Dearbhail McDonald* says Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg is appealing to men to support women in the workplace.
When she first launched Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg (pictured) faced an instant backlash.
Many threw the book (often without reading The New York Times bestseller) at Sandberg, one of a handful of US female billionaires, with an estimated net worth of $1.6 billion.
Michelle Obama delivered a stunning riposte to Sandberg’s advice to women to assert themselves and “lean in” to their ambitions.
“That whole, ‘So you can have it all’,” Obama said in December.
“Nope, not at the same time.”
“That’s a lie.”
“And it’s not always enough to lean in, because that shit doesn’t work all the time.”
At the end of last month, Sandberg flew into Ireland, just in time for the opening of Facebook’s unprecedented Supreme Court appeal aimed at halting a referral to the European Court of Justice (CJEU).
Judgement has been reserved in that case which could prove critical, once again, for EU–US data transfers.
Sandberg was in Dublin to announce an extra 1,000 Facebook jobs in Ireland this year and unveil details of a €1 million investment with the Anti-Bullying Centre to enhance online safety.
The mother of two, whose husband, Dave Goldberg, died in 2015, also took time out to have a fireside chat with hundreds of Irish devotees of her Lean In non-profit, which has 41,000 circles worldwide.
At a standing room only event, Sandberg launched a robust defence of her Lean In philosophy.
She appealed to the handful of men in the room to support women in the workforce because it’s the smart, not just the right, thing to do.
Sandberg, the corporate “superhuman”, showed a remarkably human side discussing her husband’s death and the broader issue of dealing with people experiencing illness and death, at one stage fighting back tears.
“Too often, we ignore the elephants in the room,” said Sandberg who separately — and deftly — deflected a question about “recent criticisms” of Facebook.
The criticisms, of course, include Sandberg and Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg presiding over a non-stop series of data and hate speech scandals that have eroded trust in the social media giant and raised fears its platform is being deployed to manipulate elections.
Has the backlash against Sandberg been greater because she is a female leader?
I’m not so sure.
Such are the scale of controversies that have engulfed Facebook, it’s Sandberg’s reputation as the “adult in the room” that is more of a target than her gender.
Sandberg told her audience not to get discouraged, show up every day and take responsibility for our mistakes.
Bemoaning the fact that women still don’t have a place where they can be “unambiguously and unapologetically ambitious,” Sandberg invited us to imagine a world where 50 per cent of countries are run by women and 50 per cent of homes are run by men.
Now there’s a concept I can lean into.
* Dearbhail McDonald is INM Group Business Editor and an Eisenhower Fellow. She tweets at @DearbhailDibs.
This article first appeared at www.independent.ie.
