Success for me is that if my son chooses to be a stay-at-home parent, he is cheered on for that decision. And if my daughter chooses to work outside the home and is successful, she is cheered on and supported.
I wish I were strong enough to ignore what others say, but experience tells me I often can’t. Allowing myself to feel upset, even really upset, and then move on – that’s something I can do.
And what I saw happening is that women don’t make one decision to leave the workforce. They makes lots of little decisions really far in advance that kind of inevitably lead them there.
Women don’t take enough risks. Men are just ‘foot on the gas pedal.’ We’re not going to close the achievement gap until we close the ambition gap.
The most important thing – and I’ve said it a hundred times and I’ll say it a hundred times – if you marry a man, marry the right one.
It turns out that a husband who does the laundry, it’s very romantic when you’re older. And it’s hard to believe when you’re younger. But it’s absolutely true.
What I tell everyone, and I really do for myself is, I have a long-run dream, which is I want to work on stuff that I think matters.
I would be better at my job if I were technical.
It’s easy to dislike the few senior women out there. What if women were half the positions in power? It would be harder to dislike all of them.
Women are not making it to the top. A hundred and ninety heads of state; nine are women. Of all the people in parliament in the world, thirteen per cent are women. In the corporate sector, women at the top – C-level jobs, board seats – tops out at fifteen, sixteen per cent.
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, our grandmothers lived in, where career choices for women were so limited.
It’s pretty exciting to take real people living in the real world, their opinions, and have people have to react to that. As opposed to their perceptions of what people are thinking, which are often very different.
Facebook is a really exciting place trying to do something really important that I really believe in. And it matters.
We have a problem with women in leadership across the board. This leadership gap – this problem of not enough women in leadership – is running really deep and it’s in every industry. My answer is we have to understand the stereotype assumptions that hold women back.
I believe we need affordable child care. I believe we need flexibility. I believe we need institutional reform and public policy reform.
We know when we use the full talents of our population we’re more productive. And we know that when people really feel like they can have flexible lives, they’re better employees.
It is illegal to discriminate on the basis of pregnancy or gender. It is not illegal to talk about it.
When we get feedback on women, we ask, “Is that real or is that the gender bias at play?” Everyone could start doing that today and I think we’d see really big results.
The social web can’t exist until you are your real self online. I have to be me. You have to be you. Once we are online as ourselves, connected to each other and our other friends, then you can have the evolution of what becomes the social web.
Facebook is great for women and men. We are enormously flexible. We care a lot about great opportunities for women, we push ourselves to make things as flexible as possible.