Celebrity News

Facebook shares tech industry’s diversity struggle

CANNES — It sounds like Facebook shares Silicon Valley’s male-dominated culture.

The social network plans to release its own first-ever gender diversity study that will show most of its employees are white guys.

Facebook’s report will be “in line with everyone else” in the tech industry, said Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, who attended a Q&A session at the Cannes Lions advertising festival on Wednesday.

Google disclosed earlier this year that 70 percent of all its workers are male and 61 percent are white; just 3 percent are Hispanic and 2 percent black.

Sandberg said while there a number of top women execs at Facebook, including ad chief Carolyn Everson, the industry needs to address cultural issues to fix its well-documented struggle with diversity.

For instance, Silicon Valley has yet to embrace the idea that women and minorities can be top-notch computer “coders,” Sandberg said.

Sandberg, who championed women in the workplace as the author of “Lean In,” said she is reading a forthcoming book from Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson about the history of computing that is filled with women’s contributions to the industry.

Sandberg, 44, has been tipped as a top candidate to succeed Disney CEO Bob Iger and is widely expected to pursue politics when it comes time for her to exit Facebook.

For all her accomplishments, Sandberg said she handed out cupcakes in May to celebrate CEO Mark Zuckerberg hitting 30. The Harvard dropout was just 23 when Sandberg joined Facebook more than six years ago.

“Mark is remarkable,” she said. “People underestimated him perhaps because he is shy. He is one of the best listeners.”

Sandberg said the biggest challenge for the company is to keep growing, in large part by making Internet access affordable in poorer countries.

She also reflected on Facebook’s rocky initial public offering little more than two years ago, saying it was probably a mistake to go public at a time when the company was struggling to make the transition to mobile.

“We made a mistake; we bet on the wrong technology,” she said.

Sandberg was referring to Facebook’s HTML5 nightmare, which required the company to rebuild its platform for Apple’s IOS and Google’s Android when it figured that HTML5 wouldn’t bridge both the PC and mobile devices.

Sandberg ended the session with a gender-role question for the audience, asking how many men were ever asked, “How do you do it all?” She called on men to do more of the chores at home, giving women an equal shot at getting ahead in the workplace.