My own concerns about combining my career and family rose to the forefront again when I was considering leaving Google for Facebook. I had been at Google for six and a half years and had strong leaders in place for each of my teams. By then, Google had more than 20,000 employees and business procedures that ran smoothly and allowed me to make it home for dinner with my children almost every night. Facebook, on the other hand, had only 550 employees and was much more of a start-up. Late night meetings and all-night hackathons were an accepted part of the culture. I worried that taking a new job might undermine the balance I had worked hard to achieve. It helped that Dave was working as an entrepreneur-in-residence at a venture capital firm, so he had almost complete control of his schedule. He assured me that he would take on more at home to make this work for our family.
My first six months at Facebook were really hard. I know I’m supposed to say “challenging,” but “really hard” is more like it. A lot of the company followed Mark’s lead and worked night-owl engineering hours. I would schedule a meeting with someone for 9:00 a.m. and the person would not show up, assuming that I meant 9:00 p.m. I needed to be around when others were and I worried that leaving too early would make me stand out like a sore—and old—thumb. I missed dinner after dinner with my kids. Dave told me that he was home with them and they were fine. But I was not.
I thought about Larry Kanarek’s speech back at McKinsey and realized that if I didn’t take control of the situation, my new job would prove unsustainable. I would resent not seeing my family and run the risk of becoming the employee who quit with unused vacation time. I started forcing myself to leave the office at five thirty. Every competitive, type-A fiber of my being was screaming at me to stay, but unless I had a critical meeting, I walked out that door. And once I did it, I learned that I could. I am not claiming, nor have I ever claimed, that I work a forty-hour week. Facebook is available around the world 24/7, and for the most part, so am I. The days when I even think of unplugging for a weekend or vacation are long gone. And unlike my job at Google, which was based almost exclusively in California, my Facebook role requires a lot of travel. As a result, I have become even more vigilant about leaving the office to have dinner with my children when I’m not on the road.
I still struggle with the trade-offs between work and home on a daily basis. Every woman I know does, and I know that I’m far luckier than most. I have remarkable resources—a husband who is a real partner, the ability to hire great people to assist me both in the office and at home, and a good measure of control over my schedule. I also have a wonderful sister who lives close by and is always willing to take care of her niece and nephew, occasionally at a moment’s notice. She’s even a pediatrician, so my kids are not just in loving hands, they’re in medically trained hands. (Not all people are close to their family, either geographically or emotionally. Fortunately, friends can be leaned on to provide this type of support for each other.)
If there is a new normal for the workplace, there is a new normal for the home too. Just as expectations for how many hours people will work have risen dramatically, so have expectations for how many hours mothers will spend focused on their children. In 1975, stay-at-home mothers spent an average of about eleven hours per week on primary child care (defined as routine caregiving and activities that foster a child’s well-being, such as reading and fully focused play). Mothers employed outside the home in 1975 spent six hours doing these activities. Today, stay-at-home mothers spend about seventeen hours per week on primary child care, on average, while mothers who work outside the home spend about eleven hours. This means that an employed mother today spends about the same amount of time on primary child care activities as a nonemployed mother did in 1975.21
My memory of being a kid is that my mother was available but rarely hovering or directing my activities. My siblings and I did not have organized playdates. We rode our bikes around the neighborhood without adult supervision. Our parents might have checked on our homework once in a while, but they rarely sat with us while we completed it. Today, a “good mother” is always around and always devoted to the needs of her children. Sociologists call this relatively new phenomenon “intensive mothering,” and it has culturally elevated the importance of women spending large amounts of time with their children.22 Being judged against the current all-consuming standard means mothers who work outside the home feel as if we are failing, even if we are spending the same number of hours with our kids as our mothers did.
When I drop my kids off at school and see the mothers who are staying to volunteer, I worry that my children are worse off because I’m not with them full-time. This is where my trust in hard data and research has helped me the most. Study after study suggests that the pressure society places on women to stay home and do “what’s best for the child” is based on emotion, not evidence.
