Women in Tech Are Forever Cast as ‘Adults’ But Rarely as CEO

tech.hindustantimes.com:

In the early years of Facebook, the startup's motto was “move fast and break things.”

This was before the Cambridge Analytica scandal, before the platform was used to spread election and COVID-19 vaccine misinformation — essentially before we knew how much potential social media really had to, well, break things. But the problem with breaking things is that you need someone to eventually come along and clean up the mess.

Enter Sheryl Sandberg. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg never hid the fact that he brought on Sandberg as COO to handle “ things I don't want to.” That included figuring out how the company would make money, but also acting as the antidote to his hoodie-wearing, college-dropout persona. Fifteen years Zuckerberg's senior, Sandberg was literally and figuratively the grown up in the room. The troika of Eric Schmidt, Larry Page and Sergey Brin popularized the term “ adult supervision” at Google, but it was Sandberg at Facebook who really came to embody it. 

Sandberg stepped down as COO of Facebook's parent company Meta Platforms Inc. late last year, the first of a recent string of departures among senior women in tech and media that culminated with YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and Vice Media Inc. CEO Nancy Dubuc announcing last month that they would be leaving their respective roles. With none jumping into new high-profile gigs, they leave behind a complicated legacy when it comes to women who have reached the top in the business world. 

One of the chief questions left to disentangle is why the path for these high-achieving women, especially in the tech world, so often requires that they play the role of Adult. It's a label that implies a certain kind of executive; one who ensures everyone is well-behaved and on