by SHERYL SANDBERG
Sabeen Virani, a Dubai based consultant working in Saudi Arabia, pointing to her proud achievement.
When Pat Mitchell invited me to speak at TEDWomen, everyone assumed I would talk about social media. I assumed so too. But as I started pulling together my thoughts, I landed on another topic: “Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders.” Because for all the ceilings that have been shattered, we still have a real problem.
Women became 50 percent of the college graduates in the United States in 1981. Since then, we have slowly and steadily made progress, earning increasingly more of the college degrees, taking more of the entry-level jobs, going into previously male-dominated fields, moving up each step of the ladder. But there is one big exception to this improvement — the top jobs. Thirty years later, we have not come close to holding our proportional share of positions of power in any industry.
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Thanks to the power and reach of the TED conference, the response to the talk has been truly encouraging. Women forwarded the link to their colleagues, friends, roommates and daughters. I received emails from women of all ages, sharing stories of their fears and their triumphs. Last week, I received one from Sabeen Virani, a consultant for a Dubai-based strategy consulting firm, who was working in Saudi Arabia where she was the only woman in an office of 300 employees. My talk includes a story about a male executive who did not know where the women’s restroom was in his own office. The issue for Sabeen, she wrote, was not that no one knew where the women’s restroom was, but that it did not exist at all. Inspired by the talk, she worked hard to earn the respect of her client and gained the courage to ask for her own bathroom. She sent me a photo of her smiling in front of a door with a printed paper sign that reads simply and powerfully, “Toilets for women only.”
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(Thanks to reader)