
Then Sandberg spun into PR fifth gear, outsourcing the nasty business of protecting her company’s image to a Republican-run opposition research goon squad that felt no compunction about trafficking in anti-Semitic memes (George Soros is behind anti-Facebook activism!) while simultaneously charging Facebook’s critics with anti-Semitism.
Male executives, of course, deploy such calculating tactics all the time. Such tactics were hardly consistent, though, with the moral and transparent style of leadership Sandberg had been peddling in “Lean In,” which has sold over 4 million copies in five years. They looked a lot more like a discarded plotline from “House of Cards.”
But here’s a question: Was it ever realistic to expect Sandberg to behave differently?
Why do we assume female leaders are inherently gentler and less egomaniacal? With so few examples to draw from, how on earth would we even know?
Sandberg’s reputation as a formidable chief operating officer burnished her reputation as a towering feminist; her reputation as a towering feminist burnished her reputation as a formidable chief operating officer. But there was always going to be a gulf between celebrity Sandberg and businesswoman Sandberg. The two, arguably, even lived in tension with each other, with conflicting prerogatives.
It was possibly naive, in this case, to think Sheryl Sandberg could have it all.
Facebook may have a reputation as a nurturing Eden for millennials, abloom with motivational posters, unlimited snacks and helium balloons. But “nurturing” is not how one would describe its leadership culture. “Below me was Care Bears, and above me was ‘Game of Thrones,’” a former Facebook executive told me. “You couldn’t get to the top in Silicon Valley when Sheryl did by being a nice person.”
Much of the advice Sandberg gives in “Lean In” is, frankly, unapologetically strategic. And why ever not, when the obstacles to female advancement can seem as high as the moon? But controversially, much of it was also retrograde, a nod to realpolitik: Ask for a raise because women as a group tend to be underpaid, not because you personally deserve it. Note that someone more senior to you suggested that you ask for this salary negotiation in the first place. Be “relentlessly pleasant,” to borrow a phrase from Mary Sue Coleman, president of the Association of American Universities.
Only when women are represented at the top in greater numbers, she argued, will they be allowed to lobby for themselves without self-consciousness.
“Relentlessly pleasant” is exactly how Sandberg has been in her dealings with Congress. The Times investigation notes that she sends personalized thank you notes to lawmakers she meets.
What makes Sandberg’s current behavior so unsavory is that she put corporate interests — and her own image — ahead of the needs of democracy. She would sooner downplay Facebook’s involvement in a national security crisis than compromise the integrity of her reputation. And in so doing, Sandberg, one of the country’s most influential and renowned feminists, may have contributed to the historic loss of the first viable female candidate for president of the United States.
