What Sheryl Sandberg’s leaving shows about how far women have come in tech.
One of the most well-known, outspoken, and powerful women in Silicon Valley is leaving. At best, any progress has been small.
Sheryl Sandberg told Meta this week that she was leaving her job as COO, and she also talked about her legacy as a woman in tech.
“I’m especially proud that this is a company where so many great women and people from different backgrounds have worked their way up and become leaders, both in our company and elsewhere,” she said in a post on her Facebook and Instagram pages.
Even though Ms. Sandberg praised the progress of women at Meta, the situation for women at the top of the tech industry as a whole has been much more disappointing. And when she leaves in the fall, Silicon Valley will lose one of its most visible and outspoken female executives. She will leave behind few, or even none, people who are like her.
Ms. Sandberg, who is 52, was one of a group of women at major tech companies who gave keynote speeches, rose to the level of founders like Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg, and had a seat at the table at high-powered business events like the Allen & Company conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. But over the years, many of these women, like Marissa Mayer of Yahoo, Meg Whitman of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Ginni Rometty of IBM, have left, often with their reputations in tatters.
More generally, women haven’t made any big steps forward in recent years at the top of Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Meta, and other tech giants, where men still hold most of the power. Even though tech is becoming more important to the global economy and to people’s lives, the tech industry is not as good as other industries at getting women into leadership roles.
“The CEO is the face of the company,” and in the tech industry, “somehow, collectively, the world seems to want that face to be a white man,” said Jenny Lefcourt, co-founder of All Raise, a nonprofit that works to promote gender and racial equality, and an investor at Freestyle Capital.
A report from the law firm Fenwick & West says that 4.8 percent of the top 150 firms in Silicon Valley by revenue were led by women at the end of 2020. This is the same number as in 2018. On the other hand, the number of female CEOs of companies in the S&P 500 index rose from 4.8 percent in 2018 to 6 percent at the end of 2020.
Some powerful women in tech companies that are on the stock market, like Twitter’s general counsel Vijaya Gadde, have been harassed. Others have sued for discrimination, like Francoise Brougher, who used to be the chief operating officer of Pinterest. And in recent years, it seems like female tech leaders are often hired to clean up other people’s mistakes. This has led to the term “glass cliff,” which is a play on the term “glass ceiling” and refers to the high risks of the jobs.
Safra Catz of Oracle, Lisa Su of Advanced Micro Devices, and Sarah Friar of Nextdoor are all women who run public tech companies. However, they tend to be less public than Ms. Sandberg.
Alphabet, which owns Google, and Microsoft also have women in their executive suites. For example, Ruth Porat is Alphabet’s chief financial officer, and Amy Hood is Microsoft’s. Susan Wojcicki is in charge of business units at YouTube. Melanie Perkins, who runs the design software company Canva, and Fidji Simo, who runs the delivery company Instacart, are two examples of women who run tech start-ups.
But there are still problems for women in almost every part of the tech ecosystem. Amazon, Google, and Apple all put out annual diversity reports that show small steps forward for women in leadership. Venture capital firms are still mostly run by men, and only a small amount of funding goes to women who start businesses. In Silicon Valley, stories about toxic workplaces, discrimination, and harassment keep spreading.
“If we keep making progress at this rate, we won’t reach equality in our lifetimes,” Ms. Lefcourt said. “We need a big change from here on out.”
Ms. Lefcourt said that the lack of progress was due to the systemic unconscious biases in the tech industry, which were especially strong when risky start-ups were just getting started. She also said that women in the industry don’t have many examples of what success looks like.
Since at least the 1930s, men have run the largest tech companies. David Packard and Bill Hewlett started the well-known company Hewlett-Packard in a garage in Silicon Valley in 1939. In the 1950s, men led chip companies like Fairchild Semiconductor. Even in the 1990s, when Carly Fiorina became CEO of Hewlett-Packard, there were not many women in charge in Silicon Valley.
In the Internet age, some women were chosen to lead, like Carol Bartz, who was the CEO of Autodesk and then became the CEO of Yahoo in 2009. Some women joined new businesses like Google, which grew quickly. When Sheryl Sandberg left her job as a vice president at Google in 2008 to work for Facebook, she helped create a new archetype of an experienced female executive who helped make start-ups started by men more professional. Last year, Facebook changed its name to Meta.
