Why we have too few women leaders | Sheryl Sandberg
TED
0:04 So for any of us in this room today, let's start out by admitting we're lucky.
0:08 We don't live in the world our mothers lived in, our grandmothers
0:12 lived in, where career choices for women were so limited.
0:15 And if you're in this room today,
0:17 most of us grew up in a world where we have basic civil rights,
0:22 and amazingly, we still live in a world where some women don't have them.
0:26 But all that aside, we still have a problem, and it's a real problem.
0:30 And the problem is this: Women are not making it
0:34 to the top of any profession anywhere in the world.
0:38 The numbers tell the story quite clearly.
0:41 190 heads of state— nine are women.
0:44 Of all the people in parliament in the world, 13 percent are women.
0:49 In the corporate sector, women at the top,
0:52 C-level jobs, board seats— tops out at 15, 16 percent.
0:57 The numbers have not moved since 2002 and are going in the wrong direction.
1:02 And even in the non-profit world,
1:04 a world we sometimes think of as being led by more women,
1:08 women at the top: 20 percent.
1:11 We also have another problem, which is that women face harder
1:15 choices between professional success and personal fulfillment.
1:18 A recent study in the U.S.
1:21 showed that, of married senior managers,
1:24 two-thirds of the married men had children
1:26 and only one-third of the married women had children.
1:30 A couple of years ago, I was in New York, and I was pitching a deal,
1:33 and I was in one of those fancy New York private equity offices you can picture.
1:38 And I'm in the meeting— it's about a three-hour meeting—
1:41 and two hours in, there needs to be that bio break, and everyone stands up,
1:46 and the partner running the meeting starts looking really embarrassed.
1:49 And I realized he doesn't know where the women's room is in his office.
1:54 So I start looking around for moving boxes,
1:56 figuring they just moved in, but I don't see any.
1:58 And so I said, "Did you just move into this office?" And he said,
2:02 "No, we've been here about a year." And I said,
2:06 "Are you telling me that I am the only woman to have pitched a deal
2:10 in this office in a year?" And he looked at me, and he said, "Yeah.
2:14 Or maybe you're the only one who had
2:16 to go to the bathroom." (Laughter) So the question is,
2:21 how are we going to fix this?
2:25 How do we change these numbers at the top?
2:28 How do we make this different?
2:31 I want to start out by saying, I talk about this— about keeping women
2:34 in the workforce— because I really think that's the answer.
2:39 In the high-income part of our workforce,
2:41 in the people who end up at the top— Fortune 500 CEO jobs,
2:45 or the equivalent in other industries— the problem,
2:49 I am convinced, is that women are dropping out.
2:52 Now people talk about this a lot,
2:54 and they talk about things like flextime and mentoring
2:57 and programs companies should have to train women.
3:00 I want to talk about none of that today,
3:01 even though that's all really important.
3:04 Today I want to focus on what we can do as individuals.
3:07 What are the messages we need to tell ourselves?
3:09 What are the messages we tell the women that work with and for us?
3:12 What are the messages we tell our daughters?
3:15 Now, at the outset, I want to be
3:17 very clear that this speech comes with no judgments.
3:19 I don't have the right answer.
3:21 I don't even have it for myself.
3:23 I left San Francisco, where I live, on Monday,
3:26 and I was getting on the plane for this conference.
3:29 And my daughter, who's three, when I dropped her off at preschool,
3:32 did that whole hugging-the-leg, crying, "Mommy, don't get on the plane" thing.
3:36 This is hard.
3:37 I feel guilty sometimes.
3:38 I know no women, whether they're at home or whether they're in the workforce,
3:43 who don't feel that sometimes.
3:44 So I'm not saying that staying in the workforce is the right thing for everyone.
3:49 My talk today is about what the messages are
3:52 if you do want to stay in the workforce, and I think there are three.
3:57 One, sit at the table.
3:59 Two, make your partner a real partner.
4:02 And three, don't leave before you leave.
4:07 Number one: sit at the table.
4:09 Just a couple weeks ago at Facebook,
4:11 we hosted a very senior government official,
4:13 and he came in to meet with senior execs from around Silicon Valley.
4:18 And everyone kind of sat at the table.
4:21 He had these two women who were
4:22 traveling with him pretty senior in his department,
4:25 and I kind of said to them, "Sit at the table.
4:27 Come on, sit at the table," and they sat on the side of the room.
4:32 When I was in college, my senior year,
4:34 I took a course called European Intellectual History.
4:36 Don't you love that kind of thing from college?
4:38 I wish I could do that now.
4:40 And I took it with my roommate, Carrie,
4:42 who was then a brilliant literary student— and went
4:45 on to be a brilliant literary scholar— and my brother— smart guy,
4:49 but a water-polo-playing pre-med, who was a sophomore.
4:52 The three of us take this class together.
