Why Sheryl Sandberg Believes Business Leaders Must Explicitly Champion Female Ambition

When women are given the same stretch assignments, opportunities, mentors, there's no ambition gap. So it is the system. It is what is going on for women in corporate America. That's not just causing the broken rung, but now it's causing an ambition gap. Right. And this is not good enough for our economy and for our daughters. Welcome. I'm Manita Hooja, editor-at-large at Forbes and founder of Iconoclast, and we're here at the Nasdaq market site. Our special guest today is someone who has helped shape the modern conversation around women, leadership and power, Sheryl Sandberg. She's the founder of Lean In, former CEO of Meta Platforms, and one of the most influential philanthropists working on gender equity today. She's now joined forces with former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Columbia University's Institute of Global Politics on a landmark new report on child marriage, a practice that still claims 12 million girls each year. Joining us now on this critical topic, AI, women in the workforce and much more. Sheryl Sandberg, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me, Manita. And I want to welcome you back because I believe this is your first interview back from maternity leave. It is indeed. And what an interview to come back to talk about such a critical topic at such an important time. So thank you so much for joining us here today. I'm so glad to be with you. And I love that you've come back from maternity leave and you're taking on just such an important topic. It is important indeed. And so with that, I want to dive right into all of the amazing content that we have to get through. So Sheryl, you've spent your entire career focused on women's economic participation. What personally drew you to this issue? So I started my career working in development. I was at the World Bank. I was the economist for the India division health team. I worked on. I worked on leprosy. I worked on malaria, blindness and HIV AIDS. And if you think about the lives women have around the world, I'm not sure there's a more. I'm sure there's not a more important topic than child marriage, because child marriage takes everything away, everything away from a girl. It takes her control over her own life. It takes her out of school. It takes her control over her own body, including her sexual choices. And so I've always really cared about this. And then a few years ago, I got married in my 50s, choosing myself. And my husband and I did a thing where we donated all our gifts and made this part of our wedding because I really had such a sense that I was choosing this as a fully formed adult. And that so many million girls, one million a month are going to get married under the age of 18 this year alone. And that's such a staggering fact. And I think we've spoken about this. I have a personal connection to this topic as well, especially culturally. So just to see the numbers behind that was it was quite shocking because I understand it anecdotally and culturally from where my family hails from in the world. But I didn't understand how global an issue this is. I mean, look, there are 640 million women in the world today who are married as children. One in five girls is getting married as a child. And let's talk about what that is. So I rolled out this report with the great Secretary Hillary Clinton, the SIPA Institute, the Center for Global Development, this report, and the first lady of Sierra Leone, who herself is a survivor because there was an arranged marriage that would have happened to her as a child that she managed not to have happen. And what she has said very loudly is she thinks we need to call it what it is. This isn't marriage. This is legalized rape. Right. This is and this is strong language. She says this. This is pedophilia. That's what this is. Because when you take a girl, they can be as young as nine or younger. And you tell them that they are the property, the property of some older man. That's what happens. And so we have a responsibility to stand up for these girls all around the world. Yes, it's definitely criminal. I think she likened it to to slavery, too. Right. She said that this is they're trapped in these situations and they really have no agency over their own lives and livelihood, for sure. Yeah. And that's what she said. She said you have to picture their life. So you get up in the morning and someone tells you what to do. You do not go to school. You clean, you cook, you have sexual relationship whenever someone else wants to. I mean, you have absolutely no control over your own body, your own your own future. And everything gets taken away from you. So we got a chance to also speak with Secretary Clinton yesterday and understand, as you mentioned, the staggering toll, 640 million women. We are looking to raise the visibility of the economic consequences of child marriage. You know, we have worked very hard. I did as secretary of state. I have for many years tried to raise the issue, the child marriage dilemma, because what happens is these young girls lives are so dramatically altered. But we wanted to make the argument. And of course, this is something that Cheryl is particularly focused on, that the economy of these families, these communities, these countries is adversely affected by the numbers of girls that are in a marriage before they are ready, before their education has been completed. So I think trying to change the focus a little bit. I believe it's a human rights issue. I've always believed that. But I want to add the dimension that it is also an economic issue. But the report puts a staggering dollar figure to it as well, I think 175 billion. Why do you think the economic argument hasn't yet been taken as seriously into account by key decision makers as it should? Well, I'm I'm really grateful to be here with you at Forbes talking about this, because while this is an