Science & Tech Quote by Erik Qualman

Qualman is selling a tidy narrative: social media isn’t “tech,” it’s “relationships,” and because relationships are culturally coded as women’s territory, women are naturally poised to lead the space. That framing is doing two jobs at once. It flatters social media by elevating it from gadgetry to human connection, and it reassures readers who might feel disoriented by the tech economy’s power shift: don’t worry, the new order still maps onto old gender assumptions.

The subtext is more revealing than the compliment. By defining relationship-building as the core competence, he subtly re-sorts the industry’s labor into “hard” and “soft” skills, then assigns those skills a gender. It’s an argument that feels progressive (women gaining influence) while still leaning on essentialism (women are better at relationships). That’s why the Sheryl Sandberg name-check matters. Sandberg becomes proof-by-example, a legitimizing token that smooths over the fact that Facebook’s leadership and engineering culture have historically been male-dominated. “Run in part” is also a hedge: enough authority to make the point, not enough to challenge the broader hierarchy.

Contextually, this reads like early-2010s social media commentary, when platforms were being reframed from engineering feats to social ecosystems, and when Sandberg’s public profile (and later Lean In) made her a shorthand for women’s leadership in Silicon Valley. Qualman’s intent is optimistic and marketable, but the mechanism is conservative: it argues for women’s power by keeping them pinned to a narrow, culturally approved kind of power.