Sheryl Sandberg: Marissa Mayer Is Being Attacked Only Because She's A Woman

When Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer decided employees had to come to the office and could no longer work at home, we highly doubt she thought it generate as much controversy as it did.

The story leapt from the pages of the industry press to mainstream news outlets in the matter of a few days. Suddenly, Mayer was under fire for forcing her staff to come to the office.

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, and friend of Marissa Mayer, thinks this would have never happened to a man.

In a big Time Magazine profile, Sandberg weighs in on the Mayer controversy:

Awkwardly, it turns out, women don’t particularly like successful women either. Sandberg points to how quickly people criticized her friend Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo, who went back to work two weeks after having a child and recently appeared to make Yahoo’s work practices a lot less flexible. “No one knows what happened there,” she says. “I think flexibility is important for women and for men. But there are some jobs that are superflexible and some that aren’t.” Regardless, she believes no man who ordered the same policies would have come under fire the way Mayer has.

We're not so sure we agree with Sandberg on this one. A male CEO would probably come under a lot of fire too for banning people from working from home. If anything, we think Mayer is under attack because she's Marissa Mayer, a famous ex-Googler. What do you think?