Mark Zuckerberg’s sister says she left Facebook because she ‘hated being the only woman in almost every room that I was in for 10 straight years.’
Randi Zuckerberg, 36, left her brother’s company in 2011 to found her own social media firm. But she said that women continue to be marginalized in the male-heavy world of tech.
‘I always felt very complicated about gender roles in Silicon Valley,’ she told CNN Business.
‘I loved what I did at Facebook.‘[But] I hated being the only woman in almost every room that I was in for 10 straight years.
‘And I always thought, you know, gosh, I want to be part of the solution, not continue to be part of the problem.
‘So I think maybe I need to step outside of Silicon Valley and really understand where we’re losing women and where we’re losing girls in this funnel.’
Randi Zuckerberg, who worked in the fledgling live video department of the social network in its early days, says that Facebook was her brother’s vision.
‘It’s his company,’ she said. ‘At some point I really wanted to create something for myself.’
She recalls how her brother asked her to join Facebook in 2004, when it was just a startup with some 50 employees. She says that since that time, tech has had difficulty integrating women into the workforce.
‘One of the things that I did realize is that I desperately wanted to see a world where there was more representation from women in the room,’ she said.
‘And I couldn’t understand why, after 15 years, it’s changed so little.’
‘Even to this day, my best advice for young women in tech is to have a man’s name like Randy because I can’t even tell you how many meetings I got in those early days of Facebook because people thought that they were meeting a dude,’ she said.
‘And I just feel like it is my life mission to use the luck that I had and hold the door open for other women.’