Lean In

by Sheryl Sandberg

  The classic scenario unfolds like this. An ambitious and successful woman heads down a challenging career path with the thought of having children in the back of her mind. At some point, this thought moves to the front of her mind, typically once she finds a partner. The woman considers how hard she is working and reasons that to make room for a child she will have to scale back. A law associate might decide not to shoot for partner because someday she hopes to have a family. A teacher might pass on leading curriculum development for her school. A sales representative might take a smaller territory or not apply for a management role. Often without even realizing it, the woman stops reaching for new opportunities. If any are presented to her, she is likely to decline or offer the kind of hesitant “yes” that gets the project assigned to someone else. The problem is that even if she were to get pregnant immediately, she still has nine months before she has to care for an actual child. And since women usually start this mental preparation well before trying to conceive, several years often pass between the thought and conception, let alone birth. In the case of my Facebook questioner, it might even be a decade.

  By the time the baby arrives, the woman is likely to be in a drastically different place in her career than she would have been had she not leaned back. Before, she was a top performer, on par with her peers in responsibility, opportunity, and pay. By not finding ways to stretch herself in the years leading up to motherhood, she has fallen behind. When she returns to the workplace after her child is born, she is likely to feel less fulfilled, underutilized, or unappreciated. She may wonder why she is working for someone (usually a man) who has less experience than she does. Or she may wonder why she does not have the exciting new project or the corner office. At this point, she probably scales her ambitions back even further since she no longer believes that she can get to the top. And if she has the financial resources to leave her job, she is more likely to do so.

  The more satisfied a person is with her position, the less likely she is to leave.3 So the irony—and, to me, the tragedy—is that women wind up leaving the workforce precisely because of things they did to stay in the workforce. With the best of intentions, they end up in a job that is less fulfilling and less engaging. When they finally have a child, the choice—for those who have one—is between becoming a stay-at-home mother or returning to a less-than-appealing professional situation.

  Joanna Strober, co-author of Getting to 50/50, credits a compelling job for her decision to return to the workforce after becoming a mother. “When I first started working, there were lots of scary stories about female executives who ignored their kids or weren’t home enough,” she told me. “Everyone in our office talked about one executive whose daughter supposedly told her that when she grew up she wanted to be a client because they got all the attention. I found these stories so depressing that I gave up before even really starting down the partner track. However, when five years later I was in a job I really loved, I found myself wanting to return to work after a few weeks of maternity leave. I realized those executives weren’t scary at all. Like me, they loved their kids a lot. And, like me, they also loved their jobs.”

  There are many powerful reasons to exit the workforce. Being a stay-at-home parent is a wonderful, and often necessary, choice for many people. Not every parent needs, wants, or should be expected to work outside the home. In addition, we do not control all of the factors that influence us, including the health of our children. Plus, many people welcome the opportunity to get out of the rat race. No one should pass judgment on these highly personal decisions. I fully support any man or woman who dedicates his or her life to raising the next generation. It is important and demanding and joyful work.

  What I am arguing is that the time to scale back is when a break is needed or when a child arrives—not before, and certainly not years in advance. The months and years leading up to having children are not the time to lean back, but the critical time to lean in.

  Several years ago, I approached an employee at Facebook to manage an important new project. She seemed flattered at first but then became noticeably hesitant. She told me that she wasn’t sure she should take on more responsibility. Obviously, something else was going on, so I quietly asked, “Are you worried about taking this on because you’re considering having a child sometime soon?” A few years earlier, I would have been afraid to ask this question. Managers are not supposed to factor childbearing plans into account in hiring or management decisions. Raising this topic in the workplace would give most employment lawyers a heart attack. But after watching so many talented women pass on opportunities for unspoken reasons, I started addressing this issue directly. I always give people the option of not answering, but so far, every woman I have asked has appeared grateful for a chance to discuss the subject. I also make it clear that I am only asking for one reason: to make sure they aren’t limiting their options unnecessarily.

  In 2009, we were recruiting Priti Choksi to join Facebook’s business development team. After we extended an offer, she came in to ask some follow-up questions about the role. She did not mention lifestyle or hours, but she was the typical age when women have children. So as we were wrapping up, I went for it. “If you think you might not take this job because you want to have a child soon, I am happy to talk about this.” I figured if she didn’t want to discuss it, she would just keep heading for the door. Instead, she turned around, sat back down, and said, “Let’s talk.” I explained that although it was counterintuitive, right before having a child can actually be a great time to take a new job. If she found her new role challenging and rewarding, she’d be more excited to return to it after giving birth. If she stayed put, she might decide that her job was not worth the sacrifice. Priti accepted our offer. By the time she started at Facebook, she was already expecting. Eight months later, she had her baby, took four months off, and came back to a job she loved. She later told me that if I had not raised the topic, she would have turned us down.

