By Rip Empson (Writer, TechCrunch)
By this point, women in technology, especially those in powerful positions, are probably tired of hearing about: women in technology.
But, tonight, during a conversation with Charlie Rose, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg was asked exactly that: If the tech industry is today a place where women can find the level of opportunity that she, as a top executive at one of the world’s most well-known companies, would like them to be able to find.
Sandberg holds that women have made an incredible amount of progress in both higher education and management, gaining a larger share (if not taking the lead from men) in college and graduate degrees and leadership roles. But the glass ceiling refuses to crack completely.
“Over the last ten years”, Sandberg tells Rose, “women have stalled out at the top”. She continues:
“A lot of reasons, but I really think we need more women to lean into their careers and to be really dedicated to staying in the work force. I think the achievement gap is caused by a lot of things. It’s caused by institutional barriers and all kinds of stuff.
But there’s also a really big ambition gap. If you survey men and women in college today in this country, the men are more ambitious than the women. And until women are as ambitious as men, they’re not going to achieve as much as men…”
