Sheryl Sandberg

Open full sized image

Sandberg’s legacy is mixed. She is seen by some as a champion for women in the workplace as the author of the best-selling book Lean In. But her tenure at Facebook was marked by controversy around the platforms tactics.

Noam Galai—WireImage/Getty Images

Sheryl Sandberg is an American technology executive who was the chief operating officer (COO) of the social networking company Facebook from 2008 to 2022. Sandberg sat on Facebook’s (now Meta) board of directors starting in 2012 and announced her departure from the board in January 2024. Although her contributions helped drive Facebook’s profitability, her tenure was controversial, as her work is regarded as having facilitated the spread of misinformation on the social media platform.

Sandberg studied economics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There she did her undergraduate thesis with economist Lawrence Summers as her adviser. She received her bachelor’s degree in 1991 and was the top student in economics. When Summers became chief economist at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., Sandberg joined him there, and from 1991 to 1993 they worked on projects that helped developing countries.

Sandberg received a master’s in business administration from Harvard in 1995, and from 1995 to 1996 she worked at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company. Summers became deputy secretary of the U.S. Treasury Department in 1995, and Sandberg joined him there as his chief of staff in 1996. From the time Summers became Treasury secretary in 1999 until he left the post in 2001, Sandberg was his chief of staff.

In 2001 Sandberg joined the search engine company Google, as general manager of its business unit, notwithstanding that Google had no business unit at the time. She soon became vice president of global online sales and operations. She was in charge of the development of AdWords, which placed text advertisements on search result pages, and of AdSense, which placed relevant advertisements on the websites of individuals and companies that contracted with Google. Both AdWords and AdSense helped Google become a profitable company and were responsible for much of Google’s earnings. In 2004 she was put in charge of Google’s for-profit philanthropy arm, Google.org, which focused on the problems of climate change, public health, and poverty.

Sandberg was recruited as Facebook’s COO in 2008. Facebook had grown enormously since its founding in 2004, and founder Mark Zuckerberg thought that someone more experienced in management (such as Sandberg) was needed to supervise the daily operations of the company. Just as she had at Google, Sandberg created an advertising strategy for Facebook that allowed the company to finally become profitable, and her close partnership with Zuckerberg was seen as a crucial ingredient in Facebook’s success. Sandberg was often seen as the “adult in the room” and was known to be Facebook’s number two, only after Zuckerberg. Her strategy helped to make Facebook’s 2012 initial public offering (IPO) successful—an accomplishment which was recognized with a seat on Facebook’s board of directors.

Although Sandberg’s advertising strategies helped Facebook financially, she increasingly faced controversy for Facebook’s inability to protect user data, as well as its misinformation scandals. In a drastic turn for Facebook’s public perception, Sandberg testified in 2018 before Congress about how Russian interference through Facebook had contributed to the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president two years earlier. This was in combination with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which almost 90 million Facebook accounts were compromised and targeted with political propaganda.

Sandberg also faced criticism in 2018 for her role in hiring the Washington, D.C.-based research firm Definers to investigate opposition to Facebook, which targeted rival companies and George Soros, a prominent critic of Facebook’s practices and the subject of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Sandberg’s reputation suffered, but she remained COO.

Sandberg became an outspoken advocate for women to be more aggressive in seeking success in the business world. She often pointed out that, despite the gains women had achieved through feminism, business executives were still predominately male, and women needed to close “the ambition gap.” She believed that, for women to want to return to work after having children, they should do everything they could to seize interesting and challenging opportunities early in their careers. Sandberg articulated her philosophy in Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013); the book was published in concert with the launch of Lean In, an education and community-building organization for women in business. Though Sandberg’s advocacy was generally well received, some critics noted that her experience and position were so rarefied and unique as to be irrelevant to the typical working woman and pointed to her lack of perspective on minority standpoints.