4:55 And then Carrie reads all the books in the original Greek and Latin,
4:59 goes to all the lectures.
5:00 I read all the books in English and go to most of the lectures.
5:04 My brother is kind of busy.
5:06 He reads one book of 12 and goes to a couple of lectures,
5:10 marches himself up to our room a couple
5:13 days before the exam to get himself tutored.
5:16 The three of us go to the exam together, and we sit down.
5:19 And we sit there for three hours—
5:21 and our little blue notebooks— yes, I'm that old.
5:23 We walk out, we look at each other,
5:25 and we say, "How did you do?" And Carrie says, "Boy,
5:27 I feel like I didn't really draw out the main
5:30 point on the Hegelian dialectic." And I say, "God,
5:33 I really wish I had really connected John Locke's theory
5:35 of property with the philosophers that follow." And my brother says,
5:39 "I got the top grade in the class."
5:41 (Laughter) "You got the top grade in the class?
5:45 You don't know anything." (Laughter) The problem with these stories
5:50 is that they show what the data shows:
5:53 women systematically underestimate their own abilities.
5:56 If you test men and women,
5:58 and you ask them questions on totally objective criteria like GPAs,
6:02 men get it wrong slightly high, and women get it wrong slightly low.
6:06 Women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce.
6:09 A study in the last two years of people entering
6:12 the workforce out of college showed that 57 percent of boys entering,
6:16 or men, I guess, are negotiating their first salary,
6:20 and only seven percent of women.
6:23 And most importantly, men attribute their success to themselves,
6:28 and women attribute it to other external factors.
6:31 If you ask men why they did a good job, they'll say, "I'm awesome.
6:36 Obviously.
6:36 Why are you even asking?" If you ask women why they did a good job,
6:41 what they'll say is someone helped them,
6:43 they got lucky, they worked really hard.
6:46 Why does this matter?
6:47 Boy, it matters a lot.
6:49 Because no one gets to the corner office
6:52 by sitting on the side, not at the table,
6:55 and no one gets the promotion if they don't think they deserve their success,
6:59 or they don't even understand their own success.
7:03 I wish the answer were easy.
7:05 I wish I could go tell all the young women I work for, these fabulous women,
7:08 "Believe in yourself and negotiate for yourself.
7:11 Own your own success." I wish I could tell that to my daughter.
7:15 But it's not that simple.
7:17 Because what the data shows, above all else, is one thing,
7:21 which is that success and likeability are positively
7:24 correlated for men and negatively correlated for women.
7:28 And everyone's nodding, because we all know this to be true.
7:31 There's a really good study that shows this really well.
7:34 There's a famous Harvard Business School study on a woman named Heidi Roizen.
7:38 And she's an operator in a company in Silicon Valley,
7:42 and she uses her contacts to become a very successful venture capitalist.
7:47 In 2002— not so long ago— a professor who was then
7:50 at Columbia University took that case and made it [Howard] Roizen.
7:54 And he gave the case out, both of them, to two groups of students.
7:58 He changed exactly one word:
8:00 "Heidi" to "Howard." But that one word made a really big difference.
8:06 He then surveyed the students, and the good news was the students,
8:09 both men and women, thought Heidi
8:11 and Howard were equally competent, and that's good.
8:14 The bad news was that everyone liked Howard.
8:17 He's a great guy.
8:18 You want to work for him.
8:19 You want to spend the day fishing with him.
8:21 But Heidi?
8:21 Not so sure.
8:22 She's a little out for herself.
8:24 She's a little political.
8:25 You're not sure you'd want to work for her.
8:28 This is the complication.
8:30 We have to tell our daughters and our colleagues,
8:32 we have to tell ourselves to believe we got the A, to reach for the promotion,
8:37 to sit at the table, and we have to do it in a world where, for them,
8:41 there are sacrifices they will make for that, even
8:44 though for their brothers, there are not.
8:47 The saddest thing about all of this is that it's really hard to remember this.
8:51 And I'm about to tell a story which is truly embarrassing for me,
8:54 but I think important.
8:55 I gave this talk at Facebook not so long ago to about 100 employees,
9:01 and a couple hours later,
9:02 there was a young woman who works there sitting outside my little desk,
9:05 and she wanted to talk to me.
9:07 I said, okay, and she sat down, and we talked.
9:10 And she said, "I learned something today.
9:12 I learned that I need to keep my hand up." "What do you mean?" She said,
9:16 "You're giving this talk, and you said you would take two more questions.
9:19 I had my hand up with many other people, and you took two more questions.
9:23 I put my hand down, and I noticed all the women did the same,
9:26 and then you took more questions,
9:28 only from the men." And I thought to myself, "Wow,
9:32 if it's me— who cares about this, obviously—
9:34 giving this talk— and during this talk,
9:38 I can't even notice that the men's hands are still raised,
9:42 and the women's hands are still raised,
9:44 how good are we as managers of our companies
9:47 and our organizations at seeing that the men
9:49 are reaching for opportunities more than women?" We've
9:53 got to get women to sit at the table.
