Last week, I mentioned that while I was writing about Lisa Belkin’s thinking, I came across Sheryl Sandberg’s commencement address to the Barnard College class of 2011. Currently, the COO at Facebook, Sandberg is married with two children. She began her career at the World Bank, did a year’s stint at McKinsey, and then became Chief of Staff for then Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers who had been her professor while she was an undergraduate at Harvard. She went on to work at Google where she was Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations before being lured to Facebook. Sandberg, who has clearly faced the challenges of being a woman in the male dominated high tech world, exhorted the Barnard graduates to take on what she calls “this generation’s central moral problem, which is gender equality.”
Speaking to the all-female class, Sandberg declared, “we have to admit something that’s sad but true: men run the world.” She went on to cite the litany of dismal statistics:
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’s 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.
And, of course, that doesn’t include the 17% of Congress who are women and the 6 female governors.
“You are our hope,” she proclaimed to her audience. And she was very explicit about how she wanted to the graduates to fulfill their promise. She wanted them to “lean way into” their careers because, “We need women at all levels, including the top, to change the dynamic, reshape the conversation, to make sure women’s voices are heard and heeded, not overlooked and ignored.” And this is my point about Belkin. She certainly aids the cause by writing about these issues, but if change is going to occur so that her “emotional and economic tug-of-war” will not remain the “central story” for another generation, I agree with Sandberg that we must have women as part of the conversation.
Sandberg offered some very pointed advice to her audience. First, she asked them to shoot high, to aim for top level positions as their male counterparts would. She makes that point citing studies indicating that “in the college-educated part of the population, men are more ambitious than women” from the time they graduate from college and throughout their careers. In my favorite sentence from her speech, she pronounced, “We will never close the achievement gap until we close the ambition gap.” In a call to action, she challenged the graduates, “But if all young women start to lean in, we can close the ambition gap right here, right now, if every single one of you leans in. Leadership belongs to those who take it. Leadership starts with you.”
She went on to urge that the women not underestimate themselves, as we so well know girls and women are wont to do, giving credit to others or luck when they do well, blaming themselves when they don’t. “Women,” she declared, need to “own their own success.”
She’s not naïve. She admits that career success is difficult for women. As she learned firsthand, people still display hostility towards female successes. And then there is the whole issue of the “second shift” that I talked about last week. Her advice about equity at home so a woman can succeed at work is this:
the most important career decision you’re going to make is whether or not you have a life partner and who that partner is. If you pick someone who’s willing to share the burdens and the joys of your personal life, you’re going to go further.
Sandberg honors those women who have made the choice to raise their children full-time, work part-time, or work in a less demanding job (though, I have to say she’s not very convincing). But she wants to make sure that the young women in her audience make those choices consciously. With a thought-provoking angle on this issue, she observes that
Women almost never make one decision to leave the workforce. It doesn’t happen that way. They make small little decisions along the way that eventually lead them there. Maybe it’s the last year of med school when they say, I’ll take a slightly less interesting specialty because I’m going to want more balance one day. Maybe it’s the fifth year in a law firm when they say, I’m not even sure I should go for partner, because I know I’m going to want kids eventually.
She points out these women often don’t even have the responsibilities (like a partner or children) yet, but they are already “quietly leaning back” instead of leaning in.
And if you lean back, she warns, you’ll be “bored” and soon you’ll feel “undervalued” because your full talents won’t be used. And then you won’t really be interested in working (if you have that choice). You also may question the whole “rat race” and someone else’s definition of success. If that’s how you feel, she suggests that you need to question whether you are in the right field. Are you doing what you love? You need to find work you’re passionate about (the way Belkin was about her job at The Times). “Try until you find something that stirs your passion, a job that matters to you and matters to others. It is the ultimate luxury to combine passion and contribution. It’s also a very clear path to happiness.”
So she pleads, “Do not lean back; lean in. Put your foot on that gas pedal and keep it there until the day you have to make a decision, and then make a decision. That’s the only way, when that day comes, you’ll even have a decision to make.”
I think Sandberg has great advice. What she leaves out is that once her listeners are in a position to influence policy, they need to do so. They need not just to accept the system as it is now, but they need to work to make workplaces friendlier to families, so both men and women can find more balance and more satisfaction. They need to recruit male allies in this effort, and there’s indication that the men in their generation are willing to help. They need to encourage revision in processes like academic tenure and law partnership. They need to fight for better childcare and more support for parenting responsibilities. And they need to find ways to do this that is economically and financially advantageous. But to that I would say, at this point, because the women most able to “opt out” are the most educated, we are currently wasting a huge portion of our human resources because so much of our worklife is so unsupportive. That seems to be a compelling economic argument right there.
However, it would be completely unfair to place all the responsibility for change on the shoulders of the next generation entering the workforce. The Business Insider headlined Sandberg’s address, somewhat unfairly, “The Women Of My Generation Blew It, So Equality Is Up To You, Graduates.” We need to stay in this fight, keep working towards more family friendly workplaces, and continue to provide leadership for these younger women to emulate. As importantly, we need to mentor these younger women. If we want them to lean into their careers, they need to feel supported, and we are the ones to support them.
If we need a role model, we need to look no farther than French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, Holton class of 1974. When Lagarde visited Holton in 2007, quoting Madeleine Albright she said, “there should be a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women.” On principle, when she has left a management position, she has replaced herself with another woman. She believes that every woman should have the “accountability and responsibility” to do that. Should she become the new Director of the IMF, Lagarde will have the opportunity to exercise that responsibility on an international scale. We are keeping our fingers crossed.
The link for Sandberg’s speech:
http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-coo-sandberg-the-women-of-my-generation-blew-it-so-equality-is-up-to-you-graduates-2011-5?utm_source=twbutton&utm_medium=social&utm_term=&utm_content=&utm_campaign=sai
