Lean In

by Sheryl Sandberg

  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.

  Choosing to leave a child in someone else’s care and return to work is a difficult decision. Any parent who has done this, myself included, knows how heart wrenching it can be. Only a compelling, challenging, and rewarding job will begin to make that choice a fair contest. And even after a choice is made, parents have every right to reassess along the way.

  Anyone lucky enough to have options should keep them open. 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. That’s the only way to ensure that when that day comes, there will be a real decision to make.

  8

  Make Your Partner a Real Partner

  BEING A MOTHER has been an amazing experience for me. Giving birth was not. After nine months of serious nausea, I could not wait to move on to the next phase. Unfortunately, my son was in no such rush. When my due date arrived, my OB decided I should be induced. My parents and my sister, Michelle, joined me and Dave at the hospital. Some say it takes a village to raise a child, but in my case, it took a village just to get the child out of me. My hours in labor went on … and on … and on. For my supporters, excitement gave way to boredom. At one point, I needed help through a contraction but couldn’t get anyone’s attention because they were all on the other side of the room, showing family photos to my doctor. It has been a running joke in my family that it’s hard to hold anyone’s attention for too long. Labor was no exception to that rule.

  After three and half hours of pushing, my son finally emerged, weighing nine pounds, seven ounces. Half of that weight was in his head. My sister is a pediatrician and has attended hundreds of deliveries. She kindly did not tell me until much later that mine was one of the hardest she had ever witnessed. It was all worth it when my son was pronounced healthy and the nausea that I had felt for nine straight months vanished within an hour. The worst was over.

  The next morning, I got out of bed in my hospital room, took one step, and fell to the floor. Apparently I had yanked my leg back so hard during labor that I had pulled a tendon. I was on crutches for a week. Being unable to stand added a degree of difficulty to my first week of motherhood but also provided one unforeseen benefit: Dave became the primary caregiver for our newborn. Dave had to get up when the baby cried, bring him to me to be fed, change him, and then get him back to sleep. Normally, the mother becomes the instant baby care expert. In our case, Dave taught me how to change a diaper when our son was eight days old. If Dave and I had planned this, we would have been geniuses. But we didn’t and we aren’t.

  In fact, we should have planned a lot more. When I was six months pregnant, a Ph.D. candidate interviewed me by phone for her dissertation on working couples. She began by asking, “How do you do it all?” I said, “I don’t. I don’t even have a child,” and suggested that she interview someone who actually did. She said, “You’re just a few months away from having a baby, so surely you and your husband have thought about who is going to pick up your child if he is sick at school? Who is going to arrange for child care?” And so on. I couldn’t answer a single one of her questions. By the end of the call, I was in full panic, overwhelmed by how truly unprepared Dave and I were to handle these responsibilities. As soon as Dave walked in the door that night, I pounced. “Ohmigod!” I said. “We are just a few months away from having a baby, and we have never talked about any of this!” Dave looked at me like I was crazy. “What?” he said. “This is all we talk about.”

  In dissecting this discrepancy, Dave and I figured out that we had spent a lot of time talking about how we would do things, but almost always in the abstract. So Dave was right that we had discussed parenthood often, and I was right that the discussion had not been that practical. Part of the problem was that our inexperience made it hard even to know what specifics to cover. We had very little idea what we were in for.

  I also think that we were in denial about the tremendous shift in our lives that was rapidly approaching. Dave and I were not even working in the same city when I got pregnant (although just to be clear, we were in the same place when I got pregnant). Dave had founded a company, Launch Media, in L.A. and sold it to Yahoo years earlier. Yahoo’s headquarters were in Northern California, where I lived and worked, but Dave’s team remained in Los Angeles, where he lived and worked. When we started dating, we decided to base our life together in the Bay Area, so Dave began commuting, typically spending Monday through Thursday in Southern California and then flying north to spend weekends with me. This pattern continued even after we were married.

  After the birth of our son, Dave began flying back and forth several times a week. It was great that we had the ability for him to commute, but it was far from ideal. Even though he was making an exhausting effort to be with me and our baby, he was still gone a lot. Since I was with the baby full-time, the great majority of child care fell to me. The division of labor felt uneven and strained our marriage. We hired a nanny, but she couldn’t solve all our problems; the emotional support and shared experience that a spouse provides cannot be bought. After a few short months of parenthood, we had already fallen into traditional, lopsided gender roles.

