Yet where Sandberg sees scale, others see something sinister. Meta is now the second leading digital advertising business behind Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Along the way, the company acquired Instagram and WhatsApp, had a successful initial public offering (IPO) and expanded from 400 employees to more than 77,000 today. After she took up her role at Facebook, its advertising sales exploded from $777m in 2009 to $117bn in 2021 – the year Meta reached a market valuation of a trillion dollars. Sandberg’s response, in lockstep with Zuckerberg, has been to deny, deflect, apologise and promise to do betterĪt Google, where she worked before joining Facebook, she led the transformation of the search engine into the world’s leading digital advertising business. Sandberg once said that she felt she was “ put on this planet to scale organisations” and she has the track record to back it up. Put simply, “scale” means to add revenue at a faster rate than costs. An overview of current research findings illuminates the need for employee activism and the development of representative woman gender prototypes in particular, to harness cultures of inclusivity and non-discrimination in the workplace.Still, as Shera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang write in An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination, Sandberg “pioneered a whole new level of tracking” and led the creation of “a new business of data mining at scale”. At present, the United Nations recognises 71 gender identities, while hegemonic heterosexual domination and discrimination still persist regardless of legislation and activism aimed at inclusion and non-discrimination of all gender identities. This article aims to reflect on the current status quo of feminism by drawing on the work of seminal communication scholars, such as Herbert Mead, Irving Goffman and Serge Moscovici whose work on individual and social identity sheds light on the processes of gender prototyping that are rapidly changing. However, while multiple disciplinary discourses herald the progress with regards to women’s liberation, notably pertaining to gender identities, they illuminate that in spite of winning a number of battles along the way, the wars on exclusion, discrimination, patriarchy and misogyny have not yet ended. This event can be positioned in the “fourth wave of feminism” referred to by certain leading feminist scholars (for example Gouws 2010). On 26 July 2013, the United Nations launched the Free & Equal campaign in Cape Town, South Africa, to mark the global commitment to end gender discrimination.

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