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What Feminists Are Saying About the Facebook IPO

Facebook has announced what will likely be the tech industry’s biggest Initial Public Offering of stock ever. What do practitioners of feminism, a philosophy centered in the experiences of women, have to say about the political economy of the world’s biggest social technology company? They’ve raised a number of interesting questions so far.

It seems that everyone has an opinion about Facebook’s stated goal of being a force for good in the world. Feminists online have also raised questions about the company’s unusually exclusive all-male Board of Directors and about mega-powerful COO Sheryl Sandberg’s public calls for women to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. As a cultural phenomenon of historic proportion, what does the Facebook IPO mean with regard to gender?