issue of human rights, it is an issue that finance ministers have to care about as well. So the report, we did a deep analysis with the Center for Global Development, Real Economists, and they came out with this figure that this is costing the global economy $175 billion every single year. Why? Lost wages, lost workforce participation, health. Remember that when children become brides, they then have children. You have 14 year old girls having babies. Their bodies aren't ready for that. And so that decreases their health, their welfare. And it traps us in a cycle of poverty. And I think if the world recognized what an economic issue this was, it would be not just people who care about women's rights and human's rights, but it would be everyone because everyone cares so much about the economy. Right, to help galvanize support on a global level. So I was surprised to discover, and I'm embarrassed to admit this, that I didn't realize that child marriage is still legal in parts of the United States. When making the case for other countries to act now, how do we reconcile with that? I mean, no one should get married before they're 18. It's the age of consent. It's the age of voting. You can't consent to this below the age of 18. And so, of course, those laws should be changed all over the world. It's also the case that the younger you are, the worse this is. It's a terrible thing under any age. But at nine, it's an even bigger problem. And so as we think about this, we need the right laws all over the world. But we also need the laws enforced. Look, there are places in the world, you know, Iran is very much in the news where the legal age of marriage is nine. There are lots of places in the world where the legal age of marriage is 18 on the books, but no one actually enforces those laws. And again, the first lady of Sierra Leone, she's very powerful on this. They passed a law in Sierra Leone, not just to criminalize getting married under 18 or marrying your daughter, but being part of that ceremony. Anyone who goes to the wedding, she says it. Anyone who DJs at the wedding, you officiate the wedding. It's your responsibility to know how old that girl was. And if that girl is under 18, and she is a girl, not a woman, because she is under 18, you are responsible for figuring that out or face criminal penalties. I think that's the kind of bold enforcement we need. And I am just so honored to have worked with her on this report. Yeah. And it's not even like just modicum of criminal punishment. I think she threw out 15 years is the baseline in terms of how seriously they take this as a nation. Yeah. We need real laws, real enforcement. We also know what we need, which is girls' education. There's a good cycle and a bad cycle here. The good cycle is girls get educated. They get through secondary school. They have agency. They have autonomy. They can earn money. They can be economically positive for their family and community. The negative cycle is they get married at super young ages. They have children at super young ages. Their bodies never recover. They drop out of school. They then are not able to break out of that cycle of poverty. And then their daughters are much more likely to get married as children. Right. And also just to provide for their children and then supply their children with the proper education and all of the things that they did not get the benefit of growing up. That's exactly right. It's a domino effect. So when you look at ending child marriage globally, what's the first lever you believe must move? Education, access to health services, or shifting social norms to sustain the practice? How do you sequence these efforts for real policy impact? I think those are the three steps. You clearly read the report, but that's what it is. And it has to be all three. Girls' education all the way through secondary school. Access to health care so girls get the treatment they need and the protection they need. And then the right laws on the books under 18 and those laws actually enforced. And then I think, I guess, speaking to Secretary Clinton, I think she had said, going back to the earlier question about it, in the United States, is that it's a state by state issue, right? So it's also state governments and leaders need to get involved. Everywhere in the world, it should be 18. No one should get married below that age. And we particularly should not be marrying off. We have a story on one of the brave survivors. She was engaged at five. At five? At five. Five years old. Engaged. Think about what that is. I mean, you just, like, you can't even imagine. You can't even comprehend. You can't even comprehend how someone could look at a five-year-old and think, like, that should be my bride. And there's financial connections to this as well. I think yesterday, at yesterday's event, there was a big discussion around dowries and just moving it around more like a financial transaction than really understanding that there are lives at stake. No, that's right. One of the brave survivors, she's from Pakistan. She had an arranged marriage, forced marriage at 16. She got taken to Canada. She was abused. Took her 11 years to get out of that marriage. She wrote a book. And my daughter was at the dinner with us last night and she told my daughter that recently a man from her hometown, from her home village in Pakistan, read her book and said, I was about to marry off my daughter and I read your book and I canceled the wedding. Oh my gosh. So she, from around the world, saved a girl from the fate that she had. And that is what this takes. And this is, again, an issue everyone should care about. People who care about the economy should care about this. What a profound story. And so when you look at everything going on in the world today, we're in this radical environment of uncertainty and geopolitical tensions. We're seeing real cuts to foreign aid and development funding right now. And you look at what that means for