In 1991, the Early Child Care Research Network, under the auspices of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, initiated the most ambitious and comprehensive study to date on the relationship between child care and child development, and in particular on the effect of exclusive maternal care versus child care. The Research Network, which comprised more than thirty child development experts from leading universities across the country, spent eighteen months designing the study. They tracked more than one thousand children over the course of fifteen years, repeatedly assessing the children’s cognitive skills, language abilities, and social behaviors. Dozens of papers have been published about what they found.23 In 2006, the researchers released a report summarizing their findings, which concluded that “children who were cared for exclusively by their mothers did not develop differently than those who were also cared for by others.”24 They found no gap in cognitive skills, language competence, social competence, ability to build and maintain relationships, or in the quality of the mother-child bond.25 Parental behavioral factors—including fathers who are responsive and positive, mothers who favor “self-directed child behavior,” and parents with emotional intimacy in their marriages—influence a child’s development two to three times more than any form of child care.26 One of the findings is worth reading slowly, maybe even twice: “Exclusive maternal care was not related to better or worse outcomes for children. There is, thus, no reason for mothers to feel as though they are harming their children if they decide to work.”27
Children absolutely need parental involvement, love, care, time, and attention. But parents who work outside the home are still capable of giving their children a loving and secure childhood. Some data even suggest that having two parents working outside the home can be advantageous to a child’s development, particularly for girls.28
Although I know the data and understand intellectually that my career is not harming my children, there are times when I still feel anxious about my choices. A friend of mine felt the same way, so she discussed it with her therapist and, later, shared this insight: “My therapist told me that when I was worrying about how much I was leaving my girls, that separation anxiety is actually more about the mom than the kids. We talk about it as though it is a problem for children, but actually it can be more of an issue for the mom.”
I always want to do more for my children. Because of work obligations, I’ve missed doctor’s appointments and parent-teacher conferences and have had to travel when my kids were sick. I haven’t missed a dance recital yet, but it probably will happen. I have also missed a level of detail about their lives. I once asked a mother at our school if she knew any of the other kids in the first-grade class, hoping for a familiar name or two. She spent twenty minutes reciting from memory the name of every child, detailing their parents, siblings, which class they had been in the year before, and their interests. How could she possibly know all this? Was I a bad mother for not knowing any of this? And why should it even bother me?
I knew the answer to that last question. It bothered me because like most people who have choices, I am not completely comfortable with mine. Later t
hat same year, I dropped my son off at school on St. Patrick’s Day. As he got out of the car wearing his favorite blue T-shirt, the same mother pointed out, “He’s supposed to be wearing green today.” I simultaneously thought, Oh, who the hell can remember that it’s St. Patrick’s Day? and I’m a bad mom.
Guilt management can be just as important as time management for mothers. When I went back to my job after giving birth, other working mothers told me to prepare for the day that my son would cry for his nanny. Sure enough, when he was about eleven months old, he was crawling on the floor of his room and put his knee down on a toy. He looked up for help, crying, and reached for her instead of me. It pierced my heart, but Dave thought it was a good sign. He reasoned that we were the central figures in our son’s life, but forming an attachment to a caregiver was good for his development. I understood his logic, especially in retrospect, but at the time, it hurt like hell.
To this day, I count the hours away from my kids and feel sad when I miss a dinner or a night with them. Did I have to take this trip? Was this speech really critical for Facebook? Was this meeting truly necessary? Far from worrying about nights he misses, Dave thinks we are heroes for getting home for dinner as often as we do. Our different viewpoints seem inextricably gender based. Compared to his peers, Dave is an exceptionally devoted dad. Compared to many of my peers, I spend a lot more time away from my children. A study that conducted in-depth interviews with mothers and fathers in dual-earner families uncovered similar reactions. The mothers were riddled with guilt about what their jobs were doing to their families. The fathers were not.29 As Marie Wilson, founder of the White House Project, has noted, “Show me a woman without guilt and I’ll show you a man.”30
I know that I can easily spend time focusing on what I’m not doing; like many, I excel at self-flagellation. And even with my vast support system, there are times when I feel pulled in too many directions. But when I dwell less on the conflicts and compromises, and more on being fully engaged with the task at hand, the center holds and I feel content. I love my job and the brilliant and fascinating people I work with. I also love my time with my kids. A great day is when I rush home from the craziness of the office to have dinner with my family and then sit in the rocking chair in the corner of my daughter’s room with both of my kids on my lap. We rock and read together, just a quiet (okay, not always quiet), joyful moment at the end of their day. They drift off to sleep and I drift (okay, run) back to my laptop.
It’s also fun when my two worlds collide. For a period of time, Mark hosted Monday-night strategy sessions at his house. Because I wouldn’t be making it home for dinner, my kids came into the office. Facebook is incredibly family friendly, and my children were in heaven, entranced by pizza, endless candy, and the huge pile of Legos that the engineers kindly share with young visitors. It made me happy that my kids got to know my colleagues and my colleagues got to know them. Mark had been teaching my son how to fence, so they would sometimes practice with pretend foils, which was adorable. Mark also taught both my kids various office pranks, which was slightly less adorable.
