Mark Zuckerberg wants more ‘male power’ in corporate America

Mark Zuckerberg capped off a busy week of policy changes – from ditching DEI plans on Facebook to introducing political content recommendations on Threads and Instagram – by appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast for a tough three hours and saying the corporate world needs “male power” “like and karate training.

“Most of our society has been disempowered or disintegrated,” Zuckerberg said before noting that he does indeed have sisters and daughters, dispelling any question that what he is about to say might be based on sexism.

“Male power is great, and obviously, society has a lot of that, but I think corporate culture has really been trying to get away from it,” Zuckerberg continued. “I think having a culture that celebrates violence a little bit has its own positive qualities.”

It should go without saying that making masculinity inherently associated with violence is dangerous and makes people think about violence – but obviously, it needs to be said. Zuckerberg went on to say that corporate America “tends to be very male” and “very aggressive,” admitting that this may have made women feel biased against them, which he admitted is “not good either.”

“It’s one thing to say we want to accept and make a better place for everyone, and I think it’s another to say masculinity is bad,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “And I think we swung, culturally, on that side of the spectrum there [people think] masculinity is toxic [and] we must remove it completely. It’s like, no. Both of these things are good.”

Zuckerberg’s claim that masculinity in corporate America is a thing of the past is clear evidence. Men currently hold nearly 90 percent of CEO positions at Fortune 500 companies — the highest level of female representation we’ve ever seen, yet still dominated by men. His words seem like a dog whistle based on gender, conveying the idea of ​​masculinity as an important cultural element in danger.

Concepts of masculinity and femininity have been used to keep women out of the workforce for centuries, and, like Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, the author of the book. Seven Steps to Leading a Gender-Equitable Business he wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 2016, “he perpetuates a rigid masculinity.”

“While gender bias and inflexible systems still hold back working mothers, research has found that fathers who take time off to care for their families may be penalized even more at work,” Wittenberg-Cox wrote. “Even short absences result in lower performance evaluations and fewer rewards, something that doesn’t happen when men take time off for other, more ‘macho’ reasons (like taking a vacation or training for a marathon).”

This discrimination reinforces oppressive systems that endanger women, non-binary, and trans people – including challenges such as the widening gender wage gap, the erosion of reproductive rights, and the re-emergence of traditional gender roles in the form of childbirth. Business ideas about masculinity and femininity continue to undermine progress, with dangerous consequences playing out in real time.

Zuckerberg’s comments also ignore decades of scholarship on social construction of gender. Judith Butler, for example, argues that gender is an object and a verb more than a noun. You are not governed by the essence of man or woman within you, but the expression itself is what creates your gender. If Zuckerberg were following this logic – which he is not – he would have admitted that corporate environments perpetuate strong and dangerous power structures under the assumption of gender binaries.

But lest we forget, Facebook started as a platform designed to rate women based on their looks.

Butler’s exploration of gender performance is not just a matter of communication: It is clearly used as a means of repressing power dynamics. They argue that gender and sexuality are socially constructed, and are ultimately different aspects of the same system of unfair demand that applies to all of us.

Furthermore, what does “masculine energy” or “feminine energy” mean? One of the most glaring problems with Zuckerberg’s dualism is that it fails to account for the diversity of experiences between men and women in all different forms of identity. As Elizabeth Spelman, a philosopher and professor at Smith College, noted nearly 40 years ago (when Zuckerberg was just two years old), such ideas of gender equality assume that gender is constructed independently of race, class, ethnicity, and nationality. If gender were separate from race and class, for example, all men would experience masculinity in the same way, and all women would experience femininity in the same way.

Zuckerberg’s framework erases these nuances, reducing complex dynamics to simple stereotypes.

It is no coincidence that Zuckerberg feels comfortable saying this now. President-elect Donald Trump, who is notoriously sexist, is about to take office, which Meta’s CEO no doubt realized when he continued to roll back security measures for protected individuals this past week.

When Zuckerberg, one of the richest and most powerful people in the world, tells Joe Rogen, one of the most popular and influential podcast hosts in the world, that companies need more “man power”, he says they need more men. He said this as he raised restrictions on Meta forums against hate speech, including allowing users to post content that denigrates women. He said this as he removed fact-checkers from the Meta forums in favor of Community Notes, a decision that faced a dramatic backlash from human rights groups. Saying this as Meta completes diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, studies show that they have had a positive impact on women in the workplace overall. He said this as he ordered facility managers to remove tampons from men’s bathrooms at Meta offices in California, Texas and New York. This is because Meta is removing dynamic and non-binary themes from its messaging system.

His words – and the actions that support them – serve as a reminder that power, unchecked, will always seek to take care of itself, even, and especially, at the expense of progress.