Who is Sheryl Sandberg?
Sheryl Kara Sandberg is an economist, book author, and current COO of Meta, where she has been a member of the board of directors since 2012. She is also the founder of Leanin.org, an organization that seeks to offer other women support, be it in terms of education or in the formation of small groups to help each other to achieve their goals.
She is the first woman to serve on the board of directors of Facebook and before being in the company led by Mark Zuckerberg, she was vice president of online sales and operations at Google, where she was also involved in the formation of the philanthropic initiative Google.org.
Sandberg was born in Washington DC but moved to Miami as a child. She resided there until she entered Harvard University, where she graduated cum laude in 1991 in Economics and won the John H. Williams Prize for the most outstanding students in economics.
During her stay at Harvard she was the founder of the organization Women in Economics and Government and met Professor Larry Summers, who hired her as a research assistant at the World Bank, after working for the Secretary of the Treasury, she joined Google and in 2012 the named one of the 100 most influential women in Times magazine.
She is the mother of two children and has been married a couple of times, but since 2015 she has been a widow, after her husband, Dave Goldberg, died due to a cardiac arrhythmia while exercising, a subject that Sandberg has discussed extensively and even published a book. about it in 2017.
What other women move the technological world?
Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder of Bumble
In 2021, she became the youngest woman to be part of the select group of the 500 richest people in the world who have acquired their fortune through work, a list in which women only represent 5%, according to data from Bloomberg. The founder and CEO of Bumble, a company in which 70% of the board is occupied by women, gave visibility to her role as mother while she signed the company’s IPO with her son in her arms .
Susan Wojcicki, YouTube CEO
She has held this position since 2014, becoming the most powerful executive on the Internet, according to Time. She has a cum laude degree in History and Literature from Harvard, as well as two master’s degrees in economics. Before coming to YouTube, Wojcicki was responsible for advertising for Google for almost 15 years, she is the mother of five children and Forbes magazine estimates her fortune to be 350 million dollars.
Safra Catz, Oracle CEO
Described by Fortune magazine as a “low-key, high-impact” woman and featured on Forbes magazine’s ‘Best Paid Women in the World’ list numerous times, with a fortune valued at $525 million, this former banker from A Wall Streeter and mother of two, she was recruited by Oracle in the 1990s and named CEO in September 2014.
Ruth Porat, Chief Financial Officer of Alphabet
She studied Economics at Stanford University and is an expert in the world of finance. In 2019, Porat was listed as one of the 19 most powerful women in the world by Forbes and 7th in Fortune’s ‘Most Powerful Women in 2020 List’. In that same year, Blackstone Group named Porat, Google’s chief financial officer, as a member of its board of directors.
Married and mother of three children, she has extensive experience in the financial world, as well as being a two-time breast cancer survivor.
Breaking a glass ceiling that is hard to break
In addition to these leaders in Silicon Valley, technology companies have made efforts to be more inclusive, but they still need to work on this parity. By company, female employees represent between 29% (Microsoft) and 45% (Amazon) of the total workforce at the largest technology companies in the United States.
For actual tech jobs, that percentage falls much further, with women holding fewer than one in four technical jobs at each of the companies that report that figure (Amazon doesn’t).
In terms of leadership positions, the status of women in the technology sector, represented by the most prominent (and valuable) companies in our chart, is roughly on par with the rest of the economy. According to the latest available data, women hold 26.5% of senior executive and management positions at S&P 500 companies, a percentage that many tech companies match or exceed, but is still far from parity.