by Hanna Rosin
Emily White is one of Sandberg’s young protégés, and she has reluctantly adopted Sandberg’s mandate that she play by the rules as well. “I am a really aggressive person. I have really strong views and I’m very competitive, and I expect people around me to be the same way,” White explains. “But I’ve definitely tried to change my style and hold my tongue a lot more. I always actively ask for other people’s opinions even when I don’t care about their opinions. And I hedge a lot more and use softer language.” Then she adds, “It drives me nuts. I’m not sure how long I can keep it up.” From White’s resentful attitude about the forced makeover, you get the hopeful feeling that this painful transition phase won’t last forever, that we are closer to the tipping point than we realize, and one day soon there will be enough Emily Whites in power that they won’t have to tread so lightly anymore.
WOMEN MAY IN TIME learn to walk this line perfectly. In their limitless capacity for morphing and adjusting, they may strike just the right balance between feminine and aggressive to move ahead without triggering any suspicion. But even if they get past these external barriers, there are still other, and in some ways deeper, ones holding them back.
Women carry psychological baggage with them into the workplace: a lingering ambivalence about their ambition, a queasiness about self-promotion, a duty to family that they can’t or won’t offload onto their husbands, a catholic notion of satisfaction that encompasses much more than climbing the corporate ladder, and a general feeling of vulnerability they seem to drag with them up the ranks no matter how powerful they get. It’s all understandable, given that most workplaces are structured in such a rigid, unaccommodating way that women are always made to feel as if they are asking for special favors. Still, these are the reasons women end up leaving behind $10,000 every year on the table, as Claudia Goldin puts it. They are not, as the women’s magazines like to say, “bad habits” women have to conquer; more like biases women should be aware of before they decide what to do about their careers.
We know, from a long-term study of Chicago business school graduates, the basic trajectory of the elite professional woman, in this case the average female MBA. Straight out of business school, she earns slightly less than her male counterparts, $115,000 compared to $130,000. Five years out, the men and women start to diverge. The women start to work fewer hours, and some stop working altogether. Nearly a decade out, the women are earning $250,000 and the men are earning $400,000.
Why? What happens? How does a giant gap get created out of a small one?
The first clue is that there is hardly any earning gap between women who don’t have children and men. Mostly what happens is obvious: Women with children start cutting back hours or seeking out situations that are more family-friendly. This is a perfectly reasonable response to an American workplace that barely acknowledges that the same adults showing up at the office every day also raise children at home.
But children are not the whole story, or maybe children are a proxy for the general drift and disaffection that often starts to weaken women’s resolve to fight somewhere in their late twenties and takes full hold of them in their thirties and forties.
Do women lack ambition? psychologist Anna Fels asked in a 2004 Harvard Business Review article. She opens with a poignant vignette of a woman who confesses a dirty secret from her childhood: She’d once had a diary littered with the letters “IWBF”—for “I will be famous.” This was a dirty secret because it now caused this forty-year-old great shame to think about that. What kind of woman walks around saying she wants to be famous?
Fels concludes that women have this bravado beaten out of them over the years. They retain their early girlish pride in their own mastery of skills, but they lose the drive to demand recognition for that mastery: They lose ambition itself. “In fact the women I interviewed hated the very word,” she writes. “For them ‘ambition’ necessarily implied egotism, selfishness, self-aggrandizement, or the manipulative use of others for one’s own end. None of them would admit to being ambitious. Instead, the constant refrain was, ‘It’s not me. It’s the work.’”
Imagine a video game called Ambition Killer. A girl would start out life with a certain amount of ambition points and then run into various obstacles that would knock some out of her—husband, children, a pig-leaded boss, an inflexible workplace, the lure of a lazy weekday afternoon. There are multiple ways that women tread old feminine ground and lose the will to fight for what they want. Sometimes women end up marrying into a situation that sets them up as the traditional wife, whether they planned to become that or not. Sometimes women feel the pressure of parenting culture that defines their desires for success as selfish, and against the interests of their children. Sometimes—and this is the hardest one—women can see no greater appeal in spending their middle years climbing a corporate ladder rather than, say, being a mother, or even reading a book in a café.
The study of University of Chicago MBA students showed a very curious split. The women set out earning their average of $115,000, and subsequently many of them married, some to men who earned more or less what they did, others to men who earned a lot more. Those who married a “high” earner, defined in the study as making more than $200,000 a year, and then had children were much more likely to stop working as women with a spouse who earned less. They also described themselves as responsible for a much greater percentage of the child care—52 percent, versus 32 percent for women with lower-earning spouses.
The underlying tragedy of such a dynamic was perfectly articulated in a column by Michael Lewis, “How to Put Your Wife Out of Business,” which ran in the Los Angeles Times in 2005. It was almost satire, but not quite. “There was a brief time, from about 1985 to 1991, when high-powered males demonstrated their status by marrying equally high-powered females with high-paying jobs. That time has passed. The surest way for a man to exhibit his social status—the finest bourgeois bling—is to find the most highly paid woman you can, working in the most high-profile job, and shut her down.”