Emilie Choi, the chief operating officer of Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange, said of Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, “It wasn’t that she was just a COO. Mark made sure she was really elevated in status.” Ms. Choi said that she and other women in tech used Ms. Sandberg’s template to work with tech founders.
Ms. Sandberg’s best-selling business book, “Lean In,” was released in 2013. It told women to take chances and work harder to get promotions and raises.
Ellen Pao, a venture capital investor, sued her employer, Kleiner Perkins, for discrimination in 2012. This case showed how hard it was for women to work in tech. She lost the case in 2015, but the trial got a lot of attention and showed how bad the boys club in Silicon Valley is. Since then, Ms. Pao has started a nonprofit called Project Include that focuses on diversity and inclusion.
Ms. Pao said that even though more people now believe women and other people when they talk about discrimination and harassment, tech companies haven’t done much to make their workplaces better.
“We don’t get many metrics on diversity and inclusion, and the ones we do get show little progress, especially at the executive levels,” she said.
After her trial, tech companies started putting out annual diversity reports that showed how their workforces were different based on race and gender. Many venture capital firms had only men as partners, but they now have women as partners too.
More women were named to executive jobs at public tech companies. In 2009, Ursula Burns became the chief executive of Xerox. After working for Google for a long time, Ms. Mayer became Yahoo’s CEO in 2012. In the same year, Ms. Rometty was named CEO of IBM. In 2014, Oracle made Ms. Catz a co-chief executive. In 2013, Microsoft made Ms. Hood its chief financial officer, and in 2015, Google hired Ms. Porat for the same job.
But many of them had trouble running tech companies that were getting old. Only Ms. Catz, Ms. Hood, and Ms. Porat are still in their original jobs.
Nicole Wong, a former Twitter executive and now a deputy chief technology officer for the Obama administration, said, “The snail’s pace of progress for women leaders in Silicon Valley is worse than disappointing.” “It makes it look like the promises that tech leaders made in 2014 about racial and gender diversity were just for show.”
In 2017, stories about powerful men in Silicon Valley sexually harassing women became part of the #MeToo movement. In that year, a group of women investors got together and started All Raise.
In 2018, California passed a law that required publicly traded companies to have at least one woman on their board of directors. This led to a lot of women joining corporate boards. (Last month, a judge in California threw out the law, and the state has said it will appeal the decision.) The Silenced No More Act, which was passed last year, is another new law that protects people who talk about discrimination or harassment at work in public.
Women in tech have kept talking about how they are treated unfairly. In 2020, Pinterest paid Ms. Brougher $22.5 million to settle her claims of discrimination and retaliation. Emily Kramer, who used to be the chief marketing officer at the financial start-up Carta, is suing for discrimination. The case is making its way through the courts.
There are some signs that things are getting better. In the past five years, Katrina Lake of Stitch Fix, Julie Wainwright of The RealReal, Jennifer Hyman of Rent the Runway, and Whitney Wolfe Herd of Bumble all took the companies they started public. And because of Ms. Sandberg, there are now more women chief operating officers in the tech industry. Some of them work at Coinbase, SpaceX, or Reddit, like Ms. Choi, Gwynne Shotwell, and Jen Wong.
At Meta, Ms. Sandberg hired and promoted women like Marne Levine, the chief business officer, and Lori Goler, the head of human resources and hiring. The number of women with director or higher titles in Meta’s management rose from 30 percent in 2018 to 35 percent in 2021, according to the company.
Meta also hired women who now run other tech companies, like Ms. Simo, who was in charge of Facebook’s main app before becoming CEO of Instacart last year.
“Sheryl’s leadership has been important to a lot of us,” said Kate Rouch, who was the chief marketing officer at Meta until August and is now the chief marketing officer at Coinbase.
But when Ms. Sandberg leaves her job in a few months, Javier Olivan, who has worked at Meta for a long time, will take over as COO. Mr. Olivan will be one of Mr. Zuckerberg’s four top assistants in charge of technology and policy. They are all men.
