TED Talk Analysis - Sheryl Sandberg December 2010

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, speaking at TED Women

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Sheryl Sandberg speaking to a woman-dominated audience

In December of 2010, TED hosted a TED Women conference in Washington D.C. At the conference, Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, spoke on the lack of women in the workforce with her TED talk, “Why we have too few women leaders”. The purpose of her talk was to draw attention to the deficit of women in the higher tiers of the corporate, government, and even non-profit sectors of the workforce. Because the TED talk was given at TED Women, the audience was primarily women who attended the conference. The audience expected to learn about the consequences of not having enough women in higher leadership roles in the office. As women in the workforce, the audience understood the background for Sheryl Sandberg’s talk and related to her assertions, but it is likely that they were not previously aware of the statistics that she presented. 

When speaking about her children, Sheryl Sandberg pointed toward herself to show her personal connections.

Sandberg opens her speech by presenting a series of startling statistics pertaining to the number of women in senior positions in different sectors of the work force, such as the fact that there are “190 heads of state; nine of them are women”. From there, Sheryl Sandberg continues by adding a personal anecdote about her children, and the struggle for both men and women to leave their children to return to work. She later uses this same anecdote to conclude her presentation, providing a summary of her ideas in a way that connects to the audience on a deeper level by advocating not only for the current working generation, but also for those of the future. 

Sheryl Sandberg articulates her three main points: sit at the table, make your partner a real partner, and don’t leave before you leave in a way that is simple, memorable, and unique. By not clouding her main ideas with superfluous words, she creates points that are easy to remember and stick out from the more complex ideas often presented in TED talks. During her point about sitting at the table, Sheryl Sandberg uses a personal story about her experience during a senior meeting. She describes how two women who accompanied a large corporate officer chose to sit against the wall, rather than engage in the discussion and sit at the table. She described how this situation perpetuates the problem of women dropping out of the workforce before climbing the corporate ladder because they excluded themselves from the important conversations due to a feeling that they lacked qualification for the job.  

Sandberg used hand motions to emphasize her main argument

There were no visual elements to the presentation, and I feel that using one or two simple graphs or pictures could have better illustrated some of the statistics given at the opening of the presentation. Sheryl Sandberg did use effective hand gestures throughout her presentation, providing natural accompaniments to her statements to add emphasis and show her passion for the topic. Overall, this TED Talk is one of my favorite presentations because of the topic, the means through which she presented her ideas, and the personal connections and stories she used to connect to the audience.

To view the TED talk, please visit:
http://www.ted.com/talks/sheryl_sandberg_why_we_have_too_few_women_leaders?language=en