Social scientists are uncovering new examples of bias all the time. In 2012, a series of studies compared men in more “modern” marriages (whose wives worked outside the home full-time) to men in more “traditional” marriages (whose wives worked at home). The researchers wanted to determine if a man’s home arrangement affected his professional behavior. It did. Compared to men in modern marriages, men in more traditional marriages viewed the presence of women in the workforce less favorably. They also denied promotions to qualified female employees more often and were more likely to think that companies with a higher percentage of female employees ran less smoothly. The researchers speculated that men in traditional marriages are not overtly hostile toward women but instead are “benevolent sexists”—holding positive yet outdated views about women.10 (Another term I have heard is “nice guy misogynists.”) These men might even believe that women have superior strengths in certain areas like moral reasoning, which makes them better equipped to raise children—and perhaps less equipped to succeed in business.11 In all likelihood, men who share this attitude are unaware of how their conscious and unconscious beliefs hurt their female colleagues.
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.12 Yet diverse groups often perform better.13 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.
My own attempts to point out gender bias have generated more than my fair share of eye rolling from others. At best, people are open to scrutinizing themselves and considering their blind spots; at worst, they become defensive and angry. One common instance of bias crops up during job performance evaluations. When reviewing a woman, the reviewer will often voice the concern, “While she’s really good at her job, she’s just not as well liked by her peers.” When I hear language like that, I bring up the Heidi/Howard study and how success and likeability are negatively correlated for women. I ask the evaluator to consider the possibility that this successful female may be paying a gender-based penalty. Usually people find the study credible, nodding their heads in agreement, but then bristle at the suggestion that this might be influencing the reaction of their management team. They will further defend their position by arguing that it cannot be gender related because—aha!—both men and women have problems with that particular female executive. But the success and likeability penalty is imposed by both men and women. Women perpetuate this bias as well.
Of course, not every woman deserves to be well liked. Some women are disliked for behaviors that they would do well to change. In a perfect world, they would receive constructive feedback and the opportunity to make those changes. Still, calling attention to this bias forces people to think about whether there is a real problem or a perception problem. The goal is to give women something men tend to receive automatically—the benefit of the doubt.
In turn, women might also want to give their bosses the benefit of the doubt. Cynthia Hogan served as chief counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee under then-senator Joe Biden before leaving in 1996 after her first child was born. Her plan was to return to the workforce a few years later. But when her second child was born prematurely, those plans changed. A full twelve years later, Vice President–Elect Biden called Cynthia to ask her to join his staff as chief legal counsel in the White House. “My first reaction was that I no longer owned any clothes other than yoga pants!” Cynthia said. But her larger concern was whether she could manage the long hours in the White House and still see her family. She put it beautifully: “I knew that whether this would work depended on two men. So first I asked my husband if he could step in and take on more of the responsibility for the kids. He said, ‘Of course, it’s your turn.’ And then I told the Vice President–elect that I really wanted to have dinner with my kids most nights. And his response was, ‘Well, you have a phone and I can call you when I need you after dinnertime.’ ”14
Cynthia believes that the lesson of her story is “Don’t be afraid to ask,” even if it seems like a long shot. Being offered a senior job, especially after being at home for so long, presented a great opportunity. Many women would have accepted it without even trying to carve out the time they needed for their families. Others would have turned it down, assuming that having dinner at home most nights was not negotiable. Being forthright led to opportunity.
Every job will demand some sacrifice. The key is to avoid unnecessary sacrifice. This is especially hard since our work culture values complete dedication. We worry that even mentioning other priorities makes us less valuable employees. I have faced this too. As I described, once I had children, I changed my working hours to be home for dinner. But only fairly recently did I start talking about this change. And while the impact of my actually leaving work early was negligible, admitting that I went home at five thirty turned out to be kind of a big deal.
I first openly discussed my office hours at the launch of Facebook Women, an in-house resource group. The initial meeting, run by Lori Goler and Facebook’s head of engineering, Mike Schroepfer, was open to any Facebook employee, including men. During the Q&A, I was asked the (inevitable) question about how I balanced my job and family. I talked about leaving work to have dinner with my children and then getting back online after they went to bed. I said that I was sharing my schedule because I wanted to encourage others to personalize their schedules too. Even though I had planned in advance to discuss this, I felt nervous. Years of conditioning had taught me never to suggest that I was doing anything other than giving 100 percent to my job. It was scary to think that someone, even people working for me, might doubt my diligence or dedication. Fortunately, it didn’t happen. A few people at Facebook thanked me for mentioning it, but that was it.
