Suddenly Sheryl Sandberg left Facebook. When I read her post I felt the sensation we get when the news arrives that someone, once famous, but disappeared from the scene for a very long time, has passed away. Was he still alive? Was Sheryl Sandberg still Mark Zuckerberg’s right hand man? It had been a while since it was gone. Yet on paper he was always the general manager, the head of all the operations of a group that for some months we have called Meta, since the head decided that the metaverse is the goal, indeed the goal, towards which to go.
If we talk about Sheryl Sandberg today it is because she was the architect of Facebook’s success, the person who explained to Zuckerberg how to transform a social network that at first only asked you to create a network of friends (Add as a friend was the key button) in a money making machine (recording our every choice and profiling us, to better sell ourselves to advertisers). But if we talk about it, it’s also because at some point in her life and her career, Sheryl Sandberg has become a leader, the champion of a new feminism.
It happened suddenly, on December 8, 2010, in Washington, when Sandberg gave a famous speech, a TED, as those fifteen-minute speeches are called in which the speaker tries to excite us with an idea or a story that changes the world. In that case the story was that of women and work, of how at work women are always penalized. Because of the men, but also because they don’t come forward enough.
Sandberg cited some data that day. 12 years have passed and those figures have changed: there were 9 women heads of state and now they are 29; those present in Parliament were 13 out of 100 and now they are 25; those who lead large companies were 15% and now they are twenty-three. The road is still long, but the wind has changed.