File photo - Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook Inc. attends the Viva Tech start-up and technology gathering at Parc des Expositions Porte de Versailles on May 24, 2018 in Paris. (Getty Images)
Randi Zuckerberg was brought in by her brother to work at Facebook in 2004 when the fledgling start-up had just 50 employees.
She worked in the live video department of the social network but says by 2011 she felt she had no choice but to leave.
“I hated being the only woman in almost every room that I was in for 10 straight years,” she told CNN. “And I always thought, you know, gosh, I want to be part of the solution, not continue to be part of the problem.
“So I think maybe I need to step outside of Silicon Valley and really understand where we’re losing women and where we’re losing girls in this funnel.”
Ms. Zuckerberg says that little has changed since her days at the social network.
“One of the things that I did realize is that I desperately wanted to see a world where there was more representation from women in the room,” she said. “And I can’t understand why, after 15 years, it’s changed so little.”
Ms. Zuckerberg offers a strange piece of advice to women working in the tech sector which she says will help them get their foot in the door.
“My best advice for young women in tech is to have a man’s name like Randi because I can’t even tell you how many meetings I got in those early days of Facebook because people thought that they were meeting a dude,” she said. “And I just feel like it is my life mission to use the luck that I had and hold the door open for other women.”
The Zuckerbergs are four siblings — Randi, 36; Mark, 34; Donna, an author, 32; and Arielle, a venture capitalist, 29.
This story originally appeared in news.com.au.
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