IN an astounding series of videos at Makers.com, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg speaks of the life of a woman executive and the importance of closing “the ambition gap.”

“We’re not making progress at the top,” she says. Women are not achieving enough in the work world because they concede to antiquated standards. As for herself, it’s important for her to leave her children every day. That way, Facebook can “touch more people.”

The perfect way for a woman to balance work and family, Sandberg said, is to marry a woman. She married a man (well, actually two of them), but that’s only because he (her second husband) was a person who was willing to do 50 percent of the housework and childcare. “If you marry a man, find the right one,” she said. “If you can marry a woman, that’s better because the split of two women in the home is better, the data shows.”

Sandberg, who is Facebook’s chief of operations, presents the familiar feminist vision of revolutionizing society and the basic nature of men and women. Men should feel as guilty as women when they leave their children under someone else’s care. Women should run half society’s institutions and men should run half the homes.

“We still live among expectations regarding childbearing even among modern families …. that the woman is default in charge [of childcare] … and if the woman is default in charge,” she is not going to achieve as much as a man.

Sandberg said she is ashamed to admit she leaves work at 5:30 every day, ashamed not because she gives her children too little time but because it suggests to others that she does not work enough. “I walk out of this office every day at 5:30 so I’m home for dinner with my kids at 6, and interestingly, I’ve been doing that since I had kids. … I would say it’s not until the last year, two years that I’m brave enough to talk about it publicly,” she said.

She returns to her work e-mail after dinner.

She tells young women:  “Be ambitious. The world is still run by men.”

“Lean into your careers. Don’t make sacrifices now for children you don’t even have yet because that almost guarantees that you won’t have a job worth staying for.” She said she was shocked when  interviewing a female job candidate to learn the woman was concerned about overworking even though she didn’t have a boyfriend yet.

She said women should not care what other people think about their lives, as she once did when she was criticized for divorcing her first husband. “You can’t live by what other people think.”

Interestingly, Sandberg is against corporate affirmative action for women. There’s probably a good reason for this. She’s a CEO. She doesn’t want to be forced to hire women – who take maternity leaves and want to leave work at 5:30 – either. Sandberg, however, was probably at some point a beneficiary of affirmative action.

Sandberg, who worked for the Treasury Department under the Clinton administration and for Google, is clearly an ambitious and aggressive woman and yet she ends many of her points with the familiar, apologetic interrogative that is common among young women today. It’s a brilliant performance.

Sandberg does not, however, address the most important question of all: Why? Why should women value the life of a corporate drudge, even the life of a very powerful one?

— Comments —

Jane S. writes:

No, here’s the most important question: how does the lifestyle Sandberg advocates benefit children? How is it good for children to only see their parents for an hour before bed? Who wants their kid to grow up with the daycare workers’ personality? What’s the point of having kids if you aren’t going to spend time with them?

According to Wikipedia, Sandberg has two children, but it doesn’t say their names, ages, gender, etc. It mentions her ex- and present husbands by name, though. You get the impression these people don’t think about their children at all.

Laura writes:

Yes, that is the most important issue. (Although I would say that that issue is part of the question I raised: Why should women value the life of a corporate drudge?)

Jill Farris writes:

This woman will be a bitter, brittle, lonely old woman. I feel sorry for her children.

Laura writes:

It’s important to be clear about what Sandberg is saying. She is not saying all choices are equally valid, which would be bad enough given that creating a home for one’s family will always be superior to pursuing a career, regardless of whether it makes one “happy” or not.

No, Sandberg is not saying all choices are equal. She is disparaging women who raise their own children. She is saying the guilt feelings of the careerist are expendable and do not indicate any violation of duty. She is saying a woman is a pushover for taking care of a man and for doing more than half of the housework.

It’s not possible to say, “Take Road A,” without also meaning, “Don’t take Road B.” It’s also not possible, as Sandberg admits, to say, “Take Road A and Road B at the same time.” By saying, “Be ambitious,” Sandberg is saying, “Don’t be un-ambitious.” By saying, “Pursue a demanding career,” she is saying, “Don’t be with your family.”

Mary writes:

She came right out and said not to plan ahead to fit children into your future plans, otherwise, in her words “you won’t have a job worth staying for.” So not all jobs are worthy, she makes this clear. She is disparaging the average working woman, and she is completely blind to any other way of thinking. [Laura writes: Excellent point, Mary!!] This is typical of highly successful corporate women: they lack empathy (kind of like men), for empathy would keep them from being tough-minded enough to rise as high as they have in their careers. Sandberg makes it obvious that she has no patience for women who have more moderate ambitions, not to mention women who want to stay home.

