Perspective

Last class, we discussed the different ways that a person could know a fact or the different meanings/implications that fact could have. Esha gave the example of a man and a woman knowing that most CEOs are men. Today I read an article about Sheryl Sandberg, the COO for Facebook.

First of all, I think she's just a really cool person. Here are a few articles. A TED Talk by her, the article from Jezebel, and an interview she gave.

http://www.ted.com/talks/sheryl_sandberg_why_we_have_too_few_women_leaders.html

http://jezebel.com/5900252/women-should-preferably-marry-other-women-says-sheryl-sandberg

http://www.makers.com/sheryl-sandberg/moments/sheryls-harvard-thesis

One of the interview videos is titled "Proud to be a Feminist." In a couple of videos, she discusses at length the importance of changing attitudes about women in the workplace and at home. The Jezebel article provides a quote about the amount of work men do versus the amount of work women do in the home and what that means for women, which is essentially that they work at least 2 jobs.

In the TED Talk, she talks about how women consistently underestimate themselves, noting men attribute their success to themselves and women attribute it to external factors. She also notes that success is positive for men and negative for women and gives this fun example. A professor gave his students the resume/work history of a woman named Heidi and then gave the same story and changed the name to Howard. While the students thought they were equally qualified, they thought Heidi was a bit "political" and Howard was a nice guy. I thought this was particularly interesting given our Tuesday discussion.

What does it mean to women to say that most CEOs are men? What does it mean for the women who do become CEOs? Clearly the statistics and studies on underestimation and on characterization of women in the workplace indicate that the fact has a much bigger social reality attached to it. Women, generally, tend to understand even facts about themselves differently than men do. Sheryl Sandberg has worked for major corporations for a long time, but she has had to navigate her career in a different way than her male counterparts and has had to understand and define herself as a woman in the workplace rather than just the supposedly gender-neutral, generic but really not so generic "employee."

Anyway, this might just be rehashing what we did last class, but the articles really made me think of Esha's example and the rest of our conversation. What do y'all think about what Sandberg says? What does it mean for women in the workplace? How do we negotiate our different perspectives on facts?