Facebook: Sandberg's social mission

Sheryl Sandberg talks to Emma Rowley about her career in Silicon Valley - and the stories she's told Mark Zuckerberg

Even Sheryl Sandberg seems slightly surprised by the furore she has caused. “Lean In is a hardcover book of feminism,” laughs the Facebook number two. “So I think what the natural thing for people to have done [would be] to completely ignore it.”
If the reaction to her new book has been quite the opposite, it is not just because Sandberg is one of the most powerful women in tech. It represents a loud call to action that is echoing beyond Silicon Valley, urging women to “lean in” to their careers, to stop holding themselves back and hobbling their progress.

Met with loud praise in some quarters, she has also faced criticism that she lets companies and governments off the hook, or ignores the sheer toll of trying to combine career and family.
Sandberg, however, comes smiling into the Covent Garden hotel suite where she is on a publicity blitz, handling even the Thatcher question – friend or foe to women? – with ease.
“I think we have to be grateful for the women that came before us – and then we have to build on their legacy to do even more,” she says promptly. “So take my own example, I say I leave [work] at five-thirty. I’m not sure the women that came before me in Silicon Valley could have done that. I don’t know if they could have survived. I say I cry at work.” Then, wryly: “I’m not sure Baroness Thatcher could have done that.”

That includes crying on the shoulder of Mark Zuckerberg, the wunderkind founder of Facebook. That, along with various other revelations – how she noticed her daughter had nits while on the eBay corporate jet; breast-pumping in her Google office – have certainly helped to create a buzz around the book.
But it is her argument that is causing debate. To her critics, she has a pithy response: read it.
“It’s incredibly clear that I’m not putting all the onus on women, that I have a lot in there on how men need to be better managers of women, how men need to acknowledge bias – how all of us need to stop telling little girls they’re bossy,” she says.
“I wasn’t anticipating this level of dialogue – but I’m so grateful for it. Because I think it’s going to take heated debate to get away from what I was most worried about writing the book: stagnation.”
Not a word you’d ever associate with Sandberg, who talks at a breakneck pace. Now 43, Miami, Harvard and business school propelled her to the US Treasury, before she joined a then-tiny Google, which would turn out to be a “rocket ship”.
She agreed to become Zuckerberg’s chief operating officer at Facebook in 2008, last year shepherding the company’s $100bn-plus (£65.6bn) float on Wall Street.
With a hefty stake in the company herself, estimates of her worth run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Alongside her meteoric rise, she has also been busy navigating married life with Dave Goldberg, a tech entrepreneur, and the births of their son and daughter, now eight and five.
She may leave the office at 5.30pm for family time, but that was after years of 7am to 7pm as a minimum – and will start work again at home later that evening.
Zuckerberg has read the book, Sandberg says, and has been “incredibly supportive”, even if, after five years sitting next to her, he said he had already heard her tell every story.
“You know, it is the personal experiences and stories that bring something to life and make it relatable and yeah, no, it wasn’t easy for me to tell them. But I think it was important,” she says.
Still, in public she seems keener on sticking to the general, despite Facebook being blamed for a generation of “over-sharers”. Her first version of her opening chapter had boasted four pages on the Masai tribe and another five on matrilineal societies, she remembers. “I thought it was fabulous,” she laughs. “No one else thought it was any good at all!”