  Like so many women, Caroline O’Connor believed that someday she’d have to choose between career and family. That day came sooner than she expected. Caroline was finishing up at Stanford’s Institute of Design when she was offered the chance to start a company at the same time that she learned she was pregnant. Her knee-jerk reaction was to think that she could not do both. But then she decided to question this assumption. “I began thinking of my dilemma as I would a design challenge,” O’Connor wrote. “Rather than accepting that launching a successful start-up and having a baby are utterly incompatible, I framed it as a question and then set about using tools I’ve developed as a designer to begin forming an answer.” O’Connor gathered data from dozens of mothers about their experiences and coping mechanisms. She did fieldwork on sleep deprivation by taking a night shift with foster infants. She concluded that with a team culture that drew support from her husband and friends, it would be possible to proceed with both. O’Connor now refers to herself as “a career-loving parent,” a nice alternative to “working mom.”4

  Given life’s variables, I would never recommend that every woman lean in regardless of circumstances. There have been times when I chose not to. In the summer of 2006, a tiny start-up called LinkedIn was looking for a new CEO, and Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s founder, reached out to me. I thought it was a great opportunity, and after five years in the same position at Google I was ready for a new challenge. But the timing was tricky. I was thirty-seven years old and wanted to have a second child. I told Reid the truth: regrettably, I had to pass because I didn’t think I could handle both a pregnancy and a new job. His reaction was incredibly kind and supportive. He tried to talk me into it, even volunteering to work full-time at the company to support me during that period, but it was hard to see a path through.

  For some women, pregnancy does not slow them down at all, but rather serves to focus them and provides a firm deadline to work toward. My childhood friend Elise Scheck looks back fondly on being pregnant, saying she has never felt so productive. Sh
e not only worked her usual hours as an attorney but organized her house and put five years of photos into albums. For others, like me, pregnancy is very difficult, making it impossible to be as effective as normal. I tried writing e-mails while hovering over the toilet, but the situation didn’t lend itself to effective multitasking. Because I had already been through this with my first pregnancy, I knew what I was in for. I turned down Reid’s offer and got pregnant—and extremely nauseated—a few months later.

  Any regrets I had about not taking that job evaporated when, about seven months after my daughter was born, Mark offered me the opportunity to join Facebook. The timing was still not ideal. As many people had warned, and I quickly discovered to be true, having two children was more than double the work of having one. I was not looking for new challenges but simply trying to get through each day. Still, Dave and I recognized that if I waited until the timing was exactly right, the opportunity would be gone. My decision to take the job was personal, as these decisions always are. And there were days in my first six months at Facebook when I wondered whether I’d made the right choice. By the end of my first year, I knew I had … for me.

  The birth of a child instantly changes how we define ourselves. Women become mothers. Men become fathers. Couples become parents. Our priorities shift in fundamental ways. Parenting may be the most rewarding experience, but it is also the hardest and most humbling. If there were a right way to raise kids, everyone would do it. Clearly, that is not the case.

  One of the immediate questions new parents face is who will provide primary care for a child. The historical choice has been the mother. Breast-feeding alone has made this both the logical and the biological choice. But the advent of the modern-day breast pump has changed the equation. At Google, I would lock my office door and pump during conference calls. People would ask, “What’s that sound?” I would respond, “What sound?” When they would insist that there was a loud beeping noise that they could hear on the phone, I would say, “Oh, there’s a fire truck across the street.” I thought I was pretty clever until I realized that others on the call were sometimes in the same building and knew there was no fire truck. Busted.

  Despite modern methods that can minimize the impact of biological imperatives, women still do the vast majority of child care. As a result, becoming a parent decreases workforce participation for women but not men.5 Forty-three percent of highly qualified women with children are leaving careers, or “off-ramping,” for a period of time.6

  Women who are the most likely to leave the workforce are concentrated at opposite ends of the earning scale, married to men who earn the least and the most. In 2006, only 20 percent of mothers whose husband’s earnings landed in the middle (between the twenty-fifth and seventy-fifth percentiles) were out of the labor force. In contrast, a whopping 52 percent of mothers with husbands in the bottom quarter and 40 percent of mothers with husbands in the top 5 percent were out of the labor force.7 Obviously, their reasons for staying home are vastly different. Mothers married to the lowest-earning men struggle to find jobs that pay enough to cover child care costs, which are increasingly unaffordable. Over the past decade, child care costs have risen twice as fast as the median income of families with children.8 The cost for two children (an infant and a four-year-old) to go to a day care center is greater than the annual median rent payment in every state in the country.9

  Women married to men with greater resources leave for a variety of reasons, but one important factor is the number of hours that their husbands work. When husbands work fifty or more hours per week, wives with children are 44 percent more likely to quit their jobs than wives with children whose husbands work less.10 Many of these mothers are those with the highest levels of education. A 2007 survey of Harvard Business School alumni found that while men’s rates of full-time employment never fell below 91 percent, only 81 percent of women who graduated in the early 2000s and 49 percent of women who graduated in the early 1990s were working full-time.11 Of Yale alumni who had reached their forties by 2000, only 56 percent of the women remained in the workforce, compared with 90 percent of the men.12 This exodus of highly educated women is a major contributor to the leadership gap.