girls in the most vulnerable parts of the world, what goes through your mind? And how can we further underscore and emphasize the need to keep this critical issue in focus amidst all of these other geopolitical tensions at this moment? Look, I think that's part of why we rolled this report out now, which is that there is so much polarization. There is so little we agree on. Do you know what we should all agree on? That legalized rape shouldn't happen. That child marriage, forced marriage, early marriage is something that should be socially, politically, economically unacceptable. And I really believe in foreign aid. I really believe that those of us in the developed world have a responsibility to help people who have less than we do, that it makes the entire world more prosperous, more secure, stronger, stronger commitments between countries. And so I'm hoping that even with everything we disagree on right now, this is an issue we can all come together on. And we have Republicans. We have Democrats. We have people from all over the world who have endorsed this report because this is so clearly something that absolutely no one should be for, which is forcing a young girl into what is essentially a completely unacceptable situation where she loses all of her rights. Well, thank you, Cheryl, for bringing such a critically important topic to the forefront and using your platform to help send this message out around the world. I want to switch now to one of the topics that you also have dedicated a lot of your time and focus on, which is the state of women in the workplace. And so it's been over a decade since you released your bestselling book, Lean In. And when you look at the current state of the world and the economy here in the U.S. and globally, the broken rung remains the biggest obstacle to the C-suite, right? Why are companies still failing to promote women at that first step into management after years of talking about DEI investment? We're at an interesting moment where you have some observations. Yeah, I mean, look, women get 59% of the college degrees in this country have for many decades. We get 11% of the top jobs, the Fortune 500 CEO jobs. So you have to believe that men are 13 times more talented than women, or you have to believe that something else is going on. I'm going to go with something else is going on. And let's be specific about what that something else is. We know that men get promoted based on potential and women get promoted based on what they've already proven. And so while we're trying to fix those numbers at the top, where that glass ceiling is, the 11%, we need to look all the way down the career path. And the first promotion to manager happens four or five, something like that, years into the workforce. That's the biggest problem and the biggest gap between men and women. For every 100 men, you get 93 women and you get 60 black women. Why? Because you can't be a manager until someone lets you be a manager. Right. So if someone's going to promote or hire based on potential, which they do with men, they're going to do that. And that's why women can't prove it. Women, women of color, they can't prove it until they've done it. And if we're going to fix the numbers at the top, we have to fix the numbers all the way down. We've been doing this survey, Women in the Workforce, for 11 years. It's the largest survey, my foundation, Lean In Does It, of women in corporate America. And this year we had a really, really surprising and really upsetting finding, which is that for the first time ever, there's an ambition gap. And we measure this very carefully. We ask people, men and women, do you want to get promoted? Nice, even question. And what this survey found for the first time in 11 years is an ambition gap. More men than women want to get promoted. And at the entry level, 80% of men and 69% of women. 69%. Think about how low that is. And if you ask why? Why? It's because women aren't getting the same opportunities. When women are given the same stretch assignments, opportunities, mentors, there's no ambition gap. So it is the system. It is what is going on for women in corporate America. That's not just causing the broken rung, but now it's causing an ambition gap. Right. And this is not good enough for our economy and for our daughters. So the sentiment is that women feel like the deck is stacked against them from the outset. That's what the data is telling us right now. And that makes them less ambitious. Why would they want to get promoted if they know they can't get promoted? Furthermore, I think your research report and I think some of the other data came out to show the first eight months of last year that I think half a million women left the workforce. Talk to us about that for a minute. So women are leaving the workforce in much greater numbers than men at the same period of time. The first eight to nine months of last year were particularly bad for women, particularly bad for black women. The decrease in federal jobs caused a large number. So and more men are entering the labor force. And let's talk about why we should be worried about that. Workforce participation is a major driver of GDP growth. Right. We need women in the workforce. We need women in the workforce, particularly as the birth rate goes down, immigration goes down, whatever your opinions are of immigration. And that's not even relevant for this. What is relevant is that the economy is driven by workforce participation. And if you need a cautionary tale, look at Japan. Japan, stagnant for decades. For decades. For decades, partially caused by low female workforce participation. Right. We can't afford that in our economy. And if we're talking about actual numbers and to galvanize attention towards this issue, I think you said 4.2% GDP growth is what's on the table. Yes. We are leaving an extra 4.2% of GDP growth. And when you understand that our economy has grown at less than 2% a year, that's a lot of GDP