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For decades, we have focused on giving women the choice to work inside or outside the home. We have celebrated the fact that women have the right to make this decision, and rightly so. But we have to ask ourselves if we have become so focused on supporting personal choices that we are failing to encourage women to aspire to leadership. It is time to cheer on girls and women who want to sit at the table, seek challenges, and lean in to their careers.
Today, despite all of the gains we have made, neither men nor women have real choice. Until women have supportive employers and colleagues as well as partners who share family responsibilities, they don't have real choice. And until men are fully respected for contributing inside the home, they don't have real choice either. Equal opportunity is not equal unless everyone receives the encouragement that makes seizing those opportunities possible. Only then can both men and women achieve their full potential.
None of this is attainable unless we pursue these goals together. Men need to support women and, I wish it went without saying, women need to support women too. Stanford professor Deborah Gruenfeld makes the case: We need to look out for one another, work together, and act more like a coalition. As individuals, we have relatively low levels of power. Working together, we are fifty percent of the population and therefore have real power. As obvious as this sounds, women have not always worked together in the past. In fact, there are many discouraging examples where women have actually done the opposite. We are a new generation and we need a new approach.
In the summer of 2012, my former Google colleague Marissa Mayer was named CEO of Yahoo. Like several of her friends and the Yahoo board, I knew that she was heading into her third trimester of pregnancy. Of course, many men take big jobs when their wives are weeks away from giving birth, and no one raises it as an issue, but Marissa's condition quickly became headline news. She was heralded as the first pregnant CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Feminists cheered. Then Marissa let it be known: "My maternity leave will be a few weeks long, and I'll work throughout it. Many feminists stopped cheering. Since taking such a short leave is not feasible or desirable for everyone, they argued that Marissa was hurting the cause by setting up unreasonable expectations.
So was this one giant leap forward for womankind and one baby step back? Of course not. Marissa became the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company... while pregnant. She decided how she wanted to manage her career and family and never claimed that her choice should apply to anyone else. If she had cut Yahoo's maternity leave to two weeks for all employees, then concern would have been in order. She did not do this, but she was still roundly criticized. Even a European cabinet member weighed in. Like any individual, Marissa knows best what she is capable of given her particular circumstances. And as journalist Kara Swisher also noted, Marissa "has a husband who can actually take care of the child, and no one seems to remember that." Women who want to take two weeks off... or two days... or two years... or twenty years deserve everyone's full support.
As Marissa's experience demonstrates, women in powerful positions often receive greater scrutiny. Because the vast majority of leaders are men, it is not possible to generalize from any one example. But the dearth of female leaders causes one woman to be viewed as representative of her entire gender. And because people often discount and dislike female leaders, these generalizations are often critical. This is not just unfair to the individuals but reinforces the stigma that successful women are unlikeable. A perfect and personal example occurred in May 2012, when a Forbes blogger posted an article entitled "Sheryl Sandberg Is the Valley's 'It' Girl" - Just Like Kim Polese Once Was." He began his comparison by describing Kim, an early tech entrepreneur, as a "luminary" in the mid-1990s who never really earned her success, but was "in the right place at the right time [and was] young, pretty and a good speaker." The blogger then argued, "I think Polese is a good cautionary tale for ... Sheryl Sandberg." Ouch.
Kim and I had never met or spoken before this incident, but she defended both of us. In a published response, she described reading the blog post and how her "immediate thought was - how sad. How sad that as an industry and a society we haven't advanced over these past two decades when it comes to views on women and leadership. As with all the past lazy, stereotype-ridden articles like this one, it gets the facts wrong." After correcting the facts, she continued, "Views like these are all too commonplace, and part of a pervasive pattern that belittles, demeans and marginalizes women as leaders" So many other readers joined her in calling the post sexist that the blogger posted an apology and retraction.
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Author's bio
Sheryl Sandberg has served as the chief operating officer of Facebook since 2008. In June 2012, she was also elected to the board of directors by the existing board members, becoming the first woman to serve on its board. Before Facebook, Sandberg was vice-president of global online sales and operations at Google. |
She also was involved in launching Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org. Before Google, Sandberg served as chief of staff for the United States department of the treasury. In 2012, she was named in Time 100, an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world assembled by Time.
I was grateful for Kim's vocal support. The more women can stick up for one another, the better. Sadly, this doesn't always happen. And it seems to happen even less when women voice a position that involves a gender-related issue. The attacks on Marissa for her maternity leave plans came almost entirely from other women. This has certainly been my experience too. Everyone loves a fight and they really love a catfight. The media will report endlessly about women attacking other women, which distracts from the real issues. When arguments turn into "she said/she said," we all lose.
Every social movement struggles with dissension within its ranks, in part because advocates are passionate and unlikely to agree on every position and solution. Betty Friedan famously and foolishly refused to work with - or even to shake hands with - Gloria Steinem. They both did so much to further women's rights. But what if they had been able to work together? Couldn't they have furthered the cause even more?
There are so many of us who care deeply about these matters. We should strive to resolve our differences quickly, and when we disagree, stay focused on our shared goals. This is not a plea for less debate, but for more constructive debate.
LEAN IN: WOMEN, WORK, AND THE WILL TO LEAD
AUTHOR: Sheryl Sandberg
PUBLISHER: Random House
Price: Rs 499
ISBN: 9780753541630
Reprinted by permission of Random House India. Excerpted from Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg. Copyright 2013 Random House India. All rights reserved
