Facebook's Sandberg claims women have 'ambition gap'

Facebook's chief operating officer said last week that women around the world are plagued by an "ambition gap."

Speaking in Davos at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting, Sheryl Sandberg explained that in the developing world, there was "an ambition gap at the societal level."

"We say we want to education our girls as much as our boys, but we don't really mean it," she told the panel.

As for the developed world, Sandberg blamed a lack of progress for women on "an ambition gap at the personal level."

"Women are not as ambitious as men," she insisted. “We don’t raise our daughters to be as ambitious as our sons.”

According to the World Bank's 2012 World Development Report on Gender Equality and Development (PDF), women in the workforce face problems much larger than a simple "ambition gap."

For starters: Women account for 58 percent of all unpaid work, nearly 4 million women go "missing" each year in developing countries, over one-third of women die in their reproductive years, and less than 20 of every 100 landowners is a woman.

Watch this video from Bloomberg TV, recorded Jan. 27, 2012.