Of course it was. I don’t think anyone is going to be shocked to read that Mark Zuckerberg created a frat-house-Mad-Men-esque environment where female employees were looked down upon as his Facebook empire was growing.
A former high-ranking female employee has just released a tell-all and again Zuck is not being shown in a good light. I love her quote that Zuck was, “Napoleon and branded a ‘little emperor’ who created a company where his staff could ‘idol worship’ him.”
These claims are found in the book ‘The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network’ by Katherine Losse who worked for Facebook between 2005 and 2010. She was employee no.51 and worked her way up from customer relations to a senior marketing role before becoming the speechwriter for Zuckerberg.
On what the what we all thought was progressive work environment at Facebook : At its core she claims that Facebook is all about creating a ‘popular techno frat that didn’t exist at Stanford or Harvard’ where men can engage in endless competition with each other. Chosen programmers were treated like ‘prodigal sons’ – whilst women were just along for the ride.She writes: ‘The older men in the office could be unbridled in their wide ranging desires for sex and attention as the youngest ones.
On her opinion of Zuckerberg himself: Losse depicts him as socially awkward and aloof, branding him a ‘little emperor’ and somebody who considered those who were not tech-obsessed as ‘not people’. In reference to his long term girlfriend Priscilla Chan, who is now his wife, she claims he once said: ‘I dated a model once who was really hot, but my girlfriend is actually smart’. Elsewhere she writes that in the office Zuckerberg ‘walked with his chest puffed out, Napoleon-style, his curly hair jumping forward from his forehead as if to announce him in advance’.
The reality of how women were treated at Facebook: On his 22nd birthday, things took an even more bizarre turn: women were told to wear a T-shirt with Mark’s picture on it and men had to wear Adidas flip flops in tribute to Zuckerberg’s style. Losse writes: ‘The gender coding was clear: women were to declare allegiance to Mark, and men were to become Mark, or to at least dress like him. I decided that this was more than I could stomach and stayed home to play sick that day. I was the only one.’
You can read much more about what assholes the guys at Facebook were during Losse’s time with the company. You just really can’t give men that much rope and control. They will take us zooming back to 1950 and fetching coffee before you know it. Losse does say the company climate change in 2009 with the arrival of chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. You can’t live in Neverland forever boys…remember that.
