Feel free to put this down in the column of things you don’t normally hear every day. Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, recently stated in an interview that women would probably be better off if they married other women instead of men. Read on for her thought process and her advice for female geeks.
Sandberg is one of the few women of power within Facebook (all seven of their board members are men). In fact, a women’s rights group called Ultraviolet has been demanding that change. In the meantime, Sandberg is in a spotlighted position, which makes her recent remarks all that more publicized.
Our sister site, The Jane Dough, reports Sandberg made the comments during a recent interview for Makers, a PBS/AOL series.
“The most important thing — and I’ve said it a hundred times and I’ll say it a hundred times — if you marry a man, marry the right one,” Sandberg said. “If you can marry a woman, that’s better because the split between two women in the home is pretty even, the data shows. But find someone to marry who’s going to do half.”
So what exactly made Sandberg, who is a known advocate of gender equality and married to a man, take that particular stance? Her own work at achieving a balance at work and home when you have children.
“I feel guilty when my son says, ‘Mommy, put down the BlackBerry, talk to me’ and that happens far too much,” she said. “I think all women feel guilty. I think what’s interesting is I don’t know many men who feel guilty. I don’t know a lot of men who feel guilty for working full time, it’s expected that they’ll work full time…I wonder if there were more shared responsibility if more men would feel guilty too and women would feel less of it.”
Another interesting bit of advice came out of the interview as well. “I want to tell any young girl out there who’s a geek in high school…I was a really serious geek in high school,” she said. “It works out. Study harder.”
Take a look at the rest of the interview, it’s a good one.
(via The Jane Dough, video via ZDNet, image by Justin Sullivan)
