Of the 195 independent countries in the world, only 17 are led by women. Women hold just 22% of seats in parliaments globally. In 2015, women hold more seats in the U.S. Congress than ever before, and they still only make up 19% of the elected officials. In the United Kingdom, about 23.5% of seats in Parliament are held by women. In the European Parliament, 35% of the seats are held by women. None of these figures are close to 50%. A meager 5% of the S&P 500 CEOs are women. In the United States, women hold 25% of senior executive positions and 19% of board seats.
A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our homes.
Conditions for all women will improve when there are more women in leadership roles giving strong and powerful voice to their needs and concerns. A 2011 McKinsey report noted that men are promoted based on potential, while women are promoted based on past accomplishments. We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in. We continue to do the majority of the housework and child care. We compromise our career goals to make room for partners and children who may not even exist yet.
The time is long overdue to encourage more women to dream the possible dream and encourage more men to support women in the workforce and in the home.
Fear is at the root of so many of the barriers that women face. Fear of not being liked. Fear of making the wrong choice. Fear of drawing negative attention. Fear of overreaching. Fear of being judged. Fear of failure. And the holy trinity of fear: the fear of being a bad mother/wife/daughter.
If you are offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask what seat. You just get on.
“She is very ambitious” is not a compliment in our culture. Aggressive and hard-charging women violate unwritten rules about acceptable social conduct. Men are continually applauded for being ambitious and powerful and successful, but women who display these same traits often pay a social penalty. Female accomplishments come at a cost.
Think globally and act locally. When you want to change things, you can’t please everyone. If you do please everyone, you aren’t making enough progress.
Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder. Plus, a jungle gym provides great views for many people, not just those at the top. On a ladder, most climbers are stuck staring at the butt of the person above. Women are also more reluctant to apply for promotions even when deserved, often believing that good job performance will naturally lead to rewards. This is called “Tiara Syndrome” where women “expect that if they keep doing their job well someone will notice them and place a tiara on their head. Hard work and results should be recognized by others, but when they aren’t, advocating for oneself becomes necessary.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. Do not wait for power to be offered. Like that tiara, it might never materialize. And anyway, who wears a tiara on a jungle gym?
Find the right career for you and go all the way to the top. Start out by aiming high. Try – and try hard.
An all-business approach is not always good business. People don’t have a professional self for Mondays through Fridays and a real self for the rest of the time. Instead of putting on some kind of fake “all-work persona,” we benefit from expressing our truth, talking about personal situations, and acknowledging that professional decisions are often emotionally driven.
People often pretend that professional decisions are not affected by their personal lives. They are afraid to talk about their home situations at work as if one should never interfere with the other, when of course they can and do. Many women who won’t discuss their children at work out of fear that their priorities will be questioned.
Leaders should strive for authenticity over perfection. This shift is good news for women, who often feel obliged to suppress their emotions in the workplace in an attempt to come across as more stereotypically male. And it’s also good news for men, who may be doing the exact same thing. And maybe the compassion and sensitivity that have historically held some women back will make them more natural leaders in the future.
It is hard to visualize someone as a leader if she is always waiting to be told what to do.
A survey of the Princeton class of 1975 found that 54% of the women foresaw work-family conflict compared to 26% of the men. Although pundits and politicians, usually male, often claim that motherhood is the most important and difficult work of all, women who take time out of the workforce pay a big career penalty. Only 74 percent of professional women will rejoin the workforce in any capacity, and only 40 percent will return to full-time jobs. Those who do rejoin will often see their earnings decrease dramatically. Controlling for education and hours worked, women’s average annual earnings decrease by 20 percent if they are out of the workforce for just one year. Average annual earnings decline by 30 percent after two to three years, which is the average amount of time that professional women off-ramp from the workforce.
If society truly valued the work of caring for children, companies and institutions would and ways to reduce these steep penalties and help parents combine career and family responsibilities. All too often rigid work schedules, lack of paid family leave, and expensive or undependable child care derail women’s best efforts. Governmental and company policies such as paid personal time off, affordable high-quality child care, and flexible work practices would serve families, and society, well.
And what about men who want to leave the workforce? If we make it too easy for women to drop out of the career marathon, we also make it too hard for men. Just as women feel that they bear the primary responsibility of caring for their children, many men feel that they bear the primary responsibility of supporting their families financially. Their self-worth is tied mainly to their professional success, and they frequently believe that they have no choice but to finish that marathon.
