Most of Sandberg's musings, however, are cultural, and her calls to action are on an individual level. "I don't have the right answer. I don't even have it for myself," says Sandberg early on, noting that a mother's choices are personal and tricky. "My talk today is about what the messages are if you do want to stay in the workforce."

Right now in Germany, the talk has pole-vaulted over the personal and the cultural to the legal. What Labor Minister Ursula von der Leyen wants, and what she frankly seems pretty frustrated not yet to have gotten, going by her remarks to German television, are legally binding quotas.

It's a funny setup when, at the end of a the day, the Minister for Family and Women Kristina Schroeder is saying, "we're on the right path" -- read: "Nice work, folks, this is good for now" -- and the Labor Minister thinks the measures aren't even halfway there. It's a well-established divide between the two individuals, however: Der Spiegel's Kristen Allen notes the "conflict" is "played up by the German media as a catfight of sorts" -- a hell of a dicey term to come up on such a fundamentally feminist news story.

The fact is, though, that von der Leyen isn't the only one in favor of strict quotas. Though in the States such talk would instantly raise equal protection flags on its Constitutional legality, quota proposals are being taken quite seriously in the German media and policy debates. "I am completely convinced that it won't work without laws," von der Leyen told German network ZDF on Monday, also reported in the German papers. Der Spiegel notes that Social Democrat Andrea Nahles has also come out in favor of quota laws, while a "working draft" of what regulations might look like is said to be knocking around the Family Ministry. The topic's mere longevity tells you a lot: Chancellor Merkel was weighing in on Germany's lag in female leadership back in March, and one of the nation's top news programs, the Tagesschau, covered it, mentioning the possibility of legal quotas.

In the U.S., it's easy to look wistfully at this kind of public debate. It's worth remembering, of course, that part the greater German concern with this topic may be that Germany lags pretty far behind the world average when it comes to female representation in finance. Sheryl Sandberg's figure for the proportion of female corporate leaders worldwide was 15 or 16 percent in her TED speech. Among the German DAX companies, it's 3.7 percent.

It's not like the U.S. is doing all that well itself, however. Although the 2010 Catalyst Census found women holding 15.7 percent of board seats on Fortune 500 companies, in 2011, only 12 out of those 500 companies actually had female CEOs (and just look at the second name on that list: Yahoo's Carol Bartz, who has already been ousted).