I am sure that all girls have ever heard such a thing in their life – “You are a girl, it’s not your place; you should be in the kitchen laying a table”. This is what we call gender discrimination and I think that we and the next generation will not hear this sentence any more. Let’s see what Sheryl Sandberg thinks.
Sandberg (2010) presents a speech about why we have too few businesswomen. She has been the chief operating officer of Facebook since 2008, prior to which she has been the vice president of Global Online sales and Operations at Google. Moreover, before joining Facebook she was considering becoming a senior executive for the Washington Post Company. She is a successful businesswoman and obviously has the dignity for that. While imagining these positions and the responsibilities tied to them, we may think that women are not in a so bad situation as the topic implies. However, Sheryl thinks that women are not reaching the top of any profession anywhere in the world. She believes that women are dropping out of the Fortune 500 CEO jobs or other equivalent positions and there are a few reasons for that:
- women underestimate their abilities
- women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce
- women attribute their success to external factors
She is right in a sense that there is still the influence of historical mentality about women being the housekeeper and the men bringing the money. Consequently we need time to get out of that shackles. Nowadays the picture is completely different and will be much better after a few years. For already a decade women are very active in terms of their careers and I have many bright examples of successful businesswomen. Not going too far, I am working in a company the director of which is a woman for already 15 years. We have three departments two of which are headed by women. Two weeks ago we had an order of writing business plan for a Policlinic the director of which is again a very successful businesswoman. One might think that they are extremes, but such examples are too many to be extremes. This is Armenia, which is a country with people still having conventional mentality. I guess in more developed countries women do not stand down. Moreover, if you open the door of any classroom in any University, 60-70% of the students are girls and if not all of them, but at least 10% will succeed in their careers.
According to Sheryl, women do not succeed because they do not believe themselves, they do not think that they deserve promotion and they don’t even understand their own success. The fact that Sheryl stated and I think is more likely to be the major reason of women escape from workforce is the family and child. Statistics shows that women of higher positions either do not have children or have not more than one. On the contrary higher positions do not affect the number of children that men have. As Sheryl notes this is because men do not share the housework with women. I think that this is true especially for Armenia.
Overall I liked the podcast; the topic was relevant to the image of Sandberg as a woman on the peak of her career and giving women an advice to be self-confident.
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