In a blog entry,When Leaning In Didn’t Work — Even For Sheryl Sandberg, the authors point out:
..”right before its initial public offering last year. The social network was set to go public with an all-male board. Sandberg obviously knows what a mistake this is — she cites the research in her book, after all, and more than 50% of Facebook’s users are women. As COO, Sandberg was at the right hand of CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Maybe she didn’t want a place on the board, although, given her insistence that women lean in, that seems unlikely. But even if she didn’t, why wasn’t she able to convince Facebook management to find another qualified woman?
Facebook did eventually appoint Sandberg to its board, but only after months of criticism and the obligatory hiring of an outside search firm Facebook also added Dr. Susan Desmond-Hellmann, the Chancellor of University of California, San Francisco, to its board in early March, just as the all the publicity around Sandberg and Lean In was cranking up.”
The authors credit Sandberg with renewing the discussion about the regrettable lack of women onthe top rungs of the corporate ladder, throughout our society. But they question why “Sandberg, who is holding herself up as a role model for ambitious professional women, couldn’t convince the Facebook team there was something economically sub-par with an all-male board. This is a woman who, by all accounts, is brilliant, is street smart, is championed by people like renowned economist Larry Summers, and who is leaning so far in that her nose is practically touching the ground.”
Good question.
Related articles
- Sheryl Sandberg: Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders (roxanneindelicato.wordpress.com)
- 10 Reasons Why You Should Read “Lean In” By Sheryl Sandberg ! (shestrives.com)