So for any of us in this room today, let's start out by admitting we're lucky.
We don't live in the world our mothers lived in,
where career choices for women were so limited.
And if you're in this room today,
most of us grew up in a world where we have basic civil rights,
and amazingly, we still live in a world where some women don't have them.
But all that aside, we still have a problem,
Women are not making it to the top of any profession
The numbers tell the story quite clearly.
190 heads of state -- nine are women.
Of all the people in parliament in the world,
In the corporate sector, women at the top,
The numbers have not moved since 2002
and are going in the wrong direction.
And even in the non-profit world,
a world we sometimes think of as being led by more women,
which is that women face harder choices
between professional success and personal fulfillment.
A recent study in the U.S. showed that, of married senior managers,
two-thirds of the married men had children
and only one-third of the married women had children.
A couple of years ago, I was in New York,
and I was in one of those fancy New York private equity offices
And I'm in the meeting -- it's about a three-hour meeting --
and two hours in, there needs to be that bio break,
and the partner running the meeting starts looking really embarrassed.
And I realized he doesn't know where the women's room is in his office.
So I start looking around for moving boxes,
figuring they just moved in, but I don't see any.
And so I said, "Did you just move into this office?"
And he said, "No, we've been here about a year."
And I said, "Are you telling me that I am the only woman
to have pitched a deal in this office in a year?"
And he looked at me, and he said,
"Yeah. Or maybe you're the only one who had to go to the bathroom."
(Laughter)
So the question is, how are we going to fix this?
How do we change these numbers at the top?
How do we make this different?
I want to start out by saying, I talk about this --
about keeping women in the workforce --
because I really think that's the answer.
In the high-income part of our workforce,
in the people who end up at the top --
Fortune 500 CEO jobs, or the equivalent in other industries --
the problem, I am convinced, is that women are dropping out.
Now people talk about this a lot,
and they talk about things like flextime and mentoring
and programs companies should have to train women.
I want to talk about none of that today,
even though that's all really important.
Today I want to focus on what we can do as individuals.
What are the messages we need to tell ourselves?
What are the messages we tell the women that work with and for us?
What are the messages we tell our daughters?
Now, at the outset, I want to be very clear
that this speech comes with no judgments.
I don't have the right answer.
I don't even have it for myself.
I left San Francisco, where I live, on Monday,
and I was getting on the plane for this conference.
And my daughter, who's three, when I dropped her off at preschool,
did that whole hugging-the-leg, crying, "Mommy, don't get on the plane" thing.
This is hard. I feel guilty sometimes.
whether they're at home or whether they're in the workforce,
who don't feel that sometimes.
So I'm not saying that staying in the workforce
is the right thing for everyone.
My talk today is about what the messages are
if you do want to stay in the workforce,
Two, make your partner a real partner.
And three, don't leave before you leave.
Just a couple weeks ago at Facebook,
we hosted a very senior government official,
and he came in to meet with senior execs
And everyone kind of sat at the table.
He had these two women who were traveling with him
pretty senior in his department,
"Sit at the table. Come on, sit at the table,"
and they sat on the side of the room.
When I was in college, my senior year,
I took a course called European Intellectual History.
Don't you love that kind of thing from college?
And I took it with my roommate, Carrie,
who was then a brilliant literary student --
and went on to be a brilliant literary scholar --
but a water-polo-playing pre-med,
The three of us take this class together.
And then Carrie reads all the books in the original Greek and Latin,
I read all the books in English
and go to most of the lectures.
He reads one book of 12 and goes to a couple of lectures,
marches himself up to our room
a couple days before the exam to get himself tutored.
The three of us go to the exam together, and we sit down.
And we sit there for three hours --
and our little blue notebooks -- yes, I'm that old.
We walk out, we look at each other, and we say, "How did you do?"
And Carrie says, "Boy, I feel like I didn't really draw out the main point
And I say, "God, I really wish I had really connected
John Locke's theory of property with the philosophers that follow."
"I got the top grade in the class."
(Laughter)
"You got the top grade in the class?
(Laughter)
The problem with these stories is that they show what the data shows:
women systematically underestimate their own abilities.
and you ask them questions on totally objective criteria like GPAs,
men get it wrong slightly high,
and women get it wrong slightly low.
Women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce.
of people entering the workforce out of college
showed that 57 percent of boys entering, or men, I guess,
are negotiating their first salary,
and only seven percent of women.
men attribute their success to themselves,
and women attribute it to other external factors.
If you ask men why they did a good job,
Obviously. Why are you even asking?"
If you ask women why they did a good job,
what they'll say is someone helped them,
they got lucky, they worked really hard.
Because no one gets to the corner office
by sitting on the side, not at the table,
if they don't think they deserve their success,
or they don't even understand their own success.
I wish I could go tell all the young women I work for,
"Believe in yourself and negotiate for yourself.
I wish I could tell that to my daughter.