I would never claim to be able to find serenity or total focus in every moment. I am so far from that. But when I remember that no one can do it all and identify my real priorities at home and at work, I feel better, and I am more productive in the office and probably a better mother as well. Stanford professor Jennifer Aaker’s work shows that setting obtainable goals is key to happiness.31 Instead of perfection, we should aim for sustainable and fulfilling. The right question is not “Can I do it all?” but “Can I do what’s most important for me and my family?” The aim is to have children who are happy and thriving. Wearing green T-shirts on St. Patrick’s Day is purely optional.
If I had to embrace a definition of success, it would be that success is making the best choices we can … and accepting them. Journalist Mary Curtis suggested in The Washington Post that the best advice anyone can offer “is for women and men to drop the guilt trip, even as the minutes tick away. The secret is there is no secret—just doing the best you can with what you’ve got.”32
In December 2010, I was standing with Pat Mitchell, waiting to go onstage to give my TEDTalk. The day before, I had dropped my daughter off at preschool and told her I was flying to the East Coast so I wouldn’t see her that night. She clung to my leg and begged me not to leave. I couldn’t shake that image and, at the last minute, asked Pat if I should add it to my speech. “Absolutely tell that story,” said Pat. “Other women go through this, and you’ll help them by being honest that this is hard for you too.”
I took a deep breath and stepped onstage. I tried to be authentic and shared my truth. I announced to the room—and basically everyone on the internet—that I fall very short of doing it all. And Pat was right. It felt really good not just to admit this to myself, but to share it with others.
10
Let’s Start Talking About It
SOMETIMES I WONDER what it would be like to go through life without being labeled by my gender. I don’t wake up thinking, What am I going to do today as Facebook’s female COO?, but that’s often how I’m referred to by others. 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. A Google search for “Facebook’s male CEO” returns this message: “No results found.”
As Gloria Steinem observed, “Whoever has power takes over the noun—and the norm—while the less powerful get an adjective.”1 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.
In between my junior and senior years of high school, I worked as a page in Washington, D.C., for my hometown congressman, William Lehman. The Speaker of the House at the time was the legendary Massachusetts representative Tip O’Neill, and Congressman Lehman promised to introduce me to him before the summer ended. But as the days ticked by, it didn’t happen. And it didn’t happen. Then, on the very last day of the session, he made good on his promise. In the hall outside the House floor, he pulled me over to meet Speaker O’Neill. I was nervous, but Congressman Lehman put me at ease by introducing me in the nicest way possible, telling the Speaker that I had worked hard all summer. The Speaker looked at me, then reached over and patted my head. He turned to the congressman and remarked, “She’s pretty.” Then he turned his attention back to me and asked just one question: “Are you a pom-pom girl?”
I was crushed. Looking back, I know his words were intended to flatter me, but in the moment, I felt belittled. I wanted to be recognized for the work I had done. I reacted defensively. “No,” I replied. “I study too much for that.” Then a wave of terror struck me for speaking up to the man who was third in line for the presidency. But no one seemed to register my curt and not-at-all clever response. The Speaker just patted me on the head—again!—and moved along. My congressman beamed.
Even to my teenage self, this sexism seemed retro. The Speaker was born in 1912, eight years before women were given the right to vote, but by the time I met him in the halls of Congress, society had (mostly) evolved. It was obvious that a woman could do anything a man could do. My childhood was filled with firsts—Golda Meir in Israel, Geraldine Ferraro on the Mondale ticket, Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court, Sally Ride in space.
Given all these strides, I headed into college believing that the feminists of the sixties and seventies had done the hard work of achieving equality for my generation. And yet, if anyone had called me a feminist, I would have quickly corrected that notion. This reaction is prevalent even today according to sociologist Marianne Cooper (who also contributed her extraordinary
research assistance to this book). In her 2011 article, “The New F-Word,” Marianne wrote about college English professor Michele Elam, who observed something strange in her Introduction to Feminist Studies course. Even though her students were interested enough in gender equality to take an entire class on the subject, very few “felt comfortable using the word ‘feminism.’ ” And even “fewer identified themselves as feminists.” As Professor Elam noted, it was as if “being called a feminist was to suspect that some foul epithet had been hurled your way.”2
It sounds like a joke: Did you hear the one about the woman taking a feminist studies class who got angry when someone called her a feminist? But when I was in college, I embraced the same contradiction. On one hand, I started a group to encourage more women to major in economics and government. On the other hand, I would have denied being in any way, shape, or form a feminist. None of my college friends thought of themselves as feminists either. It saddens me to admit that we did not see the backlash against women around us.3 We accepted the negative caricature of a bra-burning, humorless, man-hating feminist. She was not someone we wanted to emulate, in part because it seemed like she couldn’t get a date. Horrible, I know—the sad irony of rejecting feminism to get male attention and approval. In our defense, my friends and I truly, if naïvely, believed that the world did not need feminists anymore. We mistakenly thought that there was nothing left to fight for.
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