  We were not unique. In the last thirty years, women have made more progress in the workforce than in the home. According to the most recent analysis, when a husband and wife both are employed full-time, the mother does 40 percent more child care and about 30 percent more housework than the father.1 A 2009 survey found that only 9 percent of people in dual-earner marriages said that they shared housework, child care, and breadwinning evenly.2 So while men are taking on more household responsibilities, this increase is happening very slowly, and we are still far from parity.3 (Perhaps unsurprisingly, same-sex couples divide household tasks much more evenly.)4

  Public policy reinforces this gender bias. The U.S. Census Bureau considers mothers the “designated parent,” even when both parents are present in the home.5 When mothers care for their children, it’s “parenting,” but when fathers care for their children, the government deems it a “child care arrangement.”6 I have even heard a few men say that they are heading home to “babysit” for their children. I have never heard a woman refer to taking care of her own children as “babysitting.” A friend of mine ran a team-building exercise during a company retreat where people were asked to fill in their hobbies. Half of the men in the group listed “their children” as hobbies. A hobby? For most mothers, kids are not a hobby. Showering is a hobby.

  My friends Katie and Scott Mitic flip this pattern. Katie and Scott are both Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who work full-time. About a year ago, Scott traveled to the East Coast for work. He was starting a late-morning meeting when his phone rang. His team only heard one side of the conversation. “A sandwich, carrot sticks, a cut-up apple, pretzels, and a cookie,” Scott said. He hung up smiling and explained that his wife was asking what she should put in the kids’ lunch boxes. Everyone laughed. A few months later, Scott was back east with the same work colleagues. They were in a cab late that morning when Scott’s phone rang. His team listened in disbelief as he patiently repeated the lunch list all over again: “A sandwich, carrot sticks, a cut-up apple, pretzels, and a cookie.”

  When Scott tells this story, it’s sweet and funny. But take this same story and switch the genders and it loses its charm. That’s just reality for most couples. Scott and Katie buck expectations with their division of household duties. There’s an epilogue to their story. Scott went on a third trip and discovered that Katie forgot to make the kids’ l
unches altogether. She realized her slipup midmorning and solved the problem by having a pizza delivered to the school cafeteria. Their kids were thrilled, but Scott was not. Now when he travels, he packs lunches in advance and leaves notes with specific instructions for his wife.

  There may be an evolutionary basis for one parent knowing better what to put in a child’s lunch. Women who breast-feed are arguably baby’s first lunch box. But even if mothers are more naturally inclined toward nurturing, fathers can match that skill with knowledge and effort. If women want to succeed more at work and if men want to succeed more at home, these expectations have to be challenged. As Gloria Steinem once observed, “It’s not about biology, but about consciousness.”7

  We overcome biology with consciousness in other areas. For example, storing large amounts of fat was necessary to survive when food was scarce, so we evolved to crave it and consume it when it’s available. But in this era of plenty, we no longer need large amounts of fuel in reserve, so instead of simply giving in to this inclination, we exercise and limit caloric intake. We use willpower to combat biology, or at least we try. So even if “mother knows best” is rooted in biology, it need not be written in stone. A willing mother and a willing father are all it requires. Yes, someone needs to remember what goes into the lunch box, but as Katie will attest, it does not have to be Mom.

  As women must be more empowered at work, men must be more empowered at home. I have seen so many women inadvertently discourage their husbands from doing their share by being too controlling or critical. Social scientists call this “maternal gatekeeping,” which is a fancy term for “Ohmigod, that’s not the way you do it! Just move aside and let me!”8 When it comes to children, fathers often take their cues from mothers. This gives a mother great power to encourage or impede the father’s involvement. If she acts as a gatekeeper mother and is reluctant to hand over responsibility, or worse, questions the father’s efforts, he does less.

  Whenever a married woman asks me for advice on coparenting with a husband, I tell her to let him put the diaper on the baby any way he wants as long as he’s doing it himself. And if he gets up to deal with the diaper before being asked, she should smile even if he puts that diaper on the baby’s head. Over time, if he does things his way, he’ll find the correct end. But if he’s forced to do things her way, pretty soon she’ll be doing them herself.

  Anyone who wants her mate to be a true partner must treat him as an equal—and equally capable—partner. And if that’s not reason enough, bear in mind that a study found that wives who engage in gatekeeping behaviors do five more hours of family work per week than wives who take a more collaborative approach.9

  Another common and counterproductive dynamic occurs when women assign or suggest tasks to their partners. She is delegating, and that’s a step in the right direction. But sharing responsibility should mean sharing responsibility. 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.

  Like many pieces of advice, letting a partner take responsibility and do his share in his own way is easy to say and hard to do. My brother, David, and sister-in-law, Amy, were very aware of this tension when they first became parents. “There were many times when our daughter was more easily consoled by me,” Amy said. “It’s really hard to listen to your baby cry while your struggling husband with no breasts tries desperately and sometimes awkwardly to comfort her. David was insistent that rather than handing the baby to me when she was crying, we allow him to comfort her even if it took longer. It was harder in the short run, but it absolutely paid off when our daughter learned that Daddy could take care of her as well as Mommy.”