A long time ago, the high earner would not have married an MBA in the first place. He’d have married a flight attendant or a secretary or the high school girlfriend who had worked to put him through business school. But these days people of equal education tend to pair up. For the pashas of Wall Street, it’s not enough to marry a model; you have to marry the most impressive woman in business school—and then, as Lewis says, put her out of business. To feminists this should be an outrage: countless potential future female CEOs sacrificed to their husbands’ greed and selfish demands. Women who would be king would do well to heed this advice: If you meet a man in business school and suspect he might strike gold, don’t marry him. Go for the middle manager instead.
Or at least she might go for someone who will understand that her career counts as much as his. One would expect that a powerful woman would downplay her husband’s role in her success, that she would insist that she’d made it despite the man in her life. But in a new twist on an old trope, the powerful women I spoke to all admitted being utterly dependent on their husbands. All described this as the first rule of success: “Choose your spouse or partner carefully. I often say this as a joke, but there is almost no other choice that you can make that will have as much of an impact—positive or negative—on your career,” says Sallie Krawcheck. Sheryl Sandberg tells women at every speech she gives that “your most important career decision is who you marry.” And then sometimes she adds, depending on the crowd, “If you can be a lesbian, definitely do it.” Many of the most successful women—former HP CEO Carly Fiorina, Indra Nooyi, The Daily Beast and Newsweek editor in chief Tina Brown—credit their husbands with making their success possible. “I lucked out at home,” says Nooyi, who was born into a traditional Indian family and married an Indian man, Rajkantilal Nooyi. “He supported me massively. I don’t think I could have worked the way I did if I hadn’t had that kind of support at home.”
In my midtwenties, I had a serious boyfriend I’
d met right after college. We traveled together, traded novels, and talked about politics. I was just starting out as a journalist, and he generously praised my writing. If I had asked him how he felt about his wife working, he would have said he fully supported it. But I could tell that wasn’t quite true. I could tell by the way he talked about his mother and her attempt, late in life, to create a career for herself. I could tell by the way he talked about what his future kids would be doing over the summer. I could tell by his large ambitions, which left little space for any distractions. I was right to pay close attention to these cues: Today he is fabulously wealthy, and his highly credentialed wife does not work.
This is an economy where single childless women under thirty make more money than single childless men. This means that among the elite, who tend to marry later, there is a high chance that the woman is making more than the man when they first get married. Women can learn to let that early start set the rhythm of the marriage and to resist the impulse to defer. As a frustrated friend with a baby once said of her husband, like her a corporate lawyer, “It’s not that his job is less flexible. It’s that he is less flexible about his job.”
Before they married, Emily White’s husband assumed that she would probably be the one taking care of most things around the house. But he’s learned to be accommodating. He runs a private equity firm, which is a demanding job but still leaves him more space than she has. He now “does the majority of house stuff,” White says—paying bills, fixing leaks, getting dinner, planning the rare vacations. She takes their child to school in the morning but he does the evening nanny handoff—“arguably the bigger sacrifice,” she admits, so she can work later. White chose him consciously, because whatever his worldview was when they met, she could tell he was the kind of guy who was “open to having that worldview rocked.” White’s personal experience has left her with the impression that “the men around here”—meaning in Silicon Valley—“are becoming more comfortable with all that. There’s no shame here if you’re the one doing more of the child care.”
A few years ago I wrote a story in The Atlantic called “The Case Against Breast-Feeding.” The title is a slight exaggeration—I understand perfectly what the proven health benefits of breast-feeding are. But my point was, those benefits are not so tremendous that they should automatically outweigh all the factors on the other side of the ledger. My conclusion was:
Overall, yes, breast is probably best. But not so much better that formula deserves the label of “public health menace,” alongside smoking. Given what we know so far, it seems reasonable to put breast-feeding’s health benefits on the plus side of the ledger and other things—modesty, independence, career, sanity—on the minus side, and then tally them up and make a decision. But in this risk-averse age of parenting, that’s not how it’s done.
I’ve seen so many friends nearly quit their jobs because they did not want to stop breast-feeding or deal with the stress of pumping breast milk at work. In that myopic, desperate moment of early motherhood, women demote their own ambition to the near moral equivalent of starving your baby.
Even after all these years in the working world, women tend to portray parenting decisions as a choice between the mother’s selfish desire and the baby’s needs. But this is a very narrow way of looking at things. It might surprise people to learn that over the course of the century, as women have flooded the workforce, time-use studies show they spend at least as much or even more time with their children than women did in earlier decades. In fact, one study found that since 1995, women have almost doubled the amount of time they spend directly caring for their children, to 21.2 hours a week. I’ve seen this statistic come up in several different studies and I still do not understand how it’s possible. But it does confirm one thing without a doubt: The sin of our parenting generation is definitely not neglect.
