Sheryl Sandberg Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders

Sheryl Sandberg gave a TED Talk entitled “Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders” in 2010. Sandberg is the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook and before that she was a vice president for Google’s Global Online Sales and Operations and was chief of staff for the Secretary of the Treasury. In this speech, she uses her current position as a powerful working woman, in combination with a strict logical structure and pathetic examples, to make the argument that women should be more aggressive in professional arenas.

This speech is given in front of a large audience at a TED conference. The full auditorium leaves little room for one-on-one connection to Sandberg, so she must rely on connecting to them only through her speech. Sandberg is talking in December of 2010 to a group of women about the current status of women in business and how she would like to see women act in the future. Her age and the date of the

She identifies with them as “we” and discusses the differences between this world and that of our mothers and grandmothers. By only speaking to one gender in her speech, she possibly isolates the influence she could have on men, but on the other hand, it makes her much more appealing to listen to as a woman. The seats in the auditorium are filled with women, which gives her ethos in this situation because she stands out as successful among other women. The larger context here is the entire internet and anyone interested in watching her speech online, but when she gives her speech, she focuses on her immediate audience, not the broader one. But while she does not consider the internet as her audience, it definitely broadens her audience, particularly to men. Online, men are able to listen to her speech and consider whether or not they agree with her points. On TED.com, the speech is also possibly more available to younger women or women who could not afford to attend a TED conference, but may still be inspired by her