Jennifer O’Connell: Dave Goldberg understood that feminism liberates men

Dave Goldberg, a 47-year-old tech entrepreneur, chief executive of the online polling firm Survey Monkey and a father of two, died suddenly on May 1st. The news, although tragic, probably would not have resonated outside his immediate circle of family and friends, except that Goldberg happened to have been one half of Silicon Valley's powerhouse couple: he was married to Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer. The public got to know him through her book, Lean In, in which he starred as her supportive, good-humoured, kind and funny other half. He was, the New York Times declared in his obituary, "the signature male feminist of his era".

There is a certain kind of person who finds the idea of a powerful man self-identifying both as a feminist and as someone who does his own laundry threatening, and Goldberg's death seemed to serve as a rallying cry for a number of them. "Cause of death: nagging" someone on Twitter snarked. Other commentators pointed to his death as a salutary lesson that the advice promoted in Lean In didn't work.

When a cause of death was not immediately forthcoming (Goldberg fell off a treadmill while on holidays in a Mexican resort and died of head trauma), the bad jokes gave way to speculation that he must have died by suicide, and that the media was covering it up as part of some kind of global feminist plot.

But if there is a lesson to be drawn from Dave Goldberg’s life and tragic, untimely death, it isn’t that his life would have been better, or easier, or longer if he had opted for a more stereotypical approach to his marriage or his job. Instead, the lesson that can be drawn from it is something that must have given his wife and family solace last week: the knowledge that although his life was short, Goldberg at least was present in every moment of it. He managed to flourish both in his career and in his family life, and support his wife to do the same, while showing other couples how it could be done.

He was, the New York Times said, "the living, breathing, car-pooling centre of a new philosophy of two-career marriage". For him and Sandberg, the hours between 6pm and 8pm were sacrosanct, as they were home for dinner with the couple's two children every day. He taught her how to change nappies, she would later write; and he would send himself up for being the man who was famous for making laundry a part of foreplay.

At his memorial last week, Sandberg said: “Eleven years of being Dave Goldberg’s wife and 10 years of being a parent with him is perhaps more luck and more happiness than I could have ever imagined. I am grateful for every minute we had.”

Goldberg wasn’t the first signature feminist man – men have been part of the movement agitating for women’s rights since the 1860s – but he was certainly prominent among a new wave of prominent, self-identifying ones, a wave that includes Barack Obama (he recently called it “an embarrassment” that American women earn 77 cent for every $1 a man earns), the Dalai Lama, Daniel Craig, singer John Legend and actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, all of whom recently declared their feminism.

I believe far more men – maybe even the majority – would identify as feminist if there wasn’t so much confusion over what the term signifies. For a man to say he is a feminist means, essentially, that he believes in the principle of social, political and economic equality for everyone, regardless of gender. It means that he opposes sexism and socially constructed gender roles, and wants an end to sexism, the oppression of women and sexual and domestic violence.

If only more men could see it, feminism enriches men’s lives as well as women’s: it allows men to become equal partners in their relationships, and liberates them from the stultifying sociocultural constraints that meant fathers were once afraid to be seen pushing a pram or kissing their child. True feminism takes issue with the myth of male weakness, the notion that men are basically animals who can’t control their own behaviour and who are incapable of change.

If there is any wider lesson to be gleaned from Dave Goldberg’s death, it is that being a feminist, by all accounts, made his life and his relationships richer. It’s time for more men to stand up and be counted as feminists.

The fake workaholics

A study published in the journal Organization Science last week highlighted an aspect of the modern workplace culture that demonstrates why the world needs more executives like Dave Goldberg.

It found that nearly one-third of the male employees – and just over one-tenth of female employees – in a high-pressure US consulting firm were faking their 80- to 90-hour working weeks. One team with a large number of parents of small children had worked out an agreement whereby they would quietly cover for one another so that everyone could have more flexible hours, without drawing management’s attention to the fact.

Encouragingly, these fake workaholics did just as well in performance reviews as their colleagues who were genuinely putting in 80 or 90 hour weeks.

Depressingly, however, both male and female employees who opted not to work the long hours and came right out and asked for more flexibility or parental leave were punished with poorer reviews. The moral of the story: until less dysfunctional workplaces are the norm, if you can get away with gaming the system, you should do it.