  While it’s hard to predict how an individual will react to becoming a parent, it’s easy to predict society’s reaction. When a couple announces that they are having a baby, everyone says “Congratulations!” to the man and “Congratulations! What are you planning on doing about work?” to the woman. The broadly held assumption is that raising their child is her responsibility. In more than thirty years, this perception has changed very little. A survey of the Princeton class of 1975 found that 54 percent of the women foresaw work-family conflict compared to 26 percent of the men. The same survey of the Princeton class of 2006 found that 62 percent of the women anticipated work-family conflict compared to only 33 percent of the men. Three decades separate the studies and still nearly twice as many women as men enter the workforce anticipating this stumbling block. Even in 2006, 46 percent of the men who anticipated this conflict expected their spouse to step off her career track to raise their children. Only 5 percent of the women believed their spouse would alter his career to accommodate their child.13

  Personal choices are not always as personal as they appear. We are all influenced by social conventions, peer pressure, and familial expectations. On top of these forces, women who can afford to drop out of the workplace often receive not just permission but encouragement to do so from all directions.

  Imagine that a career is like a marathon—a long, grueling, and ultimately rewarding endeavor. Now imagine a marathon where both men and women arrive at the starting line equally fit and trained. The gun goes off. The men and women run side by side. The male marathoners are routinely cheered on: “Lookin’ strong! On your way!” But the female runners hear a different message. “You know you don’t have to do this!” the crowd shouts. Or “Good start—but you probably won’t want to finish.” The farther the marathoners run, the louder the cries grow for the men: “Keep going! You’ve got this!” But the women hear more and more doubts about their efforts. External voices, and often their own internal voice, repeatedly question their decision to keep running. The voices can even grow hostile. As the women struggle to endure the rigors of the race, spectators shout, “Why are you running when your children need you at home?”

  Back in 1997, Debi Hemmeter was a rising executive at Sara Lee who aspired to someday lead a major corporation like her role model, Pepsi-Cola North America CEO Brenda Barnes. Even after starting a family, Debi continued to pursue her career at full speed. Then one day when Debi was on a business trip, she opened her hotel door to find USA Today with the startling headline “Pepsi Chief Trades Work for Family.” The subhead elaborated: “22-Year Veteran Got Burned Out.” In that moment, Debi said she felt her own ambitions shift. As Debi told me, “It seemed like if this extraordinary woman couldn’t make it work, who could? Soon after, I was offered a big job at a bank and I turned it down because my daughter was just a year old and I didn’t think I could do it. Almost a decade later, I took a similar job and did it well, but I lost a decade. I actually saved that clipping and still have it today. It’s a reminder of what I don’t want another generation to go through.”

  If a female marathoner can ignore the shouts of the crowd and get past the tough middle of the race, she will often hit her stride. Years ago, I met an investment banker in New York whose husband worked in public service. She told me that over the years all of her female friends in banking quit, but because she was her family’s primary breadwinner, she had to stick it out. There were days when she was jealous and wished she could leave, days when there was just too much to do or too much crap to put up with. But she did not have that option. Eventually, she landed in a position that had less crap and more impact. Now when she looks back, she is glad that even in the hard times, she continued in her career. Today, she has a close relationship with her children and now that they have grown up and
moved away, she’s especially grateful to have a fulfilling job.

  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.14 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.15 Average annual earnings decline by 30 percent after two to three years,16 which is the average amount of time that professional women off-ramp from the workforce.17 If society truly valued the work of caring for children, companies and institutions would find 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.

  One miscalculation that some women make is to drop out early in their careers because their salary barely covers the cost of child care. Child care is a huge expense, and it’s frustrating to work hard just to break even. But professional women need to measure the cost of child care against their future salary rather than their current salary. Anna Fieler describes becoming a mom at thirty-two as “the time when the rubber hit the road.” A rising star in marketing, Anna was concerned that her after-tax salary barely covered her child care expenses. “With husbands often making more than wives, it seems like higher ROI to just invest in his career,” she told me. But she thought about all the time and money she had already invested in her career and didn’t see how walking away made economic sense either. So she made what she called “a leap of blind faith” and stayed in the workforce. Years later, her income is many times greater than when she almost withdrew. Wisely, Anna and other women have started to think of paying for child care as a way of investing in their families’ future. As the years go by, compensation often increases. Flexibility typically increases, too, as senior leaders often have more control over their hours and schedules.