"It turns out men still run the world and I'm not sure how well that's going," Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook and author of Lean In, told the audience at the AllThingsD conference. She also discussed her thoughts on how Facebook is growing and becoming more mobile.
Sandberg said from 1970 to 2000, the number of women in high positions has increased but that growth has slowed considerably over the past decade. She says that people don't want to talk about gender and that's keeping us from getting more women at the top of companies and organizations. The issue is not limited to the tech industry, she said, but is a problem in all fields. One reason is that not enough women are going into technology fields, particularly computer science, where the percentage of women entering the field has dropped from about 35 percent in the mid-80s to around 20 percent today. If women were going into computer science at the same rate as men, she said, there might be enough workers to fill the gap in needed workers.
Women are often told they are "bossy" at work, while men are rarely called that. As women get more successful, she said, they are less liked but when men get more successful, they are more liked. She complained that often human resource departments discourage men from talking about personal and family issues with women, and discussed how men are often held back from giving real feedback and from mentoring women because of how it might look if they are alone with women.
Sandberg described her relationship with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: they sit next to each other, exchange messages all the time, and had a plan where they gave each other feedback every Friday. She said Zuckerberg focuses on product, engineering, and design, while she focuses on running the sales company and the business side of the company.
Asked about Facebook Home, Sandberg said people are always walking around with a computer that is 100,000 times more powerful than the one that took a man to the moon, but most are still focused around applications and tasks, not people. "We consider it V (version) one," she said. Everyone builds on top of Android or iOS, and on top of that, 70 or 80 percent of the top applications also integrate with Facebook, she said. She agreed that the reaction was "bi-modal" with most reviews either being very positive or very negative. The positive ones have come from heavy Facebook users while the negative ones have come from people who liked some of the features (such as Chat Heads) but disliked how it reorganizes existing apps. Facebook is committed to monthly rollouts to improve that.
Mobile is a bigger opportunity for Facebook than the desktop was, she said, noting that Facebook usage accounts for one in seven minutes on the desktop and one in five on the phone. It can be both mass market and increasingly targeted, saying that Samsung was able to reach the maximum number of people through the Super Bowl, but could also target specific users, for instance, such as heavy soda drinkers. She notes that 30 percent of Facebook's revenue is now mobile and that is growing.
Asked about wearable technology, Sandberg admitted it took some time to get used to Google Glass, but she likes it. She noted that Facebook isn't creating its own wearable device, but that Facebook is one of the first apps for Glass. "Never say never, but we're not a device-making company," she said.
Facebook is continuing to grow in every geography, and now has 1.1 billion users. Engagement has also increased, she said, noting that five years ago, 50 percent of users were on the service every day; now that number is 60 percent.
She dismissed concerns that teenagers aren't using Facebook by saying teenagers are using other social services including Twitter and Tumblr more, but Facebook use is much higher and growing as well. She said there is room for all of the social services to grow and Instagram is doing quite well.
She wouldn't comment on Waze or mapping applications but said Facebook can't build everything even if it's a good idea. For instance, she said the company isn't building an ad network. The company's big goal for the next year remains mobile.
One audience member said the ads she sees on Facebook seem sexist because they are targeted at women and Sandberg said the problem is that advertisers need to learn to target based on more things than just gender.
Asked about take-downs, Sandberg said the company takes down obvious hate speech, but said there's a lot of stuff that's not inciting violence but is still distasteful or has inappropriate or cruel comments. These shouldn't be taken down, she said, but shouldn't be anonymous.
Asked if the growth in sites like Snapchat reflects a problem of trust in Facebook and other sites, Sandberg agreed that trust is a huge issue. Facebook has given people the ability to do many things but it has been too complicated and the company is trying to make it more transparent. It is not true that the more things you sell publicly, the better we do for advertising, she said. "We take trust very seriously," and the best way to do that is give users the ability to control sharing. She said she wouldn't make an announcement, but it sounded like she finds temporary sharing was very interesting.
0 comments:
Post a Comment