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Please to say.
Joining us right now is Bloomberg Original's host and executive producer Emily Chang.
She joins us right now with Cheryl Sandberg. Emily Romaine.
Thank you so much on Cheryl, thank you so much for joining us. I know this ambition gap is troubling to you. Essentially, women are leaning out. They're deciding they don't want to be promoted because it doesn't seem worth it after all the work that's been done, all the talk, what do you think.
Broke, Well, let's start at the top.
So not all women are leaning out, and not all companies. But what our report shows this year, this is our eleventh year, is that about half of companies no longer prioritize advancement for women, and twenty one percent of those companies say women's career advancement is a low or no priority at all. And those are the companies that participated in the Women in the Workplace report we do with McKinsey.
And so these companies in many ways are the best the best, and then we do see that ambition gap, but only when women don't get the opportunities and support they need.
How when companies at risk like or is the conventional wisdom that this is better for business not ringing true.
I think the conventional wisdom should be and is what's true, which is that when you get the best out of your whole workforce, you're going to do better. So what's happening is that women face more barriers at every level of the career entry level. We call it the broken wrung, and we see it every year. For every one hundred men that get promoted, ninety three women, sixty black women,
eighty two latinas. That's because we hire and promote men based on potential and women for what they've already proven.
So of course women can't prove they're a manager.
Then at the senior levels, our report shows this year that at the same levels, a man is seventy percent more likely to get tapped for leadership training. Think about what that says. If you're a future leader, come to leadership training. And so this is only happening in the companies that aren't doing the right thing. When women get the full support and the same stretch opportunities, they're not leaning out at all. And so it's a question of
economic productivity. Do we want to get the best growth in our economy? Do we want to get the best out of our workforce. We're at to fork in the road, and companies have a decision to make.
The Trump administration is pushing policies that explicitly try to incentivize women to have more babies while simultaneously weakening workplace protections. Do you see these natalist policies as they are called, as pressure on women to return to traditional roles or is it support for families?
I mean, look, women can have as many kids as they want and still have to go to work. I think what we forget in a lot of this is that the great majority of women do not have the choice to be a full time mother and a full time spouse. Now, I feel we sometimes come up with new language for old ideas, and I want to be clear. If you can afford to be a full time spouse and a full time parent as a man or a woman, and you want to do that, I think that can
be deeply fulfilling work. But we've got to remember that most women don't have that option. They have an economic reality that they have to wake up in the morning and leave their home to earn money. To support their families, and so again new language for old ideas trad wife. That's just telling these women that have to leave their home that it's going to harm their marriages and their kids.
That's not what the data supports.
We should be able to make any choice we make without putting old pressures on women in a modern workforce where that's not the economic reality they live in.
President Trump has called on companies to root out what he calls illegal DEI you know, threatening federal contracts, threatening regulatory action. How is this going to be looked back on? How is history going to look back on the DEI rollback?
You know, I think people didn't understand and thought that women were getting unfair treatment. But let's there are some numbers at this Women got fifty nine percent of the college degrees, and women are ten percent of fortune five hundred CEO jobs.
I'm not saying there.
Aren't times when people are given preferential treatment.
Of course there are, what on average in our economy.
Do you really think that fifty nine percent of the college degree is getting ten percent of book jobs means they're systematic special treatment for women. I mean my experience in the workforce and I think yours and a lot of people is that it was hard. It was hard to be one of the only women women in the room. And so the question is what can companies do? And I'll tell you there's a lot they can do, and
it's in our report and it's completely legal. So, for example, feedback, one percent of men get style based feedback in performance reviews and sixty six percent of women.
What can companies do?
You establish criteria in advance that everyone agrees to that are universally applied. Everyone gets this kind of feedback that is not just legally permissible, but allowed and encouraged and creates a level playing field. This isn't about special treatment. This is about getting everyone the opportunity to do their best work and contribute.
Meta is among many companies that have rolled back DEI policies, and Mark Zuckerberg reportedly blamed you for the policies being there in the first place. Some employees have felt that your legacy is being dismantled. What have your conversations been like with Mark about this. I know you're still friends and you have to have feelings about this.
I don't think that's exactly what happened in that meeting, and Mark went out and.
Publicly posted and clarified.
But here's what I would say is that every company, including Meta, has the opportunity unity to make sure that they're fair to women. Here's what the data shows us, over and over and over again, so many examples. When a man and woman ask for raises or promotions, the woman's thirty percent more likely to be told she's too aggressive.
What do you do?
Standardize your processes. Every company should be doing it. So for example, interviews, if you don't have agreed upon questions, you ask naturally and maybe not on purpose, but naturally, people sometimes ask the easier questions to the men and the harder questions to the women. Just standardize your questions, put systems in place that protect people, but also that just give people the opportunity to contribute.
You have to acknowledge that there's a big rhetoric shift happening, and obviously we're seeing it in Silicon Valley.
We are seeing people.
Tech leaders who said one thing in the last election now whispering in the president's ear. A lot of these people that you know personally, What do you think is happening here? Is this transactional? Is this just business or is this a real change in values happening.
I think a lot of the rhetoric is terrible, and I think we see some of the impacts in this report. But you know, I'm fifty six, so I've been in the workforces my fourth decade, and what I see is that we make progress, we backslide, we make progress.
There's a backlash.
I think the reason these ideas take hold so easily is they were never really gone, even though the rhetoric is bad. Now, do I really think we ever fully encouraged leadership in little girls and little boys as and women as much as men know, So when it happens, when this rhetoric happens, it's so easy to take hold because it's like fertile ground. I'll give you one that really scares me. Eighth and tenth grade boys, middle and
high school boys. They surveyed them in twenty eighteen, and they said, what do you believe women should have the same opportunities as men in the workforce?
In twenty eighteen, sixty three percent. Yes.
I could spend all day talking about why that's so upsetting, like where are the other thirty seven percent? But sixty three said yees, sixty two percent said yes.
Today it's forty five.
We are seeing that same double ditch slide in middle and high school boys believing that women should.
Get equal pay. That's not okay.
And what it's going to take to change that is I think people realizing that this is about economic productivity. This is about do we want our companies to succeed.
You built two companies, Help build two companies that are incredibly economically productive. We are in the middle of this massive AI moment where companies are investing a lot, but it's also total chaos, it seems for you know, within and among some of the startups that are trying to build sustainable business models in an AI moment.
What's your advice to companies right.
Now about how they build a business model that can work and survive in the age of AI.
You know, it's such a good question.
And I was at Google in some of the early years and then I to Facebook now Meta, and I do think there's times when it really makes sense to invest ahead of revenue in business models. Right If Google, when I was there in the early days, had tried to cover our costs for search, we never would have gotten enough search out there to get enough user feedback to improve the search results, to get to what was a great business for Google.
So it makes sense.
At some point, at some level, you have to have revenue that covers costs.
Is that from ads?
Well, people make it so complicated. It's not complicated ready. Someone has to pay, who can pay, Businesses can pay, They can pay via advertising, they can pay via paying in some way, shape or form for database services, or people have to pay, and it will be a combination of all of these things.
But over time, the revenue is going to have to cover the costs, all right.
Cheryl Samberg, author of Leaning You Know, obviously help build Facebook and Google into what they are today.