Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg On Equal Wages: 'Start Paying Women Well'

Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, asked governments and companies to be proactive regarding equal pay for men and women Sunday.

Sandberg stated that equal pay for women must be supported by sturdier policies at work, in an interview released Sunday by BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. She called for more to be done regarding the gender pay gap. Sandberg said the first step is to "start paying women better."

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Sandberg confessed she struggled with self-doubt during her time at Harvard University. She said women were more inclined to underestimate their worth more than men do, hindering themselves from asking for higher pay.

"We need to start paying women well and we need the public policy and the corporate policy to get there," she told the BBC. "But certainly women applying for jobs at the same rate as men, women running for office at the same rate as men, that's got to be part of the answer," she continued.

The issue of gender pay gap surfaced this month when the BBC publicized the pay of its journalists.

Men earned more than 197,000 annually, outnumbering their women counterparts two to one. BBC’s top earning broadcaster made four-times more money than its highest-paid female broadcaster.

Sandberg, one of Silicon Valley’s top executives and author of Lean In, said women undervalued their business contributions. Sandberg sparked headlines in 2013 with her book about female empowerment on the job. She stated both girls and boys should be empowered to follow their dreams.

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"We start telling little girls not to lead at very young ages and we start telling little boys to lead at a very young ages, and that's a mistake," she told interviewer Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs.

"I believe everyone has inside them the ability to lead and we should let people choose that, not based on gender but on who they are and who they want to be."

After the Westminster terror attack on March 22, Sandberg met with Home Secretary Amber Rudd and discussed what Facebook was doing to fight terrorism. She stated they were "aligned" during the discussions.

She said, "complicated conversations" about encrypted messages on WhatsApp continued between the government and Facebook. She also conferred strides Facebook was taking to keep itself and it's WhatsApp messaging app from being utilized to plan and promote terrorist attacks.

"We want to make sure all of us do our part to stop terrorism, and so our Facebook policies are very clear: there's absolutely no place for terrorism, hate, calls for violence of any kind," she said.

Rudd wanted law enforcement to have access to encrypted WhatsApp messages terrorists shared with each other. She asked tech companies to be proactive regarding terrorism.

"As technology evolves these are complicated conversations, we're in close communication working through the issues all around the world," she said.