growth. Think about that. Think about that for purchasing power. And think about that for families. Because we also know that when women make money, they spend it on their family. On their family. Spend it on their kids. Oh, I know that pretty well. So you've mentioned that senior level women are more burnt out than ever. If the reward for leaning in is total exhaustion, what incentivizes women currently in the workforce in this next generation to want those seats at the table? Look, I've always believed, and I deeply believe, that more women in leadership will create the environment where fewer women can be burnt out because they have better family-friendly policies. And I'll share a personal story on this. So I was at Facebook many years ago. And I had a woman who was working on my team. And she was young. And she got cancer. And I said, are you going to be OK? And she said, yes, I'm going to be OK. But I'm not going to have a baby. I'm never going to have a child. And I said, why won't you have a child? And she said, I'm going to go through chemo and radiation. I won't be able to have a child. In order to do that, I need to freeze my eggs. And I can't afford it. So she told me this story. I'm a woman. Probably why she told me. I care. Big men could care, too. I went to our head of HR, Lori Goeller. And I said, we should pay for egg freezing for women who have cancer. And she said, why would we only pay for women who have cancer? We should pay for egg freezing. So we went to the company and said, we're going to pay for egg freezing. If you read the headlines from them, you would have thought I murdered someone with an ax. People are like, Sheryl Sandberg wants everyone to lean in and not have babies. It got so bad that I had to go to an internal Facebook meeting, 1,000 people. And I said, raise your hand if your manager has told you not to have babies and freeze your eggs. No hands. Fast forward to today. That's a benefit most of the tech companies and a lot of the big companies have. It's just considerate. I was going to say that sounded more like a more regular practice than when you first mentioned it. It's a regular practice now. Today, yeah. Because there was a woman and another woman who saw this need and met it. And that's what the data shows. This is my story, but there are 100 others from other women who have done this, which is that if we get more women into leadership roles, fewer women are going to be burnt out. I think we also need to realize that we need to balance out housework in the office and at home. So let's talk about housework in the office. What do you think housework in the office is? More administrative. Yeah, the notes. Everyone who's watching, ask yourself, if someone's taking notes in the meeting today, who do you think that is in the office? It's almost always the women. It's someone's birthday. Who's bringing in a cupcake? It's the women. Women do more office housework. And then at the home, women do much more housework than men. I went on one of the late night shows as part of the book launch a long time ago. And I said, if you want to have more sex with your wife, don't send flowers. You should do laundry. It's been proven. So I came back to the office. I had the largest bouquet of flowers you've ever seen in your life. It was like taller than you are. And it said, it was from the head of FTD. He was like, can't you tell men to do laundry and send flowers? I was like, yes, I can. Yes, I can. But the point is, if you want to balance out at home and do more, that's good for your marriage. You're going to have more ambitious children, especially girls, a happier wife. And that is how we keep women from being burnt out. We share the ballot. We make family-friendly office life policies. We share the work at home. And we share the work in the office. Well, that's great advice to the general public. But to the actual woman who's listening to this, who's mid-career, who's feeling burnt out, what advice would you give her for how to juggle everything right now, today, while she's waiting for the rest of the world to listen and spread the love, so to speak? Well, I would tell her that she can't do it all on her own, which is why we exist, why we put out the Women in the Workforce Report every year. And I personally email every CEO I know, like, here, here's our report. Here's the stuff you need to do. So we should be fighting for her. And we are. From her point of view, what she should do is, I think, recognize that as you get more senior, you actually get more control. I think people don't know that, that, you know, if you have a meeting, I ask some women, do you want to be CEO? Sometimes they say yes, they say no. And I say, well, if you want to know why. They say, well, I want to, you know, have a balanced life for my kids. And I said, have you ever had a meeting with your CEO? And they say yes. I said, who set the time? The CEO. Right, the CEO. The CEO. When I went to Facebook, I went from Google. I was like a vice president at Google. I became CEO of Facebook. I went home every day at 5.30. Do you know what that meant? That meant that your teams could go home at 5.30. Yeah, because I wanted to see my son before he went to bed. And I'm not going to pretend I didn't work hard. I did. I worked in the morning before he worked, woke up, I worked at night. I went home, I put him to bed, I gave him a bath, and then I got back to work. But I was doing it on my own time, in my own terms. It was your own volition that you, yeah. Because I was the COO. And when I worked for someone who wasn't. And so I think we sometimes think there's this trade-off between getting more senior and having more balance. Turns out they're often like positively correlated. And again, if we can get more women into those jobs, the next generation of egg freezing benefits is going to happen. So you can't be the change unless you see the change. That's right. To your point. Yeah, that's right. So Cheryl, adding