Tiger Mom was instantly disliked by many women. Media portrayed its author as a tyrant who locked her daughter out on the cold porch for a few minutes because she refused to practice piano. Both daughters of the Yale Law professor Tiger Mom are extremely accomplished young women who seem to be thriving without the need for therapy, so far at least. Harvard MBA billionaire mom Sheryl Sandberg will never have financial problems but her children may struggle with entitlement issues in the future. Do these women who generate such controversy really have anything valuable to say? I would argue they do indeed, but then I like a little controversy that gets people upset enough to think about the status quo.
Let's be honest, the vision Betty and Gloria had for women back in the seventies has yet to materialize: men still run the world. Sandberg believes women themselves must re-boot feminism to get things going again. Women over the past generation in our country certainly have more choices and women have outnumbered men in college graduation rates for the past three decades. This fact has not translated to women weiding equal amount of power in business and politics. Women currently head 4% of Fortune 500 companies and run 17 out of the 195 countries in the world.
Facebook grew from 70 million users in 2008 to a billion users today on the watch of Sheryl Sandberg, this driven mother of two. Company revenues increased from 150 million to 1.5 billion in the same period. Facebook stock is beginning to show growth after a poor start a year ago. In her book, Sandberg cites studies that companies with women on their boards are more successful than those with men only. It is also true that American corporations structure their employee days around the idea that someone else is handling the home front responsibilities. Granted, Sandberg the billionaire leads a charmed life, but her observations about women and the workplace I believe are astute.
Why has feminism stalled? Many women, according to Sandberg, begin leaning back at work early on in their careers as they think about starting families. They choose not to take a leadership track perhaps due to the reality that women continue to shoulder most of the household/child care responsibilities when they get home from work. The role of head honcho at work may not be appealing to women with children because when they arrive home from a full day's work, their second full-time job begins.
Sandberg says that for women, pulling back early in their careers is a big mistake for the long haul. She argues women need to be very mindful of who they choose for partners and need to let go of some of the guilt about child raising which men do not feel. Women underestimate their abilities and fear ambition even when the benefits of ambition outweigh the negatives. Marriage does not always mean happily ever after, as we all know, and life has a way of throwing curve balls when you had expected to hit a slider low and away. Or as my recent fortune cookie warned: "Life is a mountain, not a beach."
Editor's note: I am not equipped to know whether a slider is low and away. I did correct "sending" curve balls.
Gender bias, like racism in the workplace, does not die without a fight, and the fight is worth fighting. Women in charge, Sandberg argues, can make small changes that impact all women's lives for the better. She, and other such women, undoubtedly have housekeepers and nannies, a lifestyle most working parents cannot afford. They might begin by providing opportunities for other, less fortunate women to ease the burden at work while they tackle the problems at home. Running a household with children and two working parents who cannot afford house cleaners and nannies is arguably always best approached as a joint/team venture, not a one-woman show, and the beleaguered mom could use all the help she can get. Besides, research shows men who do housework enjoy more sex so everybody wins!!!
Maybe it would also help if those bossy little girls were labeled future leaders, as bossy little boys are. Maybe mothers of sons could make a point of teaching their boys the basics of running a household so when they have families, their partners don't feel they have a second job when they come home from work. Maybe young women who want a partner and children someday should take the risk of leaning in at work to see where it takes them. If women choose to lean forward from the get-go in their career life, family life may turn out more satisfying in the long run. So, let's call a truce to the Mommie Wars, re-boot feminism and see what the world would be like if more women were in charge!
| *Sheryl has a great TED talk and her interview on Sixty Minutes is interesting as well. |
I, on the other hand, believe it is not a cure-all to let just women be in charge. Like men, women have their prejudices and blind spots. The best approach would be to have a team of women and men equally in charge. The women and men can then take advantage of each person's strengths. If you believe in what the Myers-Briggs Type indicator tells us, it is not the sex of an individual that guarantees success, but how the individual uses their traits to the advantage of the team.
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