  I truly believe that the single most important career decision that a woman makes is whether she will have a life partner and who that partner is. I don’t know of one woman in a leadership position whose life partner is not fully—and I mean fully—supportive of her career. No exceptions. And contrary to the popular notion that only unmarried women can make it to the top, the majority of the most successful female business leaders have partners. Of the twenty-eight women who have served as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, twenty-six were married, one was divorced, and only one had never married.10 Many of these CEOs said they “could not have succeeded without the support of their husbands, helping with the children, the household chores, and showing a willingness to move.”11

  Not surprisingly, a lack of spousal support can have the opposite effect on a career. In a 2007 study of well-educated professional women who had left the paid workforce, 60 percent cited their husbands as a critical factor in their decision.12 These women specifically listed their husbands’ lack of participation in child care and other domestic tasks and the expectation that wives should be the ones to cut back on employment as reasons for quitting. No wonder when asked at a conference what men could do to help advance women’s leadership, Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter answered, “The laundry.”13 Tasks like laundry, food shopping, cleaning, and cooking are mundane and mandatory. Typically, these tasks fall to women.

  In January 2012, I received a letter from Ruth Chang, a doctor with two young children who had seen my TEDTalk. She had been offered a new job overseeing seventy-five doctors in five medical clinics. Her first instinct was to say no out of concern that she could not handle the expanded responsibility in addition to taking care of her family. But then she wavered, and in that moment, Dr. Chang wrote me, “I heard your voice saying, ‘Sit at the table’ and I knew I had to accept the promotion. So that evening, I told my husband I was taking the job … and then handed him the grocery list.” Sharing the burden of the mundane can make all the difference.

  My career and marriage are inextricably intertwined. During that first year Dave and I were parents, it became clear that balancing two careers and two cities was not adding up to one happy family. We needed to make some changes. But what? I loved my job at Google and he felt enormously loyal to his team in L.A. We struggled through the commuting for another long year of marital less-than-bliss. By then, Dave was ready to leave Yahoo. He limited his job search to the San Francisco area, which was a sacrifice on his part, since more of his professional interests and contacts were in L.A. He eventually became CEO of SurveyMonkey and was able to move the company headquarters from Portland to the Bay Area.

  Once we were in the same city, it still took us some time to figure out how to coordinate our work schedules. Even though Dave and I are extraordinarily fortunate and can afford exceptional child care, there are still difficult and painful decisions about how much time our jobs require us to be away from our family and who will pick up the slack. We sit down at the beginning of every week and figure out which one of us will drive our children to school each day. We both try to be home for dinner as many nights as we can. (At dinner, we go around the table and share the best and worst event from our day; I refrain from saying so, but my best is usually being home for dinner in the first place.) If one of us is scheduled to be away, the other almost always arranges to be home. On weekends, I try to focus completely on my kids (although I have been known to sneak off a few e-mails from the bathroom of the local soccer field).

  Like all marriages, ours is a work in progress. Dave and I have had our share of bumps on our path to achieving a roughly fifty-fifty split. After a lot of effort and seemingly endless discussion, we are partners not just in what we do, but in who is in charge. Each of us makes sure that things that need to get done do indeed get done. Our division of household chores is actually pretty traditional. Dave pays bills, handles our finances, provides tech support. I schedule the kids’ activities, make sure there is food in the fridge, plan the birthday parties. Sometimes I’m bothered by this classic gender division of labor. Am I perpetuating stereotypes by falling into these patterns? But I would rather plan a Dora the Explorer party than pay an insurance bill, and since Dave feels the exact opposite, this arrangement works for us. It take
s continual communication, honesty, and a lot of forgiveness to maintain a rickety balance. We are never at fifty-fifty at any given moment—perfect equality is hard to define or sustain—but we allow the pendulum to swing back and forth between us.

  In the coming years, our balancing act may get harder. Our children are still young and go to sleep early, which gives me plenty of time to work at night and even to watch what Dave considers to be truly bad TV. As the kids get older, we will have to adjust. Many of my friends have told me that teenage children require more time from their parents. Every stage of life has its challenges. Fortunately, I have Dave to figure it out with me. He’s the best partner I could imagine—even though he’s wrong about my TV shows being bad.

  Having a true partner like Dave is still far too rare. While we expect women to be nurturing, we don’t have the same expectations of men. My brother, David, once told me about a colleague who bragged about playing soccer the afternoon that his first child was born. To David’s credit, instead of nodding and smiling, he spoke up and explained that he didn’t think that was either cool or impressive. This opinion needs to be voiced loudly and repeatedly on soccer fields, in workplaces, and in homes.

  My brother had a wonderful role model in my father, who was an engaged and active parent. Like most men of his generation, my father did very little domestic work, but unlike most men of his generation, he was happy to change diapers and give baths. He was home for dinner every night, since his ophthalmology practice required no travel and involved few emergencies. He coached my brother’s and sister’s sports teams (and would have happily coached mine if I had been the slightest bit coordinated). He helped me with my homework regularly and was my most enthusiastic fan when I participated in oratory contests.