‘Sarah, come to bed.” Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s director of global public policy, is on a private plane travelling from Davos to San Francisco with Sheryl Sandberg, her heroine and the chief operating officer of Facebook. Wynn-Williams is heavily pregnant. The plane has only one bed and it’s Sandberg’s. Wynn-Williams refuses, saying she has to work.
The instruction could be construed as a bossy expression of concern for a pregnant colleague, but the way that Wynn-Williams tells the story, accompanied by anecdotes about Sandberg and her assistant lying with their heads in each other’s laps stroking each other’s hair, buying lingerie for each other and texting about breasts, it sounds sexual. It would certainly have been completely unacceptable from a man.
Careless People engages the reader on several levels. It contains eye-opening accounts of behaviour at the top of the company and serious accusations against some Facebook executives. It’s a painful story of how unimaginable amounts of power and money corrupted an organisation that started off full of hope and high-mindedness. And because Wynn-Williams is a sharp and funny writer, it’s a highly enjoyable read — a Bridget Jones’s Diary-style tale of a young woman thrown into a series of improbable situations from which she manages to extricate herself, until she gets fired.
In 2009 Wynn-Williams, a young New Zealander working at the United Nations in New York, discovered Facebook, which had been founded in 2004 by ...
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