A few years later, producer Dyllan McGee interviewed me for her Makers video series. We spoke on a wide range of subjects, including my daily work schedule. The video was posted to the web and was instantly the subject of heated debate. Thanks to social media (serves me right), everyone had an opinion about my leaving the office at five thirty. I got flowers with an anonymous thank-you note. Mike Callahan, Yahoo’s general counsel at the time, told me that several of the more senior women in his legal department said my admission struck a chord and they were going to follow my example. Author Ken Auletta said that I could not have gotten more headlines if I had murdered someone with an ax. While I was glad to jump-start the discussion, all the attention gave me this weird feeling that someone was going to object and fire me. I had to reassure myself that this was absurd. Still, the clamor made me realize how incredibly hard it would be for someone in a less-senior position to ask for or admit to this schedule. We have a long way to go before flextime is accepted in most workplaces. It will only happen if we keep raising the issue.
The discussions may be difficult, but the positives are many. We cannot change what we are unaware of, and once we are aware, we cannot help but change.
Even a well-established institution like Harvard Business School (HBS) can evolve rapidly when issues are addressed head-on. Historically at HBS, American male students have academically outperformed both female and international students. When Nitin Nohria was appointed dean in 2010, he made it his mission to close this gap. He began by appointing Youngme Moon as senior associate dean of the MBA program, the first woman to hold that position in the school’s century-plus history. He also created a new position for Robin Ely, an expert on gender and diversity.
Associate Dean Moon, working with Professor Frances Frei, spent the first year rigorously examining the school’s culture. They visited each classroom and discussed the challenges women and international students faced. Then they used that knowledge to creat
e what Dean Nohria calls “a level of mindfulness.” Without calling for major overhauls, they tackled the soft stuff—small adjustments students could make immediately, like paying more attention to the language they used in class. They laid out a new, communal definition of leadership: “Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.” They held students responsible for the impact their behavior had on others. Those who violated that principle, or even hosted an event where that principle was violated, were held accountable. The second year, HBS introduced small group projects to encourage collaboration between classmates who would not naturally work together. They also added a year-long field course, which plays to the strengths of students who are less comfortable contributing in front of large classes.
By commencement, the performance gap had virtually disappeared. Men, women, and international students were represented proportionally in the honors awarded. There was another benefit too. In a result many considered surprising, overall student satisfaction went up, not just for the female and international students, but for American males as well. By creating a more equal environment, everyone was happier. And all of this was accomplished in just two short years.15
Social gains are never handed out. They must be seized. Leaders of the women’s movement—from Susan B. Anthony to Jane Addams to Alice Paul to Bella Abzug to Flo Kennedy to so many others—spoke out loudly and bravely to demand the rights that we now have. Their courage changed our culture and our laws to the benefit of us all. Looking back, it made no sense for my college friends and me to distance ourselves from the hard-won achievements of earlier feminists. We should have cheered their efforts. Instead, we lowered our voices, thinking the battle was over, and with this reticence we hurt ourselves.
Now I proudly call myself a feminist. If Tip O’Neill were alive today, I might even tell him that I’m a pom-pom girl for feminism. I hope more women, and men, will join me in accepting this distinguished label. 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.16 That’s a big move in the right direction.
Semantics can be important, but I don’t think progress turns on our willingness to apply a label to ourselves. I do think progress turns on our willingness to speak up about the impact gender has on us. We can no longer pretend that biases do not exist, nor can we talk around them. And as Harvard Business School has demonstrated, the result of creating a more equal environment will not just be better performance for our organizations, but quite likely greater happiness for all.
11
Working Together Toward Equality
I BEGAN THIS BOOK by acknowledging that women in the developed world are better off than ever, but the goal of true equality still eludes us. So how do we move forward? First, we must decide that true equality is long overdue and will be achieved only when more women rise to the top of every government and every industry. Then we have to do the hard work of getting there. All of us—men and women alike—have to understand and acknowledge how stereotypes and biases cloud our beliefs and perpetuate the status quo. Instead of ignoring our differences, we need to accept and transcend them.
For decades, we have focused on giving women the choice to work inside or outside the home. We have celebrated the fact that women have the right to make this decision, and rightly so. But we have to ask ourselves if we have become so focused on supporting personal choices that we’re failing to encourage women to aspire to leadership. It is time to cheer on girls and women who want to sit at the table, seek challenges, and lean in to their careers.
