Men Run the World – Close the achievement gap by closing the ambition gap

Sheryl Sandberg

Image by jdlasica via Flickr

via Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg at Barnard: “Men run the world” – May. 18, 2011

“What if men ran half of households around the world and women ran half the companies? Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg thinks the world would be a better place.

Sandberg offered that idea in her commencement speech on Tuesday in New York to a group of 600 graduating students from all-women college Barnard, as well as their camera-festooned families.”

Her message: “There aren’t enough women in the workforce, and the gender gap is very much part of our society.”

“Men run the world,” she told the audience, before rolling out a list of statistics to support the statement. One eye-popping one: Among the world’s 190 major heads of states, nine are women. Those numbers haven’t moved in the past decade.”

Sandberg is Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Chief Operating Officer, lending her experience and operational expertise, having  served as chief of staff for the Treasury Department and her extensive contacts with advertisers from her time as a top executive at Google (GOOG, Fortune 500).  Many investors and venture capitalists require experienced management, sometimes known as “adult supervision” for their young techie geniuses before they part with their money. Sandburg is sometimes referred to as filling this role for 27 year old Mark Zuckerberg.

She urged women to be more aggressive in seeking to climb the corporate or government ladder: “Women underestimate their performance.”

The only antidote to the hurdles that may be thrown in your path is to work hard, aim high and do your job well.  And, of course, Sheryl Sandberg is an inspiration to women seeking to climb the ladder as she is the operational power behind what is described at “the tech world’s hottest company.”

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Since 1996, I have been both web publisher and author of AdvancingWomen.com, a site designed to help level the playing field for women and like-minded men in careers, business and particularly web biz, and now social media. I have provided career and business content to Fortune 500 companies like Citibank and Hearst, been published internationally by Cambridge University Press, by universities, military academies, medical and business societies, and financial organizations in Australia, India, and Saudi Arabia and translated into Mandarin Chinese, reaching a Chinese audience of over 2 million. I also served as financial news editor for Hearst’s MoneyMinded.com/Woman.com. I am a past member of the Board of Directors of National Association of Women Business Owners ( NAWBO-San Antonio); am active with the White House project, whose mission is to encourage women’s participation in politics and to place women in the pipeline to reach the highest offices in our land; also active with Win With Women, National Democratic Institute, Washington, D.C. to promote women in political leadership in 65 countries and various organizations supporting the increased use and funding of technology. I attended Wellesley College and graduated from Columbia University with a degree in writing. I come from a *very* entrepreneurial family and was, for many years, a serial entrepreneur myself always looking for a new horizon to explore. The latest horizon has been the dawning of the Internet, which I migrated to and set up tent ,shortly after Netscape came out with the browser in 1994. ( As those of you involved with the Internet know, in Net time, that is somewhat equivalent to when the dinosaurs were crawling out of the swamps. I have many interesting stories from those wild and woolly pioneer days.) For the past 13 years, I’ve been working on the Internet. I’m all about building community.