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

by Sheryl Sandberg

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.32 The sooner we break the cycle, the faster we will reach greater equality.

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique

In 2012, Gloria Steinem sat down in her home for an interview with Oprah Winfrey. 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 do.”34 I believe they can and we should give them more chances to prove it.

men in younger generations appear more eager to be real partners than men in previous generations.

men in their forties most frequently selected “work which challenges me” as very important, while men in their twenties and thirties most frequently selected having a job with a schedule that “allows me to spend time with my family.”35

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.

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 And this is not just a perception problem. 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.11 This all needs to change, especially since new evidence suggests working from home might actually be more productive in certain cases.12

the traditional practice of judging employees by face time rather than results unfortunately persists. Because of this, 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.13

General Colin Powell explains that his vision of leadership rejects “busy bastards” who put in long hours at the office without realizing the impact they have on their staff. He explains that “in every senior job I’ve had I’ve tried to create an environment of professionalism and the very highest standards. When it was necessary to get a job done, I expected my subordinates to work around the clock. When that was not necessary, I wanted them to work normal hours, go home at a decent time, play with the kids, enjoy family and friends, read a novel, clear their heads, daydream, and refresh themselves. I wanted them to have a life outside the office. I am paying them for the quality of their work, not for the hours they work. That kind of environment has always produced the best results for me.”14 It is still far too rare to work for someone as wise as General Powell.

In 2009, married middle-income parents worked about eight and a half hours more per week than in 1979.16 This trend has been particularly pronounced among professionals and managers, especially men.17 A survey of high-earning professionals in the corporate world found that 62 percent work more than fifty hours a week and 10 percent work more than eighty hours per week.18 Technology, while liberating us at times from the physical office, has also extended the workday. A 2012 survey of employed adults showed that 80 percent of the respondents continued to work after leaving the office, 38 percent checked e-mail at the dinner table, and 69 percent can’t go to bed without checking their in-box.19

Sleeping four or five hours a night induces mental impairment equivalent to a blood alcohol level above the legal driving limit.20 Sleep deprivation makes people anxious, irritable, and confused. (Just ask Dave.) If I could go back and change one thing about how I lived in those early years, I would force myself to get more sleep.

In 1991, the Early Child Care Research Network, under the auspices of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, initiated the most ambitious and comprehensive study to date on the relationship between child care and child development, and in particular on the effect of exclusive maternal care versus child care. The Research Network, which comprised more than thirty child development experts from leading universities across the country, spent eighteen months designing the study. They tracked more than one thousand children over the course of fifteen years, repeatedly assessing the children’s cognitive skills, language abilities, and social behaviors. Dozens of papers have been published about what they found.23 In 2006, the researchers released a report summarizing their findings, which concluded that “children who were cared for exclusively by their mothers did not develop differently than those who were also cared for by others.”24 They found no gap in cognitive skills, language competence, social competence, ability to build and maintain relationships, or in the quality of the mother-child bond.25 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.26 One of the findings is worth reading slowly, maybe even twice: “Exclusive maternal care w...