to all of the pressures women are already facing in the workplace is the broader technological backdrop in the current environment. AI is reshaping the labor force and market quickly. Where do you see the biggest risks and also the biggest opportunity? I'm so glad you asked this question. Because this is already a huge technological revolution. I don't think we've seen even the smallest percentage yet. And a lot of jobs are going to be lost. But the people who are going to hang on to the jobs are the people who know how to use AI. And we've always encouraged more boys than girls, more men than women to use technology. And that's happening again. Our Women in the Workforce report said that men in the workforce are 50% more likely to be encouraged by their managers to use AI. 50%. And we know that boys are encouraged more. And so to every woman out there, please use AI. Do it in accordance with your school's policies, your company's policies. But learn how to use these tools because they're going to make you better and more efficient. We can't afford for men to be a bigger part of this revolution than we are. Exacerbate the current problems that we're trying to solve. And so this came up last night at dinner. But so the double-edged sword where I think you mentioned that if a man is encouraged to use AI, but that's not the same situation for women, at least the data from your report suggests. That's right. It's the same cycle we're in. And so what do we need to do? We need to be explicitly for women using this technology. And it's great technology. It's made me so much more efficient. I've been actually really trying for the last... You too? Yeah, me too. I'm just trying to organize. I have a newborn at home. I'm trying to organize schedules, calendars, and just use it as a virtual assistant. Everything from that to day-to-day workflow tasks, and just making sure that we're optimizing our time. That's right. And if you're sitting next to some man, and he's using a technology, and using it well, that makes him more efficient, and you're afraid to use that technology, or you're worried because your manager hasn't told you to use that technology, you're going to fall behind. We need to not let that happen. AI is for girls. Another aspect of this is many of the roles exposed by AR are disproportionately held by women. You've recently warned that AI could even widen the gender gap. Talk to us for a minute about that. I know we're running out of time, but I want to make sure that we hit this important question as well. I mean, look, every revolution, technoclura that's ever happened, has the potential to make things better and make things worse. And it does both in many ways. But on this one, we're at the early stages. And if women start to use the technology and use it well... And it's like anything else in your own usage, my own usage, right? I'm not good at it, but I'm way better than I was three months ago. And three months from today, I'm going to be good, because I'm going to work at it. And it is so iterative. You figure out what works for you. You figure out which products you want to use. And so this is technology that needs to be used to be understood. So get out there and try it. That's consistently the advice that I've heard, even from professors at all of the top institutions, to the deans, to whomever we've spoken to about it recently. It's just that there's no better use case than just going out and using it and finding out how to get comfortable with it. Because it will keep iterating faster than you can go to a course at a university. So two last quick questions. So if you were back in the world of big tech today, what would be some of the policies and protections that you would put to ensure an even playing field out there right now? We know what we need to do. We need to celebrate female ambition. We need to encourage girls and women to lean in. We need to make sure that our culture supports female leadership. And I have to tell you, it's a tough moment on this, right? I feel like the manosphere, which has this flavor of like, you know, dominion over women or dominion over taking control of things in a very specific way. I think that is going against the kind of inclusive leadership we need, the kind of leadership that actually gets to results. And I think people need to realize that you can be completely hard charging, demand business results, work efficiently. I'd like to think I tried to do that in my career and still care about people's lives, be empathetic. And that's the kind of leadership we need that can deliver results. And I think women need to be a full part of that. We also, we seem to like every so often come up with new language for old ideas that makes them seem fresh. And I think that's really dangerous. So my personal least favorite thing happening right now, two of them, trad wife and lazy girl jobs, right? Trad wife, what does that mean? And I want to be clear, any woman who can afford to be a full-time wife and mother who wants to do that, that is her choice and I applaud and support that. But what that phrase really has started to mean is you can't be a good wife and mother unless you do it full-time. Unless you do it. Yeah, you have to pick a lane, not that you can juggle both. That's right. And most women don't have that choice. Most women have to work. So that is just mean to say that. But the second thing is that the image it concocts, like that was what we had in the 50s. In the 50s, yeah. It's not fresh. That's not new. And that's not going to lead to the world. It's just been jargonized in a new way. Correct. We're out of time, but final thought, 10 years. If we look ahead to the next decade, are you more hopeful or more concerned about women's progress than you were 10 years ago today? I think I'm short-run concerned and long-run optimistic. Awesome. Well, Sheryl Sandberg, thank you so much for joining us here at the Nasdaq Market Site. You're watching Iconoclast.