Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg Discusses Women Lagging Behind Men in Business
When women are outstanding, they are incredible! Look at Facebook's CEO, Sheryl Sandberg. The highest-paid executive at Facebook, her salary of almost $31 million shows she is one of the highest paid self-made women executives. When her options on a further 38.1m shares vest over the next five years, in addition to the 1.9m shares she already has in Facebook she will be one of the richest women in the world.
The 42-year-old Sandberg joined Facebook from Google in 2008 after she met Mark Zuckerberg at a party then at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. After she climbed on board the Facebook train, she has revamped it into a vital, vibrant and determined business enterprise. Would Facebook have moved as smoothly to the company's IPO filing last week without Sheryl Sandberg's guidance? Not likely. In its S-1 filing, she is credited with "growing revenue, building commercial and developer relationships" and apart from Mr Zuckerberg, she is the only other person named as "key personnel." Accordingly she and Zuckerberg have the power to significantly impact Facebook is they jumped ship.
So when Ms. Sandberg was speaking in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum about women in key positions in the business world, her remarks were well received and acknowledged. Among some of the points she made concerned inequalities and double standards. She discussed the “ambition gap” which impedes women from childhood all the way to corporate boardrooms.
“We reward men for being leaders, for being assertive, for taking risks, for being competitive,” she told a panel on the future of women in business. “(But) we teach women as young as 4 (years old) to lay back, be communal. We need our girls to be ambitious to achieve in the workforce.”
Her point is well taken When you receive the prospectus of the companies you've invested in, especially American corporations, check members of the boards. Usually, there is one black man and one woman. Rarely, are there more than one of each. The predominance is still white men, however, it is improving. Just 11.3 percent of the Fortune 500 companies had male-only boards last year, according to Catalyst, a New York based nonprofit that researches women and business issues.
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