How Facebook’s scandals are hurting Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In brand

Even before her book Lean In was published in 2013, Sheryl Sandberg had become synonymous with a particular brand of female empowerment.

Sandberg’s message, set forth in a commencement speech at Barnard College in 2011 and fleshed out more fully in Lean In, was simple but ambitious: Women should pursue their professional goals without hesitation or apology. By overcoming internalized sexism and a lack of confidence, they could rise to the top of their fields, and they could bring other women up with them. If enough women leaned in, they might be able to forge not just better careers for themselves but a more just society.

“True equality is long overdue and will be achieved only when more women rise to the top of every government and every industry,” wrote Sandberg, who has been the chief operating officer of Facebook since 2008.

Sandberg had a public profile before Facebook, having served as an executive at Google and as chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. But her role at Facebook was crucial to the book’s message — she presents taking the job as CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s second in command as the kind of risk that women should embrace as they move their careers forward. And Lean In would not have gotten the kind of coverage it received had it not been written by the female COO of one of the most powerful tech companies in the world.

But if Facebook was crucial to Sandberg’s ascension as an advocate for women’s empowerment, today her role in the company has significantly tarnished her brand. Questions are swirling about how much Sandberg knew, or should have known, about Facebook’s efforts to counteract criticism over political propaganda on its platform, especially amid revelations that an opposition research firm that promulgated anti-Semitic conspiracy theories was hired on her watch. All this comes on the heels of news of Facebook’s privacy failures, the role of propaganda posts in inciting genocide in Myanmar, and the possibility that Russian troll activity on the platform helped influence the 2016 election.

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In response to a request for comment on the most recent criticisms, Facebook pointed Vox to previous statements. “It was never anyone’s intention to play into an anti-Semitic narrative against Mr. [George] Soros or anyone else,” Sandberg said in a Facebook post in November. In a statement to the press later that month, a Facebook spokesperson said that Sandberg “takes full responsibility for any activity that happened on her watch.”

And Rachel Thomas, the president of LeanIn.org, the nonprofit Sandberg founded in 2013, told Vox in a statement that “Sheryl is a core part of everything Lean In does. With her guidance and support, we push hard for gender equality.”

But in 2013, some critics cautioned that more women following Sandberg’s example might not be a good thing for the country or the world. Now it’s becoming increasingly clear that by leaning in and doing her job at Facebook, Sandberg helped build and protect a company that enabled anti-Semitism, disinformation campaigns, and ethnic cleansing. And while the social media giant once provided a platform for Sandberg to launch what she thought of as a social movement, today it’s cast her legitimacy as a leader of women into doubt.

Sandberg wrote that Lean In was “sort of a feminist manifesto.” But as sociologist and author Tressie McMillan Cottom put it to Vox, Sandberg’s job at Facebook means “she can’t actually be a feminist. Her role won’t allow her to be a feminist.” Facebook helped create Sandberg’s career as a women’s empowerment guru — and now Facebook might help to destroy it.

With Lean In, Sandberg positioned herself not just as a career expert but as a social reformer

In Lean In, Sandberg argued that women face both external and internal barriers to success at work. The external barriers included discrimination, sexual harassment, and lack of paid leave and affordable child care. But in addition to facing those obstacles, she wrote, “we hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in.”

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Sandberg acknowledged the importance of the external obstacles, but she argued that by focusing on the internal ones — the ones they could control — women could gain significant power in the workplace. She advised readers to “sit at the table,” placing themselves front and center at big meetings rather than gravitating to the sidelines; to negotiate for raises (and to “justify their requests” to combat the sexist backlash they might face); and not to “leave before they leave,” bowing out of demanding roles because they planned to have children one day.

Lean In was meant as more than a career advice book — Sandberg argued that by leaning in, women could make widespread social change. In the book’s introduction, she mentioned a party at her home for Liberian women’s rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee. A guest asked Gbowee how American women could help Liberians, Sandberg said. Gbowee’s answer: “More women in power.”

“Leymah and I could not have come from more different backgrounds, and yet we have both arrived at the same conclusion,” Sandberg wrote. “Conditions for all women will improve when there are more women in leadership roles giving strong and powerful voice to their needs and concerns.”

Timed with its release, Sandberg launched a nonprofit organization, also called Lean In, aimed in part at helping women around the world start “Lean In circles,” discussion groups where they would support each other’s career goals.

“Our mission is to create a global community dedicated to encouraging women to lean in to their ambitions,” Lean In documents obtained by the New York Times in 2013 read. “The shift to a more equal world will happen with each woman who leans in.”

Lean In was always controversial

From the day it was published, Lean In was controversial, with many critics arguing that its core message was only applicable to women who were already a lot like Sandberg: white, educated, professional women who would be rewarded for leaning in — and had the resources to weather the fallout if they weren’t.

