What Would You Do if You Weren't Afraid?

On May 17 Sheryl Sandberg — 2011 Matrix Award honoree and Chief Operating Officer of Facebook — delivered a challenging and inspirational commencement address to the graduates of Barnard College. Her subject was the continuing inequality of opportunity for women in the workforce. Some excerpts:

• "As we sit here looking at this magnificent blue-robed class, we have to admit something that’s sad but true: men run the world. Of 190 heads of state, nine are women. Of all the parliaments around the world, 13% of those seats are held by women. Corporate America top jobs, 15% are women. Numbers which have not moved at all in the past nine years. Nine years. Of full professors around the United States, only 24% are women."

• "But what is so sad—it doesn’t just make me feel old, it makes me truly sad—is that it’s very clear that my generation is not going to change this problem. Women became 50% of the college graduates in this country in 1981, 30 years ago. Thirty years is plenty of time for those graduates to have gotten to the top of their industries, but we are nowhere close to 50% of the jobs at the top. That means that when the big decisions are made, the decisions that affect all of our worlds, we do not have an equal voice at that table.

• "I encourage you to think big. Studies show very clearly that in our country, in the college-educated part of the population, men are more ambitious than women. They’re more ambitious the day they graduate from college; they remain more ambitious every step along their career path. We will never close the achievement gap until we close the ambition gap."

• I hope that you — yes, you — each and every one of you have the ambition to run the world, because this world needs you to run it. Women all around the world are counting on you...So go home tonight and ask yourselves, 'What would I do if I weren’t afraid?' And then go do it."

Watch the full address below or read the transcript here. 

For more information:

• Read Alissa Pinck's Matrix Award profile of Sheryl Sandberg
• Watch Sheryl's TED address, "Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders"

— Michele Hush