Because what the data shows, above all else, is one thing,
which is that success and likeability are positively correlated for men
and negatively correlated for women.
And everyone's nodding, because we all know this to be true.
There's a really good study that shows this really well.
There's a famous Harvard Business School study
on a woman named Heidi Roizen.
And she's an operator in a company in Silicon Valley,
to become a very successful venture capitalist.
a professor who was then at Columbia University
took that case and made it [Howard] Roizen.
And he gave the case out, both of them, to two groups of students.
But that one word made a really big difference.
He then surveyed the students,
and the good news was the students, both men and women,
thought Heidi and Howard were equally competent,
The bad news was that everyone liked Howard.
He's a great guy. You want to work for him.
You want to spend the day fishing with him.
She's a little out for herself. She's a little political.
You're not sure you'd want to work for her.
We have to tell our daughters and our colleagues,
we have to tell ourselves to believe we got the A,
to reach for the promotion, to sit at the table,
and we have to do it in a world
where, for them, there are sacrifices they will make for that,
even though for their brothers, there are not.
The saddest thing about all of this is that it's really hard to remember this.
And I'm about to tell a story which is truly embarrassing for me,
I gave this talk at Facebook not so long ago
and a couple hours later, there was a young woman who works there
sitting outside my little desk, and she wanted to talk to me.
I said, okay, and she sat down, and we talked.
And she said, "I learned something today.
I learned that I need to keep my hand up."
She said, "You're giving this talk,
and you said you would take two more questions.
I had my hand up with many other people,
and you took two more questions.
I put my hand down, and I noticed all the women did the same,
and then you took more questions,
"Wow, if it's me -- who cares about this, obviously --
and during this talk, I can't even notice that the men's hands are still raised,
and the women's hands are still raised,
as managers of our companies and our organizations
at seeing that the men are reaching for opportunities
We've got to get women to sit at the table.
(Cheers)
(Applause)
Make your partner a real partner.
I've become convinced that we've made more progress in the workforce
The data shows this very clearly.
If a woman and a man work full-time and have a child,
the woman does twice the amount of housework the man does,
and the woman does three times the amount of childcare the man does.
So she's got three jobs or two jobs, and he's got one.
Who do you think drops out when someone needs to be home more?
The causes of this are really complicated, and I don't have time to go into them.
And I don't think Sunday football-watching and general laziness is the cause.
I think the cause is more complicated.
we put more pressure on our boys to succeed
and work in the home to support wives with careers,
When I go to the Mommy-and-Me stuff and I see the father there,
I notice that the other mommies don't play with him.
because we have to make it as important a job,
because it's the hardest job in the world to work inside the home,
if we're going to even things out and let women stay in the workforce.
(Applause)
Studies show that households with equal earning
also have half the divorce rate.
And if that wasn't good enough motivation for everyone out there,
how shall I say this on this stage?
They know each other more in the biblical sense as well.
(Cheers)
I think there's a really deep irony
to the fact that actions women are taking --
and I see this all the time --
with the objective of staying in the workforce
actually lead to their eventually leaving.
We're all busy. Everyone's busy. A woman's busy.
And she starts thinking about having a child,
and from the moment she starts thinking about having a child,
she starts thinking about making room for that child.
"How am I going to fit this into everything else I'm doing?"
And literally from that moment,
she doesn't raise her hand anymore,
she doesn't look for a promotion, she doesn't take on the new project,
she doesn't say, "Me. I want to do that."
let's say she got pregnant that day, that day --
nine months of pregnancy, three months of maternity leave,
six months to catch your breath --
more often -- and as I've seen it --
women start thinking about this way earlier --
when they get engaged, or married,
when they start thinking about having a child,
One woman came to see me about this.
And I said, "So are you and your husband thinking about having a baby?"
And she said, "Oh no, I'm not married."
She didn't even have a boyfriend.
(Laughter)
I said, "You're thinking about this just way too early."
But the point is that what happens
once you start kind of quietly leaning back?
Everyone who's been through this --
and I'm here to tell you, once you have a child at home,
your job better be really good to go back,
because it's hard to leave that kid at home.
Your job needs to be challenging.
You need to feel like you're making a difference.
And if two years ago you didn't take a promotion
if three years ago you stopped looking for new opportunities,
because you should have kept your foot on the gas pedal.
Keep your foot on the gas pedal,
until the very day you need to leave to take a break for a child --
Don't make decisions too far in advance,
particularly ones you're not even conscious you're making.
is not going to change the numbers at the top.
We are not going to get to where 50 percent of the population --
in my generation, there will not be 50 percent of [women]
But I'm hopeful that future generations can.
I think a world where half of our countries and our companies
were run by women, would be a better world.
It's not just because people would know where the women's bathrooms are,
even though that would be very helpful.
I think it would be a better world.
I have a five-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter.
I want my son to have a choice
to contribute fully in the workforce or at home,
and I want my daughter to have the choice to not just succeed,
but to be liked for her accomplishments.
(Applause)