Culture> Books

Women, lean in

By Mei Jia ( China Daily ) Updated: 2013-10-29 09:34:42

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, was in China to promote her new book on feminism. Mei Jia finds about her new mission.

When Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, visited China to promote her new book Lean In, she already had a large number of fans in the country. People were drawn to Sandberg either by her story of success, or the notion of the renewed feminist movement inspired by her book.

Her personal glamour is not confined to a pretty face, elegant behavior, smart talk, perfect CV and a happy marriage, all of which laid wonderful foundation for her book to be a best-seller as Kong Yan, editor with her Chinese publisher, points out. Her persona seems to radiate from deep inside.

The moment Sandberg finished a session with Chinese media upon her visit, she walked directly to a reporter who had asked a question about her own hard decisions between work and marriage, Sandberg held the reporter's hand and said, "You'll be all right".

Sheryl Sandberg hopes her book can start to change the stereotypes and assumptions of women. Mei Jia / China Daily

Sheryl Sandberg posed with students for photographs after her speech at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, on July 3, 2013. Woohae Cho / Bloomberg via Getty Images

Sandberg knows these kinds of struggles well. And she also notices that while professional women feel guilty for choosing work over family, their male peers will probably not.

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"I wrote Lean In because despite the fact that women have made a lot of progress, nowhere in the world are women close to half of the positions of leaders as men," she says.

She is also worried about the scenario when women begin to feel content with the current progress, and "they stop being feminists".

As COO of a technology-based firm, Sandberg quotes data with ease.

She says across the world only 16 governments are run by women, while 95 percent of global companies are run by men. In the United States, women make up 18 percent of seats in the congress, and 14 percent of the top jobs in the corporations. While in China, women constitute 4.5 percent of top CEO jobs in 1997, and about 5 percent today, she quotes.

It was her TED talk in 2010, titled Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders, that planted the idea in Sandberg's mind to work for gender equality.

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