Sheryl Sandberg is beautiful, brilliant, a billionaire, and chief operating officer of Facebook. Last year her book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead was a best-seller for months and she is popular for her TED talks and speeches to women's groups. She's also happily married with three small children.
What is controversial about Sandberg's talks is - sure there are elements of sexism and testosterone involved, but more of the questions need to be sheeted to women themselves.
"We women don’t take enough risk in our careers," she has stated. In her articles and books she writes about warning her female staff: “Don’t Leave Before You Leave.”
She sees this at Facebook, and in her previous job, that made her reputation, with Google. “I offer promotions and opportunities to these young women, and they tell me, ‘I want to get pregnant in three years, so I can’t do that.'" And then they mark time, at a stage when the most ambitious job advancement should be made.
Pattie Sellers compiles Fortune's Most Powerful Women in Business list. She has seen a change in the types of companies or industries that have adopted female leaders. She reports in wonder: "Who would have imagined that two of the biggest defence contractors would have female leaders? And IBM and HP? It’s kind of amazing—America’s two biggest tech companies."
She would have responded equally to Australia's situation - that dominion of male engineers, Telstra, with a female chairman Catherine Livingstone; or our most masculine reserve, the mining industry, dominated by Gina Rinehart.
There is a lot of talk about opportunities and quotas, and women don't have the same roadblocks in their path that they had half a century ago. It's not so long ago that a woman was sacked when she married, or if they were both teachers, the woman would automatically lose her job. Now, at least, they are free to continue their career path.
Women are more collaborative than men, so in a world where teams and work groups are all-important, their contributions shine. "But women think about power differently than men do," says Sellers. "Women think about power much more horizontally. Men think about power vertically."
She asked hundreds of women and men why they started their company. "Men tend to say to make a lot of money. Women want to create the company they would like to work for." Often, they have come from a big company and they don’t want to work that way any more.
It comes down to the girls. Can they change the nature of business - or the nature of themselves?
