Facebook's other first lady: Carolyn Everson

She’s Sheryl Sandberg’s right-hand woman and runs the social network’s London arm. Carolyn Everson tells Gideon Spanier why we need more women at the top — and how she’s always a mother first
P41-42 Portraits of Carolyn Everson
19 March 2013

Facebook’s global advertising chief, Carolyn Everson, just might be the most influential woman in London’s internet industry. Some will say that’s not entirely surprising since there is an acute shortage of women in senior positions in technology, especially in Britain.

It is something that Everson, a 41-year-old American, has noticed since she moved to London in December and she feels passionately about it — just like her boss Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s formidable chief operating officer, who this month published a controversial book called Lean In about the battles facing women in the workplace around the world.

“There’s a lack of women in technology in general,” declares Everson, sitting in Facebook’s colourful offices in Covent Garden, opposite the Donmar Warehouse theatre. “We have a real lack of women in engineering. We’ve got high-profile women in Marissa Meyer from Yahoo! and Sheryl in terms of actually leading technology companies. But I think there is a shortage of women across the board.”

After a career lasting nearly 20 years, including senior positions at Microsoft and MTV, she speaks from experience and says motherhood remains the key issue.

“I’ve worked closely enough with Sheryl over the past two years that she and I have had extensive conversations about this,” says Everson, whose role as vice-president of global marketing solutions is to manage Facebook’s top 1,500 clients and agencies around the world, at a company that brings in close to $5 billion a year and rising from advertising.

“I do think women get to a point where they have to love their job and their career, it has to be so fulfilling and they have to feel as if they are having impact, in order to make the sacrifices they may feel they have to make on the home front. Women get to a point where if they are not fulfilled in their career, the inclination is to stay at home, which is totally understandable.”

Sandberg’s book recounts how some women find it hard to juggle motherhood and a career and argues men are going to have to do half the work inside the home if women are to have half the leadership positions outside of it.

Everson, who is married to a pharmaceuticals executive, Doug, has her own strong views as the mother of 10-year- old twin daughters, Taylor and Kennedy. “I want them to believe that they can achieve anything they set out to. Which means if they want to go and be an engineer and start coding — fabulous! If they want to lead a company some day — fabulous! If they want to be in government, if they want to stay at home, I just want them to know that they have every opportunity to achieve what their dreams are.

“And I feel like one of my biggest obligations to them as a mum is to be a role model for paving that path and showing them anything is possible. I identify myself first and foremost as a mum and then as a business leader.”

Such candour and warmth is unexpected. But then Everson, who has an MBA from Harvard Business School, is surprisingly down to earth, unlike many corporate figures. She appears more emollient than Sandberg, whose book has come under fire for suggesting women should push harder to get ahead in the workplace.

Everson is loyal to Sandberg. “I think there was a need to write the book and that’s why she did it. I do think many of the issues that are out there are people issues and not just female issues. I want the dads on my team or the men on my team who have ageing parents or obligations outside the office, I want them to feel every bit as empowered and OK to leave the office to do those things as women. Because if men can walk out the door to go and coach their daughter’s or son’s sports team or go to a parent-teacher conference, women might actually feel better about doing it too.”

Facebook, which is famed for female-friendly initiatives such as reserving the best places in its car park for pregnant staff at its Silicon Valley base, is arguably fortunate in being able to treat its employees well because it is a young, successful company.

Everson moved to London as part of a drive to pep up the UK operation of the world’s biggest social networking website and to recruit a new boss for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The previous incumbent, Joanna Shields, another American, quit to run Tech City, the Government’s initiative to promote east London as a technology hub.

Everson likes life here, dining nearby at The Ivy, “but not as often as you’d think”, and sending her girls to a local school rather than the American school. However, she is set to relocate to New York in the summer in a long-planned move.

Creating a British version of Silicon Valley is difficult, she says, because the West Coast of America is a “unique environment that does not exist arguably anywhere else in the world”. But she adds: “The more you can inspire capital infusion and that ‘it’s okay to fail’ and you give the entrepreneurs a reason to really innovate here, I think [Tech City] is going to be a really important initiative. London is still an incredibly important hub for the media and advertising business.”

With her blonde mane, Everson has the well-groomed look of an ad executive, rather than a technology engineer, and she has been schmoozing London’s top agency bosses, from WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell downwards.

It is her job to sell Facebook’s services such as the updated version of News Feed, which has room for bigger adverts alongside bigger photos from your friends. Mobile ads on phones and tablets are growing fast, generating close to a quarter of Facebook’s sales, which has helped the company’s shares recover some ground after last year’s disastrous stock market float.

Ad industry executives praise Everson and say Facebook is being more helpful at sharing data, so they can target their ads better. However, she stresses Facebook continues to have a policy of “never” sharing or selling personalised data about individual users and only gives out generic, anonymised information.

She maintains that Facebook has tried to make users more aware about privacy, rather than burying details in the website’s terms and conditions.

“We are really clear. We have pop-up windows that say, ‘This is what is happening, this is what we are doing, these are the controls you have’.”

Even so, sceptics remain concerned. Earlier this week, a University of Cambridge study of 58,000 people on Facebook found that a user’s “likes” such as a favourite pop star or movie could reveal sexual orientation, drug use, race, politics and other traits — even when that person had not offered that explicit information.

Everson insists such profiling predates Facebook. “Consumers give signals about what they’re interested in and have always done that, so Facebook is not new.”

She uses a similar defence about Facebook’s tax avoidance. Like Google, Amazon and other tech giants, it funnels revenues offshore — via its European headquarters in Ireland — to minimise its UK corporation tax bill, which was only £238,000, according to its last annual accounts.

“We are following a structure that many companies have set up before us. We are not the first ones to come in and say we are going to put our headquarters in Dublin. We want to be and believe we are a great source of economic growth for the UK and other countries in Europe.”

Everson’s own daughters don’t use Facebook because they are not yet 13 — the site’s minimum age — but they use Instagram, the photo-sharing app that Facebook bought last year.

The London office, which employs around 160 people and has meeting rooms named after James Bond movies and characters from Doctor Who and Harry Potter, has a family feel. As the interview ends, a member of staff arrives with their baby on a visit and Everson suddenly turns maternal and bends down to look. “He’s smiling,” she coos.

Spoken like a true working parent.

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