Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

by Sheryl Sandberg

According to the most recent analysis, when a husband and wife both are employed full-time, the mother does 40 percent more child care and about 30 percent more housework than the father.1 A 2009 survey found that only 9 percent of people in dual-earner marriages said that they shared housework, child care, and breadwinning evenly.2 So while men are taking on more household responsibilities, this increase is happening very slowly, and we are still far from parity.3 (Perhaps unsurprisingly, same-sex couples divide household tasks much more evenly.)

U.S. Census Bureau considers mothers the “designated parent,”

Gloria Steinem once observed, “It’s not about biology, but about consciousness.”7

have seen so many women inadvertently discourage their husbands from doing their share by being too controlling or critical. Social scientists call this “maternal gatekeeping,” which is a fancy term for “Ohmigod, that’s not the way you do it! Just move aside and let me!”

if he’s forced to do things her way, pretty soon she’ll be doing them herself.

wives who engage in gatekeeping behaviors do five more hours of family work per week than wives who take a more collaborative approach.9

Another common and counterproductive dynamic occurs when women assign or suggest tasks to their partners. She is delegating, and that’s a step in the right direction. But sharing responsibility should mean sharing responsibility. Each partner needs to be in charge of specific activities or it becomes too easy for one to feel like he’s doing a favor instead of doing his part.

the single most important career decision that a woman makes is whether she will have a life partner and who that partner is. I don’t know of one woman in a leadership position whose life partner is not fully—and I mean fully—supportive of her career. No exceptions. And contrary to the popular notion that only unmarried women can make it to the top, the majority of the most successful female business leaders have partners. Of the twenty-eight women who have served as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, twenty-six were married, one was divorced, and only one had never married.

when asked at a conference what men could do to help advance women’s leadership, Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter answered, “The laundry.”13 Tasks like laundry, food shopping, cleaning, and cooking are mundane and mandatory. Typically,

would rather plan a Dora the Explorer party than pay an insurance bill, and since Dave feels the exact opposite, this arrangement works for us. It takes continual communication, honesty, and a lot of forgiveness to maintain a rickety balance. We are never at fifty-fifty at any given moment—perfect equality is hard to define or sustain—but we allow the pendulum to swing back and forth between us.

children with involved and loving fathers have higher levels of psychological well-being and better cognitive abilities.14

When fathers provide even just routine child care, children have higher levels of educational and economic achievement and lower delinquency rates.15 Their children even tend to be more empathetic and socially competent.16 These findings hold true for children from all socioeconomic backgrounds, whether or not the mother is highly involved.

belief that mothers are more committed to family than to work penalizes women because employers assume they won’t live up to expectations of professional dedication. The

Making gender matters even worse, men’s success is viewed not just in absolute terms, but often in comparison to their wives’. The image of a happy couple still includes a husband who is more professionally successful than the wife. If the reverse occurs, it’s perceived as threatening to the marriage. People frequently pull me aside to ask sympathetically, “How is Dave? Is he okay with, you know, all your [whispering] success?” Dave is far more self-confident than I am, and given his own professional success, these comments are easy for him to brush off. More and more men will have to do the same, since almost 30 percent of U.S. working wives now outearn their husbands.25

things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated, and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home. These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is sexier.

Porn for Women. One page shows a man cleaning a kitchen while insisting, “I like to get to these things before I have to be asked.” Another man gets out of bed in the middle of the night, wondering, “Is that the baby? I’ll get her.”)26

be careful about role definition in the beginning of a relationship.

At the start of a romance, it’s tempting for a woman to show a more classic “girlfriendy” side by volunteering to cook meals and take care of errands. And, suddenly, we’re back in 1955. If

“My time is now as valuable as his,” she told me. “As a result, we are happier.”

equality between partners leads to happier relationships. When husbands do more housework, wives are less depressed, marital conflicts decrease, and satisfaction rises.27 When women work outside the home and share breadwinning duties, couples are more likely to stay together. In fact, the risk of divorce reduces by about half when a wife earns half the income and a husband does half the housework.28

For men, participating in child rearing fosters the development of patience, empathy, and adaptability, characteristics that benefit all of their relationships.29 For women, earning money increases their decision-making ability in the home, protects them in case of divorce, and can b...

couples who share domestic responsibilities have more sex.

when a mother stays at home, her time during the day should still be considered real work—because it is. Raising children is at least as stressful and demanding as a paying job. It is unfair that mothers are frequently expected to work long into the night while fathers who work outside the home get the chance to relax from their day jobs. When the father is home, he should take on half the child care and housework. Also, most employed fathers interact with other grown-ups all day, while mothers at home are often starved for adult conversation by evening.