9:55 (Cheers) (Applause) Message number two: Make your partner a real partner.
10:02 I've become convinced that we've made more progress
10:05 in the workforce than we have in the home.
10:07 The data shows this very clearly.
10:10 If a woman and a man work full-time and have a child,
10:14 the woman does twice the amount of housework the man does,
10:18 and the woman does three times the amount of childcare the man does.
10:22 So she's got three jobs or two jobs, and he's got one.
10:26 Who do you think drops out when someone needs to be home more?
10:30 The causes of this are really complicated,
10:31 and I don't have time to go into them.
10:34 And I don't think Sunday football-watching and general laziness is the cause.
10:38 I think the cause is more complicated.
10:40 I think, as a society,
10:41 we put more pressure on our boys to succeed than we do on our girls.
10:45 I know men that stay home and work
10:48 in the home to support wives with careers, and it's hard.
10:52 When I go to the Mommy-and-Me stuff and I see the father there,
10:55 I notice that the other mommies don't play with him.
10:59 And that's a problem, because we have to make it as important a job,
11:04 because it's the hardest job in the world to work inside the home,
11:08 for people of both genders,
11:09 if we're going to even things out and let women stay in the workforce.
11:13 (Applause) Studies show that households with equal earning
11:16 and equal responsibility also have half the divorce rate.
11:20 And if that wasn't good enough motivation for everyone out there,
11:24 they also have more— how shall I say this on this stage?
11:27 They know each other more in the biblical sense as well.
11:30 (Cheers) Message number three: Don't leave before you leave.
11:37 I think there's a really deep irony to the fact
11:39 that actions women are taking— and I see
11:41 this all the time— with the objective of staying
11:44 in the workforce actually lead to their eventually leaving.
11:48 Here's what happens: We're all busy.
11:50 Everyone's busy.
11:51 A woman's busy.
11:52 And she starts thinking about having a child,
11:54 and from the moment she starts thinking about having a child,
11:57 she starts thinking about making room for that child.
12:00 "How am I going to fit this into everything
12:02 else I'm doing?" And literally from that moment,
12:06 she doesn't raise her hand anymore, she doesn't look for a promotion,
12:10 she doesn't take on the new project, she doesn't say, "Me.
12:12 I want to do that." She starts leaning back.
12:15 The problem is that— let's say she got pregnant that day,
12:19 that day— nine months of pregnancy, three months of maternity leave,
12:23 six months to catch your breath— Fast-forward two years,
12:27 more often— and as I've seen it— women start
12:29 thinking about this way earlier— when they get engaged,
12:32 or married, when they start thinking about having a child,
12:35 which can take a long time.
12:37 One woman came to see me about this.
12:39 She looked a little young.
12:41 And I said, "So are you and your husband
12:43 thinking about having a baby?" And she said,
12:45 "Oh no, I'm not married." She didn't even have a boyfriend.
12:48 (Laughter) I said, "You're thinking about
12:50 this just way too early." But the point
12:53 is that what happens once you start kind of quietly leaning back?
12:59 Everyone who's been through this— and I'm here to tell you,
13:02 once you have a child at home, your job better be really good to go back,
13:06 because it's hard to leave that kid at home.
13:08 Your job needs to be challenging.
13:10 It needs to be rewarding.
13:11 You need to feel like you're making a difference.
13:14 And if two years ago you didn't take a promotion and some guy next to you did,
13:19 if three years ago you stopped looking for new opportunities,
13:23 you're going to be bored because you should
13:25 have kept your foot on the gas pedal.
13:28 Don't leave before you leave.
13:31 Stay in.
13:32 Keep your foot on the gas pedal, until the very day you need to leave to take
13:37 a break for a child— and then make your decisions.
13:41 Don't make decisions too far in advance,
13:43 particularly ones you're not even conscious you're making.
13:48 My generation really, sadly, is not going to change the numbers at the top.
13:52 They're just not moving.
13:53 We are not going to get to where 50 percent of the population— in my generation,
13:57 there will not be 50 percent of [women] at the top of any industry.
14:02 But I'm hopeful that future generations can.
14:05 I think a world where half of our countries and our companies were run by women,
14:11 would be a better world.
14:12 It's not just because people would know where the women's bathrooms are,
14:16 even though that would be very helpful.
14:19 I think it would be a better world.
14:21 I have two children.
14:23 I have a five-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter.
14:26 I want my son to have a choice to contribute fully in the workforce or at home,
14:30 and I want my daughter to have the choice to not just succeed,
14:34 but to be liked for her accomplishments.
14:37 Thank you.
14:38 (Applause)