The resignation of Sheryl Sandberg as COO of Meta, formerly Facebook, should not perhaps have come as a surprise. She’s sat in that chair for 14 years, taking the reins in 2008 at a time when Facebook counted users in the hundreds of millions rather than the billions, it was still ranked number two after Blogger in sheer size, and when MySpace was still a meaningful competitor. Flash forward a decade and a half, and far from a hot young upstart changing social media, it’s a lumbering beast responsible for a staggering amount of human communication. It can sway elections, connect everyone from Trekkies to terrorists, and facilitate mass organizing on a scale never witnessed in human history.
Mark Zuckerberg, the architect of this madness, has always struggled with his image, a weird mixture of tech bro swagger and a perceived difficulty to meaningfully connect with people (as immortalized and certainly exaggerated in 2010’s The Social Network), but that’s okay! You don’t have to like Mark Zuckerberg; the image of the difficult, impulsive, brilliant-but-gauche might not conform to reality, but is so firmly lodged in the popular mind that we can let it slide; after all, this is how so many young men who become billionaires overnight are. We’re used to it.
So, rather than Zuckerberg overhauling his image, Sheyl Sandberg stepped up and became the company’s smiling public face, sitting for interviews and enjoying a drink with Washington policymakers as they increasingly weighed the public cost of Facebook’s existence. The Wall Street Journal cited friends of Sandberg who said that she was sick of being a “punching bag” for the company’s problems. Quoting an anonymous coworker of hers, the Wall Street Journal reports that Sandberg “sees herself as someone who has been targeted, been tarred as a woman executive in a way that would not happen to a man. Gendered or not, she’s sick of it.”
And the thing is? She’s right.
Please draw your attention to the right, a distant, difficult billionaire who runs an incredibly controversial and powerful company that has lost an immense amount of public goodwill in just a few short years. His eyes are intense, a little smug, even. He talks to others like they’re stupid, like they’re wasting his time. He intermittently takes a sip of water like he’s doing so for the first time in his life. To the left, seated next to him, is a smiling, affable woman. She’s experienced, much more so than the head of the company, and good under pressure. She’s professional, she knows what she’s doing, and she’s also warm and genuine in a way that humanizes the entire enterprise. Zuckerberg never had to be likable because his power was never in being liked. Being disliked, being dislikeable, is all part of the mythology of the Silicon Valley genius. But being liked and, in turn, making the company likable? That was Sandberg’s job (in addition to her actual job duties, of course).
There are myriad reasons, I am sure, why this resignation is happening now. The company’s trying to pivot away from being primarily dependent on advertising revenue, which is Sandberg’s precise specialty, towards hardware. The company has also had to rework its public relations, now much more focused on government liaising by Nick Clegg, former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and now President of Global Affairs at Meta; Meta is no longer a company that needs anybody to like it; it’s too entrenched, and needs the kind of political savvy once reserved for international diplomacy and other affairs of state. Sheryl Sandberg is a businesswoman, and Meta is now closer to something resembling a sovereign power. As that self-perspective has changed, Sandberg has increasingly been sidelined in favor of Clegg.
See, while behind the scenes there is no doubt that Sandberg’s role at Meta was as critical as it was expansive, the problem for Sandberg is that her public-facing position only really existed when the company needed to appear sympathetic. She had to bear all of the weight of Facebook’s existence to the rest of the world, put a positive spin on it, maybe buy a few rounds of drinks for staffers, because more than anything the company needed to be liked. Being liked fueled growth. Growth fueled advertising. Advertising generated revenue. And since Zuckerberg wasn’t going to be able to fill that role, all of that fell on Sandberg.
And she nailed it. Facebook amassed literally billions of users thanks to her ability to make unfettered growth look less like an amorphous blob slowly consuming civilization and more like, well, Sheryl Sandberg. One cannot help but wonder what on earth that does to someone, to be so closely identified with something so enormous, multifaceted, periodically nefarious, and practically impossible to avoid while remaining within human society. Further, one cannot avoid the question of why likability was a woman’s role.
It may seem out there, but bear with me. Let’s pivot over to New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. For years, subway announcements were highly gendered: male voices gave commands (“Stand clear of the closing doors.”), while female voices provided information (“The next stop is Kosciusko Street.”). An MTA spokesperson was once quoted explaining that the logic behind this was that people, purportedly, are more inclined to take direction from men and better receive information from women. So, when Facebook needed to be liked, hiring a highly accomplished and likable woman like Sandberg made sense, whether they did so deliberately or not. A woman had to bear the weight of Being Facebook to the world with grace, charm, and firmness, and she did it under the most taxing circumstances, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal that raised the question of whether Facebook was a danger to democracy. And still, Facebook grew!
But anyone can tell you: being the smiling face is hard work. It’s emotionally taxing to carry all of that, and it’s no surprise at all that when the weight of that additional labor falls disproportionately on women’s shoulders, women burn out.
We see the same thing happen to First Ladies here in the United States, the requirement that they be the sensitive, kind, smiling face of the administration, the hostess, the mom, the gentle voice, even when the government was doing monstrous things. Women are always expected to do this work.
What’s especially telling in this case is that dealing with governments is Clegg’s entire job, while, in addition to the massive role of being both the company’s public face and flak jacket, Sandberg was also concurrently serving as the company’s chief operating officer, managing the vast machinery of Meta’s increasingly complex (and morally hefty) day-to-day business. She had to drive user growth—which she did, exceptionally, reliably, month after month for almost a decade and a half—and carry the company’s enormously fraught relationship with the public on her shoulders. Presumably, nobody asked Clegg, a lifelong pol who knew how to deal with other lifelong pols, to do that. It seems he was allowed to just do the job he was hired to do. Weird, right?
The additional labor women are expected to take on is frequently cited as a contributing factor to women’s burnout. As it turns out, even one of the most successful, most accomplished, and most powerful women in business isn’t immune.
WRITTEN BY
Liz Elting