What Sandberg’s exit means for glass ceiling

When Sheryl Sandberg said last week that she was resigning as chief operating officer of Meta, she also reflected on her legacy as a woman in tech. “I’m especially proud that this is a company where many, many exceptional women and people from diverse backgrounds have risen through our ranks and become leaders — both in our company and in leadership roles elsewhere,” she wrote in an announcement posted on her Facebook pages.

Yet even as Sandberg lauded the progress of women at Meta, the broader reality for female leaders at the top of the tech industry has been far more disappointing. And with her exit this fall, Silicon Valley is losing one of its most visible and outspoken female executives, leaving few — some would say zero — similar peers in her wake.

Sandberg, 52, was part of a cohort of women at major tech companies who made keynote speeches, rose to the level of founders like Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg, and had a seat at the table at high-powered business gatherings like the Allen & Company conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. But over the years, many of these women — including Marissa Mayer of Yahoo, Meg Whitman of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Ginni Rometty of IBM — have departed, often with their reputations in tatters.

More broadly, women have not made notable gains in recent years in the highest echelons of Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Meta and other tech giants where the corridors of power continue to be dominated by men. The industry’s record on female leadership trails that of other industries, even as tech exerts more influence in the global economy and in people’s lives.

“The C.E.O. is the face of the company,” and in the tech industry, “somehow collectively the world seems to want the face to be a white man,” said Jenny Lefcourt, co-founder of All Raise, a nonprofit focused on advancing gender and racial equality, and an investor at Freestyle Capital. At Silicon Valley’s top 150 firms by revenue, 4.8 percent were led by women at the end of 2020, unchanged from 2018, according to a report by the law firm Fenwick & West. In contrast, the percentage of female chief executives of companies in the S&P 500 index rose to 6 percent at the end of 2020 from 4.8 percent in 2018.

Some women in positions of power at publicly traded tech companies, such as Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s general counsel, have become targets of harassment. Others, such as Françoise Brougher, a former chief operating officer of Pinterest, have sued for discrimination. And in recent years, female tech leaders have often appeared to be hired to clean up someone else’s mess, leading to the term “glass cliff,” a play on “glass ceiling” and a reference to the high risks of the roles.

Alphabet, which owns Google, and Microsoft also have women in their executive suites, such as their chief financial officers (Ruth Porat at Alphabet, Amy Hood at Microsoft), and those heading up business units, including Susan Wojcicki at YouTube. A generation of tech start-ups are also led by women, such as Melanie Perkins at the design software maker Canva and Fidji Simo at the delivery company Instacart.

But women still face obstacles in nearly every facet of the tech ecosystem. Annual diversity reports published by Amazon, Google and Apple show incremental gains for women in leadership. Venture capital firms remain dominated by men, while female founders garner a tiny portion of funding. Stories about toxic workplaces, discrimination and harassment continue reverberating throughout Silicon Valley. “If we stay at this current rate of progress, it will take way beyond our lifetimes to get to parity,” Lefcourt said. “We need exponential change from here.”

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