Don’t enter the workforce already looking for the exit. Don’t put on the brakes. Accelerate. Keep a foot on the gas pedal until a decision must be made.
A 2009 survey found that only 9 percent of people in dual-earner marriages said that they shared housework, child care, and breadwinning evenly. So while men are taking on more household responsibilities, this increase is happening very slowly, and we are still far from parity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, same-sex couples divide household tasks much more evenly. Each partner needs to be in charge of specific activities or it becomes too easy for one to feel like he’s doing a favor instead of doing his part.
Studies from around the world have concluded that children benefit greatly from paternal involvement. Research over the last forty years has consistently found that in comparison to children with less-involved fathers, children with involved and loving fathers have higher levels of psychological well-being and better cognitive abilities. When fathers provide even just routine child care, children have higher levels of educational and economic achievement and lower delinquency rates. Their children even tend to be more empathetic and socially competent. These findings hold true for children from all socioeconomic backgrounds, whether or not the mother is highly involved.
Gender-specific expectations remain self-fulfilling. The belief that mothers are more committed to family than to work penalizes women because employers assume they won’t live up to expectations of professional dedication. The reverse is true for men, who are expected to put their careers first. We judge men primarily by their professional success and send them a clear message that personal achievements are insufficient for them to be valued or feel fulfilled.
Making gender matters even worse, men’s success is viewed not just in absolute terms, but often in comparison to their wives’. The image of a happy couple still includes a husband who is more professionally successful than the wife. If the reverse occurs, it’s perceived as threatening to the marriage.
Equality between partners leads to happier relationships. When husbands do more housework, wives are less depressed, marital conflicts decrease, and satisfaction rises. When women work outside the home and share breadwinning duties, couples are more likely to stay together. In fact, the risk of divorce reduces by about half when a wife earns half the income and a husband does half the housework. For men, participating in child rearing fosters the development of patience, empathy, and adaptability, characteristics that benefit all of their relationships. For women, earning money increases their decision making ability in the home, protects them in case of divorce, and can be important security in later years, as women often outlive their husbands.
When a mother stays at home, her time during the day should still be considered real work—because it is. Raising children is at least as stressful and demanding as a paying job. It is unfair that mothers are frequently expected to work long into the night while fathers who work outside the home get the chance to relax from their day jobs. When the father is home, he should take on half the child care and housework. Also, most employed fathers interact with other grown-ups all day, while mothers at home are often starved for adult conversation by evening.
The sooner we break the cycle, the faster we will reach greater equality.
In 2012, Gloria Steinem sat down in her home for an interview with Oprah Winfrey. Gloria reiterated that progress for women in the home has trailed progress in the workplace, explaining, “Now we know that women can do what men can do, but we don’t know that men can do what women can do. ”I believe they can and we should give them more chances to prove it”.
Trying to do it all and expecting that it all can be done exactly right is a recipe for disappointment. Perfection is the enemy. Gloria Steinem said it best: “You can’t do it all. No one can have two fulltime jobs, have perfect children and cook three meals and … Superwoman is the adversary of the women’s movement.”
Every job will demand some sacrifice. The key is to avoid unnecessary sacrifice.
“Done is better than perfect.” Aiming for perfection causes frustration at best and paralysis at worst. The advice offered by Nora Ephron in her 1996 Wellesley commencement speech when she addressed the issue of women having both a career and family: Ephron insisted, “It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don’t be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I’ve had four careers and three husbands.”
As Marie Wilson, founder of the White House Project, has noted, “Show me a woman without guilt and I’ll show you a man.”
When people talk about a female pilot, a female engineer, or a female race car driver, the word “female” implies a bit of surprise. Men in the professional world are rarely seen through this same gender lens.
As Gloria Steinem observed, “Whoever has power takes over the noun—and the norm—while the less powerful get an adjective. ”Since no one wants to be perceived as less powerful, a lot of women reject the gender identification and insist, “I don’t see myself as a woman; I see myself as a novelist/athlete/professional/fill-in-the blank.” They are right to do so. No one wants her achievements modified. We all just want to be the noun. Yet the world has a way of reminding women that they are women, and girls that they are girls.