As a reporter I was once assigned to cover a comprehensive 2006 study by the National Institute of Child Health. My editor had described it to me as a study showing that the kids in day care had more temper tantrums, because this is how early news stories had summarized it. In fact, the study—one of the most long-term and comprehensive ever done—shows that there are virtually no differences in either cognitive development or behavior between children raised at home with mothers, at home with nannies, or in day care. A small minority who spent long hours in day care showed a few behavioral problems, but the study found that they resolved over time. Yet the storyline about selfish mothers persists no matter what the data.
Too often, what’s left out of the conversation over child care are the benefits a mother brings back to the house when she works; not just her paycheck and her own professional satisfaction, but her example of a woman engaged with the outside world. A mean story: When my first child was in preschool, I overheard a conversation between another mother and her child in the same class. The mother was a prevalent type in the school, a corporate lawyer who had married a lobbyist in the high-earning category and then quit her job. The mom was explaining that they would be going to look at some elementary schools that afternoon, because it was important to pick the right school for the daughter so she could get a great education and love to learn. “Why is that important” the daughter asked, “if I’m just going to grow up and be a mommy like you?” Ouch.
Often there are obvious solutions to the mother time crunch, but women won’t use them. Like a husband, for example. As I am writing this chapter, my husband is packing to take our three children away to his parents’ summer house in Vermont. He is taking them without me because my deadline is approaching and he wants to give me space and time to work. It’s an act of great generosity and love. Still, the thoughts forming in my head are not driven by gratitude: He’s taking the wrong boots for the youngest child, the wrong pair of gloves for the middle one, and the eldest is about to forget her pile of books. He’s taking the water bottle with the busted top and a giant bag of pretzels instead of little baggies he can easily distribute in the car. I am already imagining the little frozen fingers and toes and the moment when, having fought over who gets to keep the pretzels on their lap, they let go of the box and all the pretzels tumble out and gleefully nestle under the floor mats.
But I am disciplining myself to wipe those images from my mind and say nothing. For one thing, it’s not fair. I would never go up to a colleague and tell him a story he’d worked hard on, which I had asked him to do, was all wrong just because I would have done it differently. Secondly, it doesn’t matter. Eleven years of parenting and three children have taught me that it honestly and truly doesn’t matter. Cold fingers and smushed pretzels are not what vacation memories are made of. They can borrow boots from the neighbors and turn the visit into an opportunity to enlist them in a snowball fight. They will probably drop the pretzels out the window and stop at a great diner. And in the meantime, I will get my work done, simple as that.
Once you start calling the baby “my baby,” you have a problem. If diversity is good in the workplace, then it’s also good at home. In her book Getting to 50/50, Sharon Meers, a former managing director at Goldman Sachs and now an executive at eBay, points out that a father’s involvement is the critical factor in a child’s success. In a massive Department of Education study, a child’s grades were more closely correlated to how many times the dad showed up at a school event than any other factor. Children with involved fathers measure as having higher IQs by age three, higher self-esteem, and in the case of daughters, grow up to be less promiscuous.
Deciding on more equitable child-care arrangements is not just a logistical matter; it’s about rooting out deep and crippling assumptions women hold long before they even have children.
Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook beautifully reframed the issue of women and work in her 2010 TED talk with her memorable phrase “Don’t leave before you leave.” The phrase was attached to a story about a young woman at Facebook who came into her office agonizning about how she would balance work and a child. The woman lo
oked very young, so Sandberg asked her, “Are you and your husband thinking about having a baby?” It turned out that the woman didn’t have a husband. She didn’t even have a boyfriend. She was just doing that thing that young women tend to do, which is hesitate before she’d even gotten started. “I watch it all day long,” Sandberg told me. “Women are making room for kids they don’t have, years before they try and get pregnant. Then when they do get pregnant, they would be coming back to a job they no longer want.” The men, meanwhile, are “super aggressive and focused. They are in your office every day. ‘Can I do that? Can I lead this?’ They don’t have to be talked into things.”
Women tend to be fatalistic about children and work, so even if there are possible solutions to the problem, they don’t look for them. At Facebook, Sandberg forces optimism on her employees by giving them the opposite of the usual advice. Recently Sandberg offered a woman a new job in business development. The woman came into her office worried that she might not be able to handle it. Why? asked Sheryl. She was pregnant, the woman confessed. “Congratulations,” said Sandberg. “That’s all the more reason for you to take this job. Then you’ll have something exciting to come back to.” The logic is, it’s hard to leave for work in the morning when your warm, delightful toddler is clinging to your leg, so what’s at the other side of that better be pretty compelling or you’ll just give up. Sandberg herself leaves work at five thirty and then like most of her colleagues tunes back in after her children have gone to bed.