The workplace has evolved more than the home in part because we enter it as adults, so each generation experiences a new dynamic. But the homes we create tend to be more rooted in our childhoods. My generation grew up watching our mothers do the child care and housework while our fathers earned the wages. It’s too easy for us to get stuck in these patterns. It is no surprise that married and cohabitating men whose mothers were employed while they were growing up do more housework as adults than other men.

it is always worth the battle to change an undesirable dynamic. I also worry that these women will face the same dynamic when it comes time to care for aging parents. Women provide more than twice as much care not only for their own parents, but for their in-laws as well.

Gloria reiterated that progress for women in the home has trailed progress in the workplace, explaining, “Now we know that women can do what men can do, but we don’t know that men can do what women can

the more women value kindness and support in their boyfriends, the more men will demonstrate it.

As more women lean in to their careers, more men need to lean in to their families. We need to encourage men to be more ambitious in their homes.

HAVING IT ALL.” Perhaps the greatest trap ever set for women was the coining of this phrase. Bandied about in speeches, headlines, and articles, these three little words are intended to be aspirational but instead make all of us feel like we have fallen short. I have never met a woman, or man, who has stated emphatically, “Yes, I have it all.” Because no matter what any of us has—and how grateful we are for what we have—no one has it all.

Sharon Poczter, professor of economics at Cornell, explains, “The antiquated rhetoric of ‘having it all’ disregards the basis of every economic relationship: the idea of trade-offs. All of us are dealing with the constrained optimization that is life, attempting to maximize our utility based on parameters like career, kids, relationships, etc., doing our best to allocate the resource of time. Due to the scarcity of this resource, therefore, none of us can ‘have it all,’ and those who claim to are most likely lying.”

Instead of pondering the question “Can we have it all?,” we should be asking the more practical question “Can we do it all?” And again, the answer is no. Each of us makes choices constantly between work and family, exercising and relaxing, making time for others and taking time for ourselves. Being a parent means making adjustments, compromises, and sacrifices every day. For most people, sacrifices and hardships are not a choice, but a necessity. About 65 percent of married-couple families with children in the United States have two parents in the workforce, with almost all relying on both incomes to support their household.

About 30 percent of families with children are led by a single parent, with 84 percent of those led by a woman.

Employed mothers and fathers both struggle with multiple responsibilities, but mothers also have to endure the rude questions and accusatory looks that remind us that we’re shortchanging both our jobs and our children. As if we needed reminding.

Gloria Steinem said it best: “You can’t do it all. No one can have two full-time jobs, have perfect children and cook three meals and be multi-orgasmic ’til dawn … Superwoman is the adversary of the women’s movement.”5

It is impossible to control all the variables when it comes to parenting. For women who have achieved previous success by planning ahead and pushing themselves hard, this chaos can be difficult to accept.

“Done is better than perfect.” I have tried to embrace this motto and let go of unattainable standards. Aiming for perfection causes frustration at best and paralysis at worst.

Ephron insisted, “It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don’t be frightened: you can always change your mind.

implored us to exert more control over our careers. He said McKinsey would never stop making demands on our time, so it was up to us to decide what we were

willing to do. It was our responsibility to draw the line. We needed to determine how many hours we were willing to work in a day and how many nights we were willing to travel. If later on, the job did not work out, we would know that we had tried on our own terms. Counterintuitively, long-term success at work often depends on not trying to meet every demand placed on us. The best way to make room for both life and career is to make choices deliberately—to set limits and stick to them.

I deeply understand the fear of appearing to be putting our families above our careers. Mothers don’t want to be perceived as less dedicated to their jobs than men or women without family responsibilities. We overwork to overcompensate. Even in workplaces that offer reduced or flextime arrangements, people fear that reducing their hours will jeopardize their career prospects.9

Employees who make use of flexible work policies are often penalized and seen as less committed than their peers.10 And those penalties can be greater for mothers in professional jobs.

the traditional practice of judging employees by face time rather than results unfortunately persists.

many employees focus on hours clocked in the office rather than on achieving their goals as efficiently as possible. A shift to focusing more on results would benefit individuals and make companies more efficient and competitive.

Sleeping four or five hours a night induces mental impairment equivalent to a blood alcohol level above the legal driving limit.

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.

data even suggest that having two parents working outside the home can be advantageous to a child’s development, particularly for girls.28

Guilt management can be just as important as time management for mothers.

Guilt mgmt is just as important as time mgmt

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.

Marie Wilson, founder of the White House Project, has noted, “Show me a woman without guilt and I’ll show you a man.”30

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

The center holds When focused on what I am doing Vs what I am not