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Eh... Sheryl gave, Sheryl Sandberg gave a... a terrific speech which I recommend you.
Ehm... eh... at... a commencement speech at Barnard, last May I guess it was, ehm... looking at these issues.
And... and I really encourage you to go and google it.
But Sheryl can you talk a little bit...
Google?
[laughter]
...about...or...
[laughter]
It's on YouTube which is Google.
[laughter]
Can you talk a little bit about not only what the corporate sector needs to do
to create greater opportunity for women employees,
but also maybe what women themselves need to do?
Yes, so I think, ehm... all of these relate that what we basically have is an ambition gap, all around the world.
We have equality nowhere for women and we have two very different forms of an ambition gap.
In the developing world, as many people said here, we have an ambition gap at the societal level.
We say we want to educate our girls as much as our boys but we don't mean it.
We don't really do the things we need to do.
In the developed world, we have an ambition gap at the personal level and the data shows this super clearly.
So in the United States women got 50% of the college degrees in 1981. Thirty years ago, thirty one years ago.
And ever since then, women have made progress at every level.
Every year they get more college degrees, more graduate degrees.
They enter more jobs, they become more junior managers.
They have stopped making progress at the top in the last ten years.
We are basically stuck, in corporate America, 15%-16% of sea level jobs and board jobs.
If you look at the numbers around the rest of the developed world, the numbers are way worse, not better.
And there is still complete stagnation.
And... if you pull women in the developed world, they're not as ambitious as men.
So when there was this study in the Economist published,
if you asked women to a self identify as very ambitious, in the United States 36% will say that.
In China or Brazil, Brazil is 59%, China is 66% and India is 85%.
And so ironically, in the places where you have the equality of education and women are even exceeding men,
you actually don't have the personal ambition... ambition levels.
And I could go on all day of the reason the root cause but I'll keep them very quickly.
We don't raise our daughters to be as ambitious as our sons.
Last month there were T-shirts sold at this Gymboree which is a very large chain of like kid's stores
That said "Smart like daddy" for the boys and "Pretty like mommy".
[laughter]
Not in 1951, last month.
Little girls are called "bossy". Anyone at Davos was a girl who was called "bossy"?
You got to Davos, you were that. I was.
[laughter]
I challenge you, go find someone and watch them call a little boy "bossy".
You won't see it.
They're not bossy, that's the natural order of things. And then it goes all the way through.
We’ve tried to equalize things in the workforce, we haven’t equalized things in the home.
In the United States, if a couple both work completely full time,
the woman does more than twice as much in the home as the man.
You can't get to equality when you're not in the home.
And the most important point is that success and likability
are positively recorrelated for men and negatively recorrelated for women.
As a man gets more powerful and successful, he is better liked.
As a woman gets more powerful and successful, she is less liked.
So from early childhood through marriage, through adolescence, all the way through.
We reward men every step of the way for being leaders, for being assertive, for taking risks, for being competitive.
And we teach women as young as four: lay back, be communal.
And until we change that at a personal level, we can't change this.
And we really have to go out there and say: "There is an ambition gap".
We need our girls to be as ambitious as our boys.
And we need our boys to be as ambitious to contribute in the home.
And we need our girls to be as ambitious to achieve in the workforce.
P...
[applause]
Yeeah!
[applause]
Point well taken Sheryl but isn’t there a danger that then you're letting CEOs off the hook?
That they can say: "Well, you know... I'd love to create greater equality in the workforce,
but until parents raise their daughters with greater inequality, then I can't achieve it". I mean...
I don't want to let this... let people here off the hook in that sense.
I never let anyone off the hook, good point. Equal maternity and paternity leave.
How do we expect our husbands to do as much as the wives if they don't... if they don't get equal leave?
It's okay as a woman in the workforce, sometime not always, to leave and take the child.
We need to let men leave and take care of the child too. We need flexibility of all type.
We need men to understand the success and likeability point and women, it is super important.
If you've watched, and I'm sure everyone here has had this experience,
you watch the CEO, typically a man, talk about his senior team.
He goes around, he talks about everyone's strength and weaknesses, right? We’ve all seen this.
And he gets to the woman, the one woman who reports to him,
and he says: "She is great at her job, she is just not as well liked just a men... man".
With no understanding that of course she is not. That's what the data shows really clearly.
We need to understand that when men negotiate for their own salaries, everyone wants to work with them more.
But when women negotiate for their own salaries, everyone men and women want to work with them less.
You teach people that, I talk about this hugely openly.
And the next time a woman sitting across from a man and she negotiates, they have a different reaction.
And that really has to come from the top and understanding that there are different challenges
and the structures to support them have to come from the very top.
So guys, you're back on the hook.