As of Tuesday, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, was a billionaire. This fact was treated as little more than an afternoon snack in the news cycle: Bloomberg pointed out the milestone, and a couple of blogs repeated it and congratulated Sandberg. So a rich woman in Silicon Valley had gotten richer—big deal.
To the extent that Sandberg’s billionaire status got attention, the conversation centered on whether she deserved it. “Did she do a billion dollars’ worth of work?” the journalist David Kirkpatrick asked when interviewed by Bloomberg. “I don’t know.” It was a weird question: to quantify a billion dollars’ worth of work seems as quixotic as counting how much wood a woodchuck could chuck. Some protested that it smacked of sexism: would a male C.O.O.’s wealth be thus questioned? It was also far from the most interesting aspect of Sandberg’s financial ascendance.
A couple of days before Sandberg reached billionaire status, Oxfam published a report, shrewdly timed to get the attention of the super-rich people who planned to attend the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland (Sandberg among them)—or, at least, of the journalists writing about them.
The most-cited detail of the report, in the press, was the finding that the bottom half of the world’s population, by wealth, is collectively poorer than the world’s eighty-five richest people. The organization had a broader point, though, which got less attention: “Concentrations of wealth distort democratic processes,” Nick Galasso, a co-author, told me.
It’s not surprising that people often use their money to influence politics in ways that help them—nor is it groundbreaking to note that wealthy people tend to prefer policies that make them wealthier. “We have all of this rising inequality, and it’s not just because of market forces. It’s because governments favor rich people over poor people,” Galasso told me. He and his co-authors name several examples: financial deregulation, tax systems that favor the rich, rules that make tax evasion easier, and economic-austerity programs. They also note another thing that might be surprising on this list: policies that disproportionately hurt women.
Galasso told me that he and his colleagues got their estimate of the wealth held by the poorer half of the world’s population from a Credit Suisse Research Institute report; the wealth of the eighty-five richest people came from the 2013 Forbes list of the world’s billionaires. It’s an eerie exercise to peruse, on the Forbes Web site, the images of the eighty-five people—generally smiling, healthy-seeming, white, and male (Sergey Brin appears the least conventional, and that’s just because he’s wearing Google Glass)—who together own more of the world’s wealth than the poorest three and a half billion. The eighty-five people include only ten women, who, for the most part, inherited their fortunes from men: among them, Liliane Bettencourt, whose father founded L’Oréal; Christy and Alice Walton, both Walmart heirs; and Jacqueline Mars, a Mars candy heir. Gina Rinehart, of Australia, whom William Finnegan profiled last year, inherited her father’s mining assets, then expanded the empire.
The billion dollars earned by Sandberg (whom Ken Auletta profiled in 2011) wouldn’t put her anywhere near those women’s wealth. But it should add her to the over-all Forbes list of the world’s billionaires—and that’s also a list, not surprisingly, on which women are underrepresented. Of the fourteen hundred and twenty-six people on it, only a hundred and thirty-eight are women.
When we talk about government policies that disproportionately hurt women, we tend to focus on extreme cases, in countries where women are virtually absent from politics. In Saudi Arabia, women are still barred from driving. On Wednesday, the Moroccan Parliament changed a law that had allowed men convicted of statutory rape to escape punishment by marrying their underage victims; the marriage loophole was removed. But women are reluctant to report rape, because sex outside marriage remains illegal in Morocco.
In less socially conservative nations, the harm to women can take more insidious forms. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce lobbied successfully against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act until it passed, in 2009. The National Federation of Independent Business has fought state bills to require paid family leave for employees to care for a newborn. Also, women are disproportionately poor, so policies that hurt the poor disproportionately hurt women. And, relatedly, because women are underrepresented among the rich and politically powerful, their interests also tend to be underrepresented in the halls of power.
John Hendra, a United Nations official, told the Inter Press Service last summer that austerity programs in parts of Europe—specifically cuts to wages and pensions, higher consumption taxes, and cuts to social services—have especially harmed women. “Austerity pushes the responsibility for, and cost of, social and public goods back onto households, and in effect, onto women,” he said.
It can get even subtler. In the U.S., women are far likelier to head low-income, single-parent households that rely on government aid to cover costs like child care and health care; over the years, well-funded interest groups have lobbied, successfully, for cuts to these programs. Changes to policies on taxes and wages—which have, over the years, widened the wealth gap between affluent and lower-income people—are also harder on women.
To be a rich woman doesn’t necessarily equate with supporting female-friendly policies, of course. Rinehart, in Australia, has pushed for workers to accept lower wages and has tried to turn the region where she keeps most of her holdings into a special zone with lower taxes.
But Sandberg, who hasn’t commented on her billionaire status, isn’t only a Silicon Valley executive. She is also a prominent public figure who, in using her wealth for philanthropic and political purposes, has been vocal about her interest in improving women’s economic prospects.
She sits on the boards of Women for Women International, a humanitarian organization that supports female survivors of war; V-Day, a movement to end violence against women; and the Center for Global Development, a think tank. She also started an organization focussed on the women’s empowerment concepts in her book, “Lean In.” She contributes to the political campaigns of prominent female politicians; after the November, 2012, election, she wrote on Facebook, “While much of the attention is focused on President Obama’s victory, it is worth noting that this election was a great step forward for women.”
Sandberg is, also, a polarizing figure, even when it comes to gender issues. Maureen Dowd, of the Times, wrote last year that “critics argue that her unique perch as a mogul with the world’s best husband to boot makes her tone-deaf to the problems average women face as they struggle to make ends meet in a rough economy, while taking care of kids, aging parents and housework.”
Sandberg has said that she doesn’t pretend to speak for all women. She has also pointed out that, as she notes in her book, women face “institutional obstacles,” which the government can and should help remove. In the future, she may run for political office. If so, she has money enough to self-finance a campaign, if she so chooses. Until then, she can—and surely will—use her financial clout to persuade today’s politicians to support causes that she cares about: among others, policies that improve women’s lives, rather than set them back.
What makes Sandberg’s milestone worth noting, then, isn’t that the markets have rewarded her for her work at Facebook, but that one more woman—and one who is both uniquely influential in business and uniquely interested in women’s issues—has been added to the short list of the world’s female billionaires. Why should Sheryl Sandberg’s billion dollars matter to anyone but Sheryl Sandberg? Because, in a society that’s become increasingly unequal, it might help if the wealthiest people start to look a little more like everyone else.
Photograph by Lucas Jackson/Reuters.
