No industry or country can reach its full potential until women reach their full potential.
The things that hold women back, hold them back from sitting at the boardroom table and they hold women back from speaking at the PTA meeting.
I just believed. I believed that the technology would change people’s lives. I believed putting real identity online – putting technology behind real identity – was the missing link.
Every woman I know, particularly the senior ones, has been called too aggressive at work. We know in gender blind studies that men are more aggressive in their offices than women. We know that. Yet we’re busy telling all the women that they’re too aggressive. That’s the issue.
I think now is our time. My mother was told by everyone that she had two choices: She could be a nurse or a teacher. The external barriers now are just so much lower. If we start acknowledging what the real issues are, we can solve them. It’s not that hard.
Bring your whole self to work. I don’t believe we have a professional self Monday through Friday and a real self the rest of the time. It is all professional and it is all personal.
Over the last 10 years, women have stalled out at the top.
Getting from point A to point Z can be daunting unless you remember that you don’t have to get from A to Z. You just have to get from A to B. Breaking big dreams into small steps is the way to move forward.
We call our little girls bossy. Go to a playground; little girls get called bossy all the time – a word that’s almost never used for boys – and that leads directly to the problems women face in the workforce.
Women have made tons of progress. But we still have a small percentage of the top jobs in any industry, in any nation in the world. I think that’s partly because from a very young age, we encourage our boys to lead and we call our girls bossy.
The reason I don’t have a plan is because if I have a plan I’m limited to today’s options.
When woman 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.
The promise of equality is not the same as true equality.
Aggressive and hard-charging women violate unwritten rules about acceptable social conduct. Men are continually applauded for being ambitious and powerful and successful, but women who display these same traits often pay a social penalty. Female accomplishments come at a cost.
The gender stereotypes introduced in childhood are reinforced throughout our lives and become self-fulfilling prophesies. Most leadership positions are held by men, so women don’t