Former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg warned that public displays of misogyny and “tech bro” rhetoric are damaging corporate culture at the world’s biggest companies.
“Rhetoric matters, who says what matters,” Sandberg told CNBC Senior Media & Tech Correspondent Julia Boorstin in the latest episode of the “CNBC Changemakers and Power Players” podcast.
Sandberg’s comments come as influential conservatives push an anachronistic view of gender roles, and amid fresh revelations linking sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to some of America’s most powerful men, including her former mentor Larry Summers.
The patriarchal undercurrent in American culture and politics also gathered momentum since Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described corporate culture as having been “culturally neutered” and said many companies would benefit from more “masculine energy.”
Zuckerberg made those comments on a podcast in January, days ahead of President Donald Trump taking office. Meta also cut back on DEI initiatives in January.
“Yes, the environment is terrible, really — I think one of the worst you and I have seen in our careers — but we’ve seen this backsliding before, and that is not an excuse for companies not to do the right thing by all of their employees,” said Sandberg.
Sandberg, who ran operations at Meta for over a decade, is also the founder of LeanIn.org, a non-profit aimed at advancing women in the workforce, and a member of the CNBC Changemakers Advisory Board. She joined the podcast to discuss LeanIn and McKinsey’s new Women in the Workplace report.
Now in its 11th year, the report revealed a newly emerging “ambition gap” for women at all levels of the corporate ladder. This finding reflects the fact that half of companies are no longer prioritizing women’s career advancement. Crucially, the study found that the ambition gap disappears when women receive the same stretch assignments, sponsorship, mentorship and promotion opportunities as men.
“The ones who are opting out — they’re doing it because they don’t see the path forward,” Sandberg said. “Even in this environment, companies have a choice,” she added.
Sandberg referenced data showing that gender diversity improves results. Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on their executive teams are 15 percent more likely to experience above-average profitability than companies in the fourth quartile, according to McKinsey. Sandberg said to get the best financial results, firms do need to be “hard core” in terms of focusing on efficiency and profits, but also supportive and empathetic towards their workers to achieve those results.
“These things are not at odds, and they’re also not particularly masculine or particularly feminine. The best leaders — whether they’re male or female — have both,” she said.
The report also revealed that women are at risk of falling behind in developing AI skills. Among young professionals, men are 50 percent more likely than women to receive support from managers to use AI at work.
“That’s a crazy emerging gap that we need to fix right now because — we’ll see what happens to jobs — but what I know sitting here today, and I think is obvious, the people who are going to do the best in this job market are the people that know how to use this technology,” Sandberg said.
As companies race to develop and deploy artificial intelligence technologies, it is critically important to have women — such as Fidji Simo, OpenIA’s CEO of applications, helping to steer decisions and modeling female leadership, Sandberg said. “It makes a really big difference.”
Simo was a 2024 CNBC Changemaker. She told CNBC in an interview for Changemakers earlier this year when she was still CEO of Instacart, “I’m not in Mark’s head, but what I can tell you is I think there needs to be a balance, a need for both. I think women need masculine energy too to be able to lead. I have to make very hard decisions day in and day out, and sometimes that requires some of that more masculine energy, some of that aggression. That’s ok, but I balance that with a lot of the values we talked about that are more feminine energy.”
Sandberg believes that with the right leadership, investment and regulation, AI technology can improve online safety, including at social media platforms like Meta. “AI should be a very good tool to find things that are against policies, so there is a path to keeping people — even as the technology expands — safer and that takes real commitment,” she said.
While social media companies including Meta have enjoyed light regulatory oversight, she believes AI needs regulation at the federal level, and a patchwork approach that would force companies to roll out different products for all 50 states would be “detrimental.”
“The right regulation makes sense, but it has to be done with an understanding of what the technology is, and I think that can be challenging in the political world,” Sandberg said. “It should be done deeply understanding the technology, knowing the technology changes, and at the federal level,” she added.
On Thursday, President Trump signed an executive order for a single national AI regulation standard. The move signaled a win for tech companies that have lobbied to limit the power of states in AI regulation.
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