Sandberg’s argument “not only ignores poor and working class women but it also ignores how navigating class constructs is different for black women, even high achieving black women,” wrote Cottom in 2013. “I dare say that Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey have a great deal in common with Sandberg but that they also experienced very different kinds of obstacles in attaining elite corporate positions.”

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Meanwhile, some questioned whether more women at the top of corporate America would lead to better conditions for all. “As long as feminists are lauding the ascension of women to boardrooms for equality’s sake and not questioning what happens in those boardrooms, true liberation is a long way off,” Sarah Jaffe wrote in Dissent in 2013.

Kate Losse, a former speechwriter for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the author of a book about her experiences working at the company, also took issue with the idea that the advice in Lean In was necessarily beneficial for women as a whole. The book “teaches women more about how to serve their companies than it teaches companies about how to be fairer places for women to work,” she wrote in Dissent.

Nonetheless, Lean In was popular. It became a best-seller, and Lean In circles sprouted up around the world — today, the organization counts 40,000 circles in 170 countries. And many women around the country found Sandberg’s tips helpful.

Anna Dapelo-Garcia, a health care administrator in Palo Alto, California, and the founder of Lean In Latinas, told Vox that reading Sandberg’s book gave her confidence and taught her not to be afraid of her own voice.

“Can I compare myself to the author? Absolutely not,” Dapelo-Garcia said. “But there were pieces of it that I felt that I could get my head around.”

Meanwhile, many feminists argued that Sandberg’s book had its place, even if it didn’t offer solutions for all the problems facing women in the workplace. “Women face very real barriers, men are given very real unearned benefits, and these are collective social problems,” wrote Jill Filipovic at the Guardian in response to criticisms of Lean In. “But on an individual level, we can take steps that both better our own lives and help pave the way for institutional changes.”

Controversy notwithstanding, Sandberg became, if not precisely a feminist icon, then certainly an influential figure in debates about women’s empowerment. As Nellie Bowles writes at the New York Times, Lean In “took her out of simply being Facebook’s No. 2 and reframed her as a thought leader and, many fans thought, a potential candidate for president.”

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Sandberg’s political future seemed especially bright in the runup to the 2016 election. If Clinton won, as Bowles notes, Sandberg was “widely expected” to join her administration, perhaps as Treasury secretary. Of course, things didn’t turn out that way.

Facebook’s troubles have called Sandberg’s credibility into question

Soon after President Trump won the 2016 election, Facebook was criticized for enabling the spread of fake news and misinformation on its platform, which many believed helped Trump’s campaign. It became clear, as Philip Bump noted at the Washington Post, that Russian trolls had used Facebook to post memes and comments and organize real-world events, all “aimed at bolstering Trump and sowing dissent.” Then came the revelation that the company had exposed data from as many as 87 million users to a researcher at the firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked for the Trump campaign.

Facebook, and Sandberg personally, also supported anti-sex trafficking legislation that was almost universally criticized by sex workers, who said it would make “both consensual and nonconsensual sex workers less safe,” as Vox’s Aja Romano wrote. Facebook backed the bill in an effort to repair its relationships with members of Congress, sources told the New York Times.

Facebook supported the bill “because the groups and experts that dedicate their lives to fighting trafficking believed this legislation was necessary to prevent this scourge,” a Facebook spokesperson told Vox.

The company came under fire for its role elsewhere in the world as well — Paul Mozur reported at the New York Times in October on evidence that members of the military in Myanmar had turned Facebook “into a tool for ethnic cleansing,” posting false stories and hateful comments about the country’s Rohingya minority that may have helped incite “murders, rapes and the largest forced human migration in recent history.”

“As Mark and Sheryl have said, for many years we were too focused on the good our products were designed to do and not focused enough on the ways they could be abused,” a Facebook spokesperson told Vox. “In Myanmar specifically, we didn’t have enough Burmese speakers reviewing content, so we’ve doubled the number of local reviewers there. Our work here is ongoing and will be a major focus for us in 2019.”

Then in November, the New York Times reported that Facebook had hired the Republican-aligned PR firm Definers Public Affairs, which had promulgated the message that anti-Facebook protests were being backed by billionaire George Soros.

As Vox’s Tara Isabella Burton noted, “the idea that activists, and leftist activists in particular, are being bankrolled by Soros, or by Jewish interest groups more widely, is a ubiquitous form of political propaganda.” Zuckerberg and Sandberg are both Jewish, and there’s no suggestion that they personally spread anti-Semitic messages. But by paying a firm that blamed Soros for protest activities, Facebook was essentially supporting a popular anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

Sandberg herself was closely implicated in this new scandal. “As evidence accumulated that Facebook’s power could also be exploited to disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg stumbled,” Sheera Frenkel and a team of other Times reporters wrote. “Bent on growth, the pair ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view.”

