Do we like them?

Do we like Sheryl Sandberg?

Our score: 6 out of 10. Real giving and a loud voice for women, set against years running a company that admitted it was slow to deal with harm.

Sandberg is best known as the Facebook number two who helped turn a social network into an advertising giant, and as the author of Lean In, the book that made her the face of corporate feminism. She left Meta's operations role in 2022 and its board in early 2024. The record I could open is thin on her early life, so this one leans on her later years.

The big stain is Facebook's rough patch around 2018. In a PBS interview that April she said the company had made big mistakes, admitted it should have followed up on Cambridge Analytica's data, and said of Russian interference: “We were too slow then.” She also said Facebook had under-invested in safety and security. That's an executive owning a failure, which counts for something, though it's still her platform.

On the harm test, I went looking for anything she herself said against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the climate and found nothing. Her post-Meta work is a board seat at an AI data-centre firm, with former Meta colleagues, which is business rather than a culture-war crusade. The mark against her is the platform she helped run, not her own words, so it's an asterisk rather than a fail.

Her biggest recent project is Screams Before Silence, a film about sexual violence during the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel. She produced it with Israel's Kastina Communications, and it features survivors, first responders and medical experts. She told Jewish Weekly that people can hold any view on the Gaza war and still agree sexual violence must be condemned. Where you land on it depends on whether you read it as a stand against sexual violence or as part of a wider political fight.

The good stuff is real. In 2016 she moved more than US$100 million in Facebook shares into charity funds, and in 2019 she pledged US$2.5 million to the Anti-Defamation League. Lean In and Option B, her grief-support work, grew out of that giving. That's a lot of money and platform pointed outward.

Fairly, the shareholder suit over Cambridge Analytica sought US$8 billion from Meta's directors and officers, Sandberg among the 11 defendants. It was settled in July 2025 as the trial was starting, with terms undisclosed. Nothing was decided against her in court that I could read, so that sits as a question mark, not a finding.