But she runs home every night for dinner. In other words, she knows the benefits of home life. Often when people like her rise high enough, they reveal a belief in the Judeo-Christian values that they have been the beneficiaries of; and their high status gives them a pass with their peers – they are not looked down upon for it but it’s accepted as a charming quirk or something. But she is advising young women, women not nearly as privileged, or gifted, or driven, or bright, or attractive as her, i.e. women who will never come close to achieving her level of success, to not care about things that she herself has made it obvious she cares about. Her children will have dinner with their mother every night, other women’s children be damned. If she really cared about other women’s children, she would be advising these young women on how to balance their lives, not telling them to go for it and not consider family at all in the equation (btw, in the video she says that her first child was born in 2005).

She reminds me of the starlet who wins her first Oscar, and gets up to the podium and cries and says she just wants to tell all the young girls out there that dreams do come true and that they should follow their dreams, that they can do anything they want and acheive anything they want if they just want it badly enough – having no idea that virtually all of the girls who follow her advice will, at best, end up doing dinner theatre in Boise, and at worst will lose their souls and find themselves alone and broke and broken at an age when other life choices have been permanently hampered.

 Laura writes:

Her children will have dinner with their mother every night, other women’s children be damned.

G.K. Chesterton called this the “plutocratic assumption.” Elite women recommend ways of life that ordinary women can’t possibly achieve and, in doing so, wreck the chances of the less fortunate for domestic stability. It’s comparable to people who use bottled water pouring toxins into the local water system.

 Years ago, I read the unbelievably sad story in a newspaper of a single working mother whose 12-year-old son had committed suicide. When police came to recover his body, they could barely make their way to the closet where he was hanging. His room – and indeed the whole house – was such a mess. This woman had no nannies or cleaning services.

She reminds me of the starlet who wins her first Oscar, and gets up to the podium and cries and says she just wants to tell all the young girls out there that dreams do come true …

Exactly.

She even talks about Meryl Streep as her role model. Yuck.

Steve writes:

I would like to comment on your post on Sheryl Sandberg, especially regarding some of the other comments. What I do not understand is that people like Ms. Sandberg seem perfectly happy in their choices. That is, she (and many men and women like her) have made a choice to go for the gold ring, and they seem perfectly satisfied, not miserable and not alone. What people like her have chosen is contrary to what I believe, how I live my life and what I understand is supposed to make a human being happy. (I am an orthodox practicing Roman Catholic husband and father of six homeschooled children living in Denver, CO. I am an in-house attorney, and make a very nice living, but have made choices so that I can be home for dinner and on weekends. I never check e-mail after dinner. I’m too busy checking homework or reading books to the kids or not falling asleep during the Rosary.) Having lived away from the Church, and experienced what the world has to offer, I am happier now than ever before. However, I sometimes have my doubts, and when I read stories like this one about Ms. Sandberg, or encounter people at work who announce that they will not have children because they want to enjoy life, etc., and I note that they do not seem unhappy or to have any doubts, well, it causes me to question my path in life, and also, the definition of Truth. Of course, I then to go a sung Latin Novus Ordo and I get back on track.

But seriously, I doubt that she will grow old and unhappy.

Laura writes:

If I were in the same room as you, I would be tempted to throw cold water in your face. “Snap out of it!!” No offense, but you must be suffering from sleep deprivation because you are not seeing things clearly.

You and your wife (neither of whom are divorced, I presume) have six children — children who are not exposed to the junk food of public schooling. They have the truth. They have you. They have each other. You may easily have more than 40 immediate living descendents before you die. You could have well over 50, enough people to populate a tiny village, all the direct result of the love, devotion and selflessness of you and your wife.

And you question whether you will be happier than Sandberg in old age?

Happiness is not a state of ease. It is a state of virtue.

Go take a nap.

But before you do, listen closely to Sandberg’s description of her divorce. She cannot hide the fact that it was a disaster. Also, do your children have to beg your wife to put down her Blackberry?

Jane S. writes:

I can’t think quite how to put this, but it figures that she’s a COO of Facebook. Social media is the left’s perfect tool for helping you overcome your preferences for certain people. With Facebook, you can have millions of friends and feel connected to everyone you’ve ever sent an email to. Of course she wants to make it sound like spending time with her children is less important than proving to her colleagues that she works hard. Otherwise, it might seem like she cares about her children more. Then she’d be useless as a mouthpiece for the Party. By the way, check out her Facebook page. Her favorites include Desperate Housewives, Gloria Steinem, and Planned Parenthood, everything an obedient Party suck-up is supposed to like. No surprises here. I’d drill down on this more, but I’m out the door.