Sandberg initially said she didn’t know Facebook had hired Definers, but she admitted in a Facebook post the day before Thanksgiving that “some of their work was incorporated into materials presented to me,” and that she had “received a small number of emails where Definers was referenced.”

“I also want to emphasize that it was never anyone’s intention to play into an anti-Semitic narrative against Mr. Soros or anyone else,” Sandberg said in the Facebook post. “Being Jewish is a core part of who I am and our company stands firmly against hate.”

Meanwhile, criticism of her role intensified when the Times and BuzzFeed News reported that she had asked Facebook’s communications team to look into Soros’s financial interests after he criticized the company publicly in January. Her request — specifically, she was curious about whether Soros was shorting Facebook’s stock — wasn’t necessarily unusual, Vox’s Emily Stewart notes: “it’s not uncommon for big-name investors to try to talk down or attack companies they’ve shorted.”

“Mr. Soros is a prominent investor and we looked into his investments and trading activity related to Facebook,” Facebook said in a statement to press on November 29. “That research was already underway when Sheryl sent an email asking if Mr. Soros had shorted Facebook’s stock.”

Still, the news was more bad press for Sandberg at a time when many were already seeing her and Facebook in a negative light.

In 2013, Facebook was a powerful perch from which Sandberg could spread her message of women’s empowerment. In 2018, however, her role at Facebook appears to have compromised her status.

Criticisms of Sandberg in the press have intensified. “Those feminists who were so quick to embrace Sandberg should now publicly condemn her,” Jessa Crispin wrote at the Guardian after the Definers news broke. “If feminism wants to claim any interest in the safety and quality of life of women — a demographic that includes those who have become victims in the rise of rightwing terrorists, many of whom organized and were radicalized online — the most visible spokespeople for the movement must distance themselves from a woman who prioritized profits over ethics and her job over countless lives.”

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And, Bowles reports at the Times, even some within the Lean In organization seem to be dissociating themselves from Sandberg. “We only ever even mention who Sheryl is to explain why her experience is relevant to women,” one of the leaders of Lean In Atlanta told Bowles. “That’s where it ends to us in terms of the mention of Sheryl.”

Not everyone feels this way. When I reached out to the Lean In organization for comment on this story, they put me in touch with Kathy Andersen, the executive director of the Women’s Fund Miami-Dade, which helps coordinate Lean In circles in the Miami area.

Sandberg “is the heart and the soul and the face and the spirit of Lean In,” Andersen said. “She was the seed that started it and she continues to grow it through her presence.”

Critical coverage of Facebook only strengthens the work of Lean In, she said, because “it highlights how complex leadership is.”

“We don’t seek leadership perfection, we seek leaders who pursue a more perfect world, and that’s what Sheryl has done,” Andersen said. “She pursues social progress and corporate profit and that’s good for everyone.”

Sandberg tried to start a social movement from inside Facebook. The past five years shows the limits of that approach.

From the beginning, Sandberg’s critics questioned whether it was possible for feminist progress and Facebook profits to go hand in hand. In the past few months, revelations about Facebook have thrown those questions into high relief.

For some, what’s happening at Facebook doesn’t detract from Sandberg’s work with Lean In. “Sheryl never represented herself as the COO of Facebook in any environment that I was in,” said Dapelo-Garcia, the Lean In Latinas founder. “Her interactions with us have been solely on Lean In.”

But for others, the two roles are inextricable.

“Sheryl Sandberg can’t actually be a feminist with the role that she has,” Cottom said, “because her organization is fundamentally going to have to be anti-feminist if it’s going to make money the way it makes money.”

To some degree, Sandberg’s role as the author of Lean In and leader of the movement surrounding it has always depended on her role at Facebook. Throughout the book, she uses her career at Facebook as an example of how women can realize their ambitions and become successful.

In 2008, “other companies were willing to hire me as CEO, but I joined Facebook as COO,” she writes at one point. “I prioritized potential for fast growth and the mission of the company above title.”

She recounts the episode as a way of showing that “women need to be more open to taking risks in their careers.”

As an author, Sandberg is chatty and, at times, funny. She has a knack for presenting social science concepts in an accessible way, and as Katherine Goldstein noted at Vox, her book is responsible for bringing ideas like “impostor syndrome” into the mainstream of American discourse. But ultimately, her success at Facebook was one of the main selling points of Lean In. If women followed in her footsteps, she argued, they too could be more successful at work, and thereby help change the world for the better.

Five years later, it’s increasingly hard to argue that you can make the world a better place as the COO of Facebook. And while Sandberg is certainly more than her current job, her job has also been at the core of her women’s empowerment message from the beginning.

“I believe that if more women lean in, we can change the power structure of our world and expand opportunities for all,” Sandberg wrote in Lean In.

In fact, by leaning into her job at Facebook, she became part of the power structure of the world. It may be up to others to change it.

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