Former Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg asked a younger female employee to “come to bed” and made an assistant spend thousands on lingerie for her, a whistleblower claims in a new book.
Sarah Wynn-Williams, the author of Careless People and a former director of global public policy for Facebook, claims Sandberg and an assistant slept in each other’s laps and stroked each other’s hair on a European trip. The book also contains damning allegations against Joel Kaplan, Sandberg’s ex-boyfriend and Meta’s president of global affairs, and unflattering anecdotes about CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/facebook-sheryl-sandberg-told-female-205807353.html
Shortly after her waters broke, Sarah Wynn-Williams was lying in hospital with her feet in stirrups, typing a work memo on her laptop between contractions. Facebook’s director of global public policy needed to send talking points from her recent trip to oversee the tech giant’s bid to launch operations in Myanmar to her boss Sheryl Sandberg. Then she would give birth to her first child.
Wynn-Williams’s husband, a journalist called Tom, was livid but, as men tend to be in labour rooms, impotent. The doctor gently closed her laptop. “Please let me push send,” whimpered Sarah. “You should be pushing,” retorted the doctor with improbable timing. “But not ‘send’.”
This incident typifies how, in this 400-page memoir of her seven years at Facebook from 2011 – as it mutated from niche social network to global power able to swing elections, target body-shamed teens with beauty products and monetise millions of humans’ hitherto private data – Wynn-Williams had become part of what reads like a diabolical cult run by emotionally stunted men babies, institutionally enabled sexual harassers and hypocritical virtue-signalling narcissists.
The cult vibe of this birthing story is made stronger by Wynn-Williams channelling Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. She quotes Sandberg’s injunction to pregnant working women – “Don’t leave before you leave” – taking its implication to be that she should work right up to the point that the baby’s head emerges into this fallen world. It doesn’t occur to her that Lean In feminism might serve as a fig leaf covering self-exploitation and soul-depleting workaholism.