The title of her own brand of feminism and leadership programs might be ‘Lean In’, but Sheryl Sandberg, one of the most high-profile women in tech, looks to be ‘leaning out’ of Meta.
As the former chief operating officer of Meta, Sandberg has announced she’s now leaving the company’s board of directors, saying “this feels like the right time to step away”.
Writing in a Facebook post that she won’t stand for reelection in May, she said that Meta is “well-positioned for the future” and that she’ll serve as an informal advisor to the company going forward.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg thanked her for the “extraordinary contributions” to the company.
Who is Sheryl Sandberg?
Sandberg, 54, joined Facebook in 2008 when it was still just a small startup. Prior to this, she’d spent about seven years at Google.
In 2012, she became a board member at Facebook, and during her tenure, the company became one of the most valuable in the world, topping $1 trillion market cap at its peak in 2021. She helped the company grow to include Instagram, Whatsapp and Messenger– rebranding into Meta.
Following multiple controversies, however, Sandberg announced her departure from Meta in mid-2022. Most notably, Facebook came under mass criticism for misinformation during the 2016 US election that saw Trump take the White House. There was also the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal in 2018, misinformation in the early days of the Covid pandemic in 2020 and the US Capital riot in 2021.
As the second in command, under Meta’s CEO Zuckerberg, Sandberg took a lot of the heat for the company’s missteps. When she stepped down as Meta COO in 2022, she was replaced by Javier Olivan, who’d been Meta’s chief growth officer.
By then, Sandberg had served as COO of Facebook/Meta for 14 and a half years and as a board member for 12 years.
‘Lean In’ controversy
While she stayed on at Facebook as a board member, Sandberg also took a deep dive into work with her non-profit organisation, LeanIn.org which focuses on women’s leadership programs.
Lean In, however, has had its fair share of controversy, with critics saying Sandberg’s form of ‘feminism’ has focused on changing women to fit male-dominated spaces – an unsustainable solution to creating true gender equality.
Sandberg’s public voice on women’s leadership burst onto the scene through her 2010 TED Talk. She followed the TED Talk up with a 2013 book title Lean In, expanding on her ideas of women needing to be more assertive and more willing to hustle to break the glass ceiling— concepts that many have pointed out pertain to on a certain subset of privileged women who find promotional success through these strategies.
Her women’s leadership programs followed up the book, and are still running today.
On the flipside of feminist voices, Michelle Obama’s criticism of the ‘Lean In’ concept is among the loudest, such as when she told a 2018 crowd on her own book tour that “it’s not always enough to lean in, because that shit doesn’t work all the time”.
A large portion of Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’ ethos was that women could “have it all” in their careers and as mothers if they just worked harder.
Following the death of her own husband in 2015 and becoming a single parent, however, Sandberg wrote in a 2016 Facebook post: “I did not really get how hard it is to succeed at work when you are overwhelmed at home.”