‘Did She Do a Billion Dollars Worth of Work?’

David de Jong, reporting for Bloomberg on the news that Sheryl Sandberg’s fortune surpassed $1 billion yesterday:

“Did she do a billion dollars-worth of work? I don’t know,” David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, a history of the company, said in a telephone interview. “She had the good fortune to land in the right place where her talents could really be applauded.”

Would Kirkpatrick have asked this of a man? And if he had, would Bloomberg have run the quote?

I searched Google for the phrase “Did he do a billion dollars worth of work?” and the only hit was this tweet from Jezebel editor-in-chief Jessica Coen, retweeting this tweet from Alex Leo pointing out the absurd gender bias in this article.

★ Wednesday, 22 January 2014