“Sarah, come to bed.” Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s director of global public policy, is on a private plane from Zurich to San Francisco, traveling back from Davos 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.
