Sheryl Sandberg, Meta’s former chief operating officer, warned that public displays of misogyny and “tech bro” rhetoric are damaging the culture at the world’s largest companies.
“Rhetoric matters, and who says what matters,” Sandberg told CNBC senior media and technology correspondent Julia Boorstin on the latest episode of the podcast “CNBC Changemakers and Power Players.”
Sandberg’s comments come as influential conservatives push anachronistic views on gender roles and amid new revelations about sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s connections to some of America’s most powerful men, including her former mentor Larry Summers.
Patriarchal undercurrents in American culture and politics have also gained momentum since then. meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described company culture as “culturally neutralized” and said many companies would benefit from a more “masculine energy.”
Zuckerberg made the comments on a podcast in January, days before President Donald Trump took office. Meta also scaled back its DEI efforts in January.
“Yes, the environment is really bad. I think it’s one of the worst environments you and I have ever seen in our careers. But we’ve seen this revert before, and that’s no excuse for companies not to do the right thing by all of their employees,” Sandberg said.
Sandberg, who has run businesses at Meta for more than a decade, is also the founder of LeanIn.org, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering women, 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 reveals an emerging “ambition gap” for women at all levels of the company. This finding reflects the fact that half of companies are no longer prioritizing women’s career advancement. Importantly, the study found that the ambition gap closed when women received the same opportunities for assignments, sponsorship, mentoring, and advancement as men.
“People who are opting out are doing it because they don’t see a path forward,” Sandberg said. “Even in this environment, businesses have a choice,” she added.
Sandberg referenced data showing that gender diversity improves outcomes. According to McKinsey, companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on their leadership teams are 15% more likely to achieve above-average returns than those in the fourth quartile. Sandberg said that to achieve the best financial results, companies need to be “thorough” in terms of focusing on efficiency and profits, but they also need to be collaborative and empathetic with their employees to achieve those results.
“They are not contradictory, and they are not particularly masculine or particularly feminine. The best leaders, male or female, are both,” she said.
The report also found that women are at risk of being left behind in developing AI skills. Among young professionals, men are 50% more likely than women to receive support from their managers to use AI at work.
“This is a crazy emerging gap that we need to fix now, because we’ll see what happens with jobs. But as I sit here today, what I know and what I think is clear is that the people who will do best in this job market are the people who know how to use this technology,” Sandberg said.
As companies race to develop and deploy artificial intelligence technology, Sandberg said it’s critical to have women like OpenIA’s CEO of Applications, Fiji Simo, to help steer decision-making and model female leadership. “It really makes a big difference.”
Simo was a 2024 CNBC Changemaker. In an interview with Changemakers earlier this year, when she was still CEO of Instacart, she told CNBC, “I’m not inside Mark’s head, but what I can say is that I think there needs to be a balance, and you need both. For women to lead, they need to have masculine energy. I think you also need Lugie. I have to make very difficult decisions every day, which sometimes requires more masculine energy and aggression. That’s fine, but I balance it with a lot of emotion.”The values we talked about are more feminine energies. ”
Sandberg believes that with the right leadership, investment, and regulation, AI technology can improve online safety, including on social media platforms like Meta. “AI should be a very good tool for finding things that go against policy, so there is a way to keep people safe as technology expands, but it will take serious effort,” she said.
While social media companies, including Meta, have enjoyed light regulatory oversight so far, she believes AI needs regulation at the federal level and that a patchwork approach that forces companies to deploy different products in all 50 states is “detrimental.”
“Appropriate regulation makes sense, but it has to be done with an understanding of what the technology is, and I think that’s difficult in politics,” Sandberg said. “It should be done at the federal level with a deep understanding of technology and an awareness of changes in technology,” she added.
On Thursday, President Trump signed an executive order on a single national AI regulatory standard. The move signaled a victory for technology companies that have been working to limit the power of states to regulate AI.
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