Today, despite all of the gains we have made, neither men nor women have real choice. Until women have supportive employers and colleagues as well as partners who share family responsibilities, they don’t have real choice. And until men are fully respected for contributing inside the home, they don’t have real choice either. Equal opportunity is not equal unless everyone receives the encouragement that makes seizing those opportunities possible. Only then can both men and women achieve their full potential.1
None of this is attainable unless we pursue these goals together. Men need to support women and, I wish it went without saying, women need to support women too. Stanford professor Deborah Gruenfeld makes the case: “We need to look out for one another, work together, and act more like a coalition. As individuals, we have relatively low levels of power. Working together, we are fifty percent of the population and therefore have real power.”2 As obvious as this sounds, women have not always worked together in the past. In fact, there are many discouraging examples where women have actually done the opposite.
We are a new generation and we need a new approach.
In the summer of 2012, my former Google colleague Marissa Mayer was named CEO of Yahoo. Like several of her friends and the Yahoo board, I knew that she was heading into her third trimester of pregnancy. Of course, many men take big jobs when their wives are weeks away from giving birth, and no one raises it as an issue, but Marissa’s condition quickly became headline news. She was heralded as the first pregnant CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Feminists cheered. Then Marissa let it be known: “My maternity leave will be a few weeks long, and I’ll work throughout it.”3 Many feminists stopped cheering. Since taking such a short leave is not feasible or desirable for everyone, they argued that Marissa was hurting the cause by setting up unreasonable expectations.
So was this one giant leap forward for womankind and one baby step back? Of course not. Marissa became the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company … while pregnant. She decided how she wanted to manage her career and family and never claimed that her choice should apply to anyone else. If she had cut Yahoo’s maternity leave to two weeks for all employees, then concern would have been in order. She did not do this, but she was still roundly criticized. Even a European cabinet member weighed in.4 Like any individual, Marissa knows best what she is capable of given her particular circumstances. And as journalist Kara Swisher also noted, Marissa “has a husband who can actually take care of the child, and no one seems to remember that.”5 Women who want to take two weeks off … or two days … or two years … or twenty years deserve everyone’s full support.
As Marissa’s experience demonstrates, women in powerful positions often receive greater scrutiny. Because the vast majority of leaders are men, it is not possible to generalize from any one example. But the dearth of female leaders causes one woman to be viewed as representative of her entire gender.6 And because people often discount and dislike female leaders, these generalizations are often critical. This is not just unfair to the individuals but reinforces the stigma that successful women are unlikeable. A perfect and personal example occurred in May 2012, when a Forbes blogger posted an article entitled “Sheryl Sandberg Is the Valley’s ‘It’ Girl—Just Like Kim Polese Once Was.” He began his comparison by describing Kim, an early tech entrepreneur, as a “luminary” in the mid-1990s who never really earned her success, but was “in the right place at the right time [and was] young, pretty and a good speaker.” The blogger then argued, “I think Polese is a good cautionary tale for … Sheryl Sandberg.”7 Ouch.
Kim and I had never met or spoken before this incident, but she defended both of us. In a published response, she described reading the blog post and how her “immediate thought was—how sad. How sad that as an industry and a society we haven’t advanced over these past two decades when it comes to views on women and leadership. As with all the past lazy, stereotype-ridden articles like this one, it gets the facts wrong.” After correcting the facts, she continued, “Views like these are all too commonplace, and part of a pervasive pattern that belittles, demeans and marginalizes women as leaders.”8 So many other readers joined her in calling the post sexist that the blogger posted an
apology and retraction.9
I was grateful for Kim’s vocal support. The more women can stick up for one another, the better. Sadly, this doesn’t always happen. And it seems to happen even less when women voice a position that involves a gender-related issue. The attacks on Marissa for her maternity leave plans came almost entirely from other women. This has certainly been my experience too. Everyone loves a fight—and they really love a cat-fight. The media will report endlessly about women attacking other women, which distracts from the real issues. When arguments turn into “she said/she said,” we all lose.
Every social movement struggles with dissension within its ranks, in part because advocates are passionate and unlikely to agree on every position and solution. Betty Friedan famously and foolishly refused to work with—or even to shake hands with—Gloria Steinem. They both did so much to further women’s rights. But what if they had been able to work together? Couldn’t they have furthered the cause even more?
Lean In Page 16