She rejoined Summers in the late 1990s when he served as secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton, where she focused on issues of international debt relief as a way of stabilizing developing nations during the Asian financial crisis. There, she worked on health projects in India, including leprosy and AIDS. In the early 1990s, Sandberg joined her mentor Larry Summers at the World Bank, where he had just been hired as the chief economist. Their failures highlight the limits, if not the delusion, of that vision. In those two decades of head-spinning optimism, leaders like Sandberg became convinced that liberals could harness capitalism, using it to make themselves fabulously wealthy while also making the world a fairer, more just place. Sheryl Sandberg's complicated legacy at FacebookĪs tempting as it might be to reduce Sandberg’s career to a hero-turned-villain story, it is far more useful as a guide to American culture and politics in the years between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s. Brooks during a public conversation on Facebook's work on 'breakthrough innovations that seek to open up the world' at The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research on Jin Washington, DC. And intersectional feminism and the #MeToo movement have made the ideas in “Lean In” seem naïve at best.įacebook's Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg speaks with AEI president Arthur C. Facebook, tarnished by a series of scandals as well as major questions about its business model, has gone from being seen as Silicon Valley golden child to dystopian Big Brother. The book fit in well with her work at Facebook, capturing the sense of bootstrapping optimism that dominated US corporate and political culture during the Obama years.Ī decade later, Sandberg’s reputation has lost some of the luster it acquired in those heady days when “Lean In” debuted at the top of the best-seller lists.

Sandberg, who announced on Wednesday that she would be stepping down as COO of Meta, Facebook’s parent company, packaged her corporate-feminist philosophy into the 2013 book “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” which she co-authored with writer Nell Scovell. She had recently begun to speak about the challenges women faced in the corporate world, and had landed on a solution: Women needed to seize more leadership opportunities and advocate more forcefully for themselves, an act she called “leaning in.”

While she reveled in the company’s success, it was not the only project she cared about.

Sandberg book