The COO of Facebook spoke at the World Economic Forum and she said some very interesting and brave things.  You can watch the video above to see what I’m talking about, but I’ll summarize.  Her basic point was although women have been getting college degrees as much or more than men for decades now, the number of women at the top of the business world is still only at 15%, and it’s been that way for longer than 10 years.
So women are going to college, getting degrees, but they still aren’t pushing themselves to achieve in the business world.
As a guy who has been in the corporate / business word for 20 years, this is no surprise to me at all. However before I get into that, let me preempt any objections to what I’m about to say first.
YES, sexism in the workplace is absolutely real and does exist.  It can and does explain some of the fact women don’t achieve as much in business as men do. Agree, agree, agree.
Moreover, I can state emphatically that this anti-women sexism in the workplace is often initiated by other women, not just men.  TONS of working women out there prefer male bosses and men in power rather than women in power.  Women tend to avoid talking about this (since it’s much easier to blame men), but it’s absolutely true.  Women can not and should not point at men as the sole cause of gender-based discrimination in the workplace.
This goes all the way back to the complaint that women have about how “Hollywood expects me to be so skinny!”. Â Um, it’s not “Hollywood”. Â It’s mostly female casting agents and female fashionistas pushing this image, not dudes. Hell, guys will fuck anything, as all of us guys know. Â Jenny McCarthy has a fantastic story about how she could not get acting and photography gigs back in the day because the all the female casting people said she was “too fat”. Â Of course the men thought she was smoking hot, which she was, but that didn’t matter.
Women should look to their own sisters just as much as they look to men regarding this problem.
Alright, to my points.
– The woman in the above video (Ana Kasparian) is completely wrong in that she says men are not born more ambitions than women.  They certainly are.  Us guys have aggressive DNA built into us for 100,000 years that women have less of.  That’s without question.  Of course women can be aggressive and ambitious, but on average men are more so.
– She is also wrong when she says the way women are raised has nothing to do with their lack of ambition.  Of course it is.  How could it not be?  I have also showed how chick logic is taught to women very early in life, and other factors, such as ambition levels, are certainly effected
– Going to college does not equal success.  Just because women go to college more than men and get degrees more than men doesn’t mean shit.  I have found that women LOVE going to college, but once they get out of college, they tend to float around in terms of their careers and life direction.
Generally speaking, and I know there are exceptions, women (including college-educated ones) work for a while, move back home with their parents for a while, then go back work for a while, have a baby and stop working, then go back to work part-time, then go on unemployment for a while, then back to work, etc, etc. Â If you follow that kind of life program, and millions of women do, then it doesn’t matter if you have a college degree or not, your income prospects will still suck.
When women become just as motivated to put their heads down and bust their asses at a career for 30 years straight with no breaks as they are to go to college and do homework for four years, then you’ll see more women CEOs.
Not until then.
(And if you think I’m a misogynist or anti-woman, please read this.)