One stumbling block is that many people believe that the workplace is largely a meritocracy, which means we look at individuals, not groups, and determine that differences in outcomes must be based on merit, not gender. Men at the top are often unaware of the benefits they enjoy simply because they’re men, and this can make them blind to the disadvantages associated with being a woman. Women lower down also believe that men at the top are entitled to be there, so they try to play by the rules and work harder to advance rather than raise questions or voice concerns about the possibility of bias. As a result, everyone becomes complicit in perpetuating an unjust system.
In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders.
Another bias arises from our tendency to want to work with people who are like us. Innovisor, a consulting firm, conducted research in twenty-nine countries and found that when men and women select a colleague to collaborate with, both were significantly more likely to choose someone of the same gender. Yet diverse groups often perform better. Armed with this information, managers should take a more active role in mixing and matching when assigning teams. Or, at the very least, managers should point out this tendency to give employees the motivation to shake things up.
Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence
Currently, only 24 percent of women in the United States say that they consider themselves feminists. Yet when offered a more specific definition of feminism—“A feminist is someone who believes in social, political, and economic equality of the sexes”—the percentage of women who agree rises to 65 percent. That’s a big move in the right direction.
In the days of tokenism, women looked around the room and instead of bonding against an unfair system, they often viewed one another as competition. Ambition fueled hostility, and women wound up being ignored, undermined, and in some cases even sabotaged by other women.
It makes no sense for women to feel that we are competing against one another anymore, but some still do. In certain instances, women question their female colleagues’ level of career commitment, aggressiveness, and leadership abilities. One study found that female professors believed that male Ph.D. students were more committed to their careers than female Ph.D. students, even though a survey of the students found no gender difference in their reported levels of commitment. Other research suggests that once a woman achieves success, particularly in a gender biased context, her capacity to see gender discrimination is reduced.
It’s heartbreaking to think about one woman holding another back.
We all want the same thing: to feel comfortable with our choices and to feel validated by those around us. So let’s start by validating one another. Mothers who work outside the home should regard mothers who work inside the home as real workers. And mothers who work inside the home should be equally respectful of those choosing another option.
Not all women want careers. Not all women want children. Not all women want both.
The goal is to work toward a world where those social norms no longer exist. If more children see fathers at school pickups and mothers who are busy at jobs, both girls and boys will envision more options for themselves. Expectations will not be set by gender but by personal passion, talents, and interests.
Most women are not focused on changing social norms for the next generation but simply trying to get through each day. Forty percent of employed mothers lack sick days and vacation leave, and about 50 percent of employed mothers are unable to take time of to care for a sick child. Only about half of women receive any pay during maternity leave. These policies can have severe consequences; families with no access to paid family leave often go into debt and can fall into poverty. Part-time jobs with fluctuating schedules offer little chance to plan and often stop short of the forty-hour week that provides basic benefits. Too many work standards remain inflexible and unfair, often penalizing women with children. Too many talented women try their hardest to reach the top and bump up against systemic barriers. So many others pull back because they do not think they have a choice. We need more women in power. When leadership insists that these policies change, they will. We must raise both the ceiling and the floor.
An “us versus them” crusade will not move us toward true equality
When Gloria Steinem marched in the streets to fight for the opportunities that so many of us now take for granted, she quoted Susan B. Anthony, who marched in the streets before her and concluded, “Our job is not to make young women grateful. It is to make them ungrateful so they keep going.” The sentiment remains true today. We need to be grateful for what we have but dissatisfied with the status quo. This dissatisfaction spurs the charge for change.
We must keep going. The march toward true equality continues. It continues down the halls of governments, corporations, academia, hospitals, law firms, nonprofits, research labs, and every organization, large and small. We owe it to the generations that came before us and the generations that will come after to keep fighting. Women can lead more in the workplace. Men can contribute more in the home. This will create a better world, one where half our institutions are run by women and half our homes are run by men.
Let’s Keep Talking …
You can join the Lean In Community at www.facebook.com/leaninorg and visit www.leanin.org for practical education and personal experiences that can help you reach your goals. Here you can explore topics critical to your success—from negotiating effectively to understanding your strengths. You also can create and join Lean In Circles, small peer groups that meet in person for ongoing encouragement and development.