Laura writes:

 Social media is the left’s perfect tool for helping you overcome your preferences for certain people.

Wow, that’s brilliant.

People tend to think of Facebook as enhancing social life. But in actuality, it dilutes it. Sandberg is the perfect spokeswoman for the diffuse, cut-throat, two-faced social milieu of Facebook.

 Robert writes:

Sheryl Sandberg’s arguments seem to me to leave out a growing number of women. Mary’s comment that ordinary women without high profile careers are left out is true. But I think there are a lot of elite women who would suffer from her advice. It seems to me that in the last two years there has been a whole genre in the American and British press of women who have not married or had children who are quite unhappy about it. All of them are women with successful careers and financially comfortable. I have to say that many of those articles are quite agonizing to read. It seems that it is easy for her to give this advice. She has a husband and children that she can make a lower priority. What about the women in her position who don’t have that option?

Laura writes:

Another good point.

However, bear in mind, Sandberg is not simply talking about her life or her personal views in these videos. She is selling Facebook. She is selling social media (and their advertisers) to a young, naive audience who likes to think it can have everything and expects limitless possibility, i.e., a subset of perfect consumers. Sandberg is appealing and fits into this vision because she has a family and a  high-powered careeer.

The disillusioned don’t fit into this demographic.

Charlie K. writes:

According to public information about Sandberg’s compensation package, she has been paid tens of millions of dollars for her services to FaceBook, not to mention the money she made at Google. At what point will her ambition have been sated? At what point will she sacrifice a few additional millions to spend more time with her child, who has only one mother? Truly, reading about this woman is like studying the habits of a different species.

Laura writes:

It would be very hard, though obviously not impossible, for her to turn her back on it all now. To someone who has lived her life, and already sacrificed one marriage to her career, being home with  children seems like a frightening encounter with nothingness. A complete loss of identity, status and power.

Lawrence Auster writes:

So far I have not taken in the substance of what Sandberg is saying so much as her personality. Her manner, the way she speaks, is extremely odd and unnatural—so chirpy and over-excited, so manically full of herself. She seems to embody the massive self-centeredness of today’s professional feminist woman, whose self-glorification increases in proportion to how much she has cut herself off from everything real and normal.

And this unnatural quality of Sandberg’s, the meaning of it, is underscored when she says, in a completely matter of fact tone (but always with that manic full-of-herself chirpiness) that whether a woman marries a man or another woman, it’s purely a matter of convenience. Marrying a woman is more convenient, and she recommends that, though she happened to marry a man.

I’ve never heard anyone say this. The advocates of homosexual “marriage” put it as a sacred matter of love–they must have the right to marry whom they love, whom they can’t help loving. Of course this is the great irony, that liberals, who generally make everything a matter of pure autonomy, so that a person is not formed by nature or tradition but instead constructs his life solely on the basis of his own voluntary choices, suddenly, when it comes to homosexuality, argue that homosexuals cannot help being the way they are, because it is their nature! Leaving aside the obvious and opportunistic contradiction of this position, they are making or pretending to make a quasi-traditionalist argument: homosexuals are born that way, so society should have institutions which recognize this.

But Sandberg seems to believe none of that. For her, homosexual marriage is desirable because it serves the convenience of the self (meaning, the self of the career woman) more than heterosexual marriage does. She is so self-centered— not just on her own self, but on the idea of the autonomous female self—that she implicitly rejects, for the sake of selfish utility, the one “transcendent” in which liberals believe: the naturalness of homosexuality. And this belief fits her excessively hyped-up, self-centered personality.

The woman is liberal disorder personified: the more disordered she is, the more highly she thinks of herself.

Laura writes:

I think Sandberg’s comment about women marrying women was mostly promotional. It was her way of saying, “Facebook supports ‘marriage equality.'”

But also her idea was the logical culmination of what women have been saying for years: that men should act more like women in marriage. Ironically, her statement was an admission of the failure of this project and the futility of years of feminist social engineering. It hasn’t worked. So women might as well marry women.

It’s also ironic that her comment comes on the heels of the Hilary Rosen story. Rosen’s lesbian “marriage” fell apart, as many lesbian relationships do. Imagine two career women wrestling over who does what at home. There is no clear division of labor.

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