Facebook COO: Women Should Run Things

The number two person at Facebook says men run the world, but things could be better with a different gender making decisions.

Slideshow: Nine Female Heads Of State

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told Barnard College graduates on Tuesday that women haven’t made a lot of progress in recent years when it comes to running companies and countries.

Read Full Transcript Of Speech

"Men run the world," Sandberg told the graduates. "It's very clear that my generation is not going to change this problem," she said.

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Many of Sandberg's remarks were about women having more leadership positions in the business world.

"Of 190 heads of state, nine are women. Of all the parliaments around the world, 13% of those seats are held by women. Corporate America top jobs, 15% are women; numbers which have not moved at all in the past nine years. Nine years. Of full professors around the United States, only 24% are women."

Current nations who have female leaders include Argentina, Brazil, Australia, Finland, Costa Rica, and Germany.

But in two decades, Sandberg says women have been held back and partly by their own doing

"Women became 50% of the college graduates in this country in 1981, 30 years ago. Thirty years is plenty of time for those graduates to have gotten to the top of their industries, but we are nowhere close to 50% of the jobs at the top," Sandberg said.

While blaming the current social environment for part of the gender equality problem, Sandberg says studies show women are not as aggressive as men when they graduate.

The key, she says, is a support system going forward in life.

"It’s a bit counterintuitive, but the most important career decision you’re going to make is whether or not you have a life partner and who that partner is," Sandberg says. "If you pick someone who’s willing to share the burdens and the joys of your personal life, you’re going to go further. A world where men ran half our homes and women ran half our institutions would be just a much better world."

On a side note, of the 13 top executives listed on Facebook's Web site , only two are women: Sandberg and HR vice president Lori Goler.

And the Web site Crunch Base says privately held Facebook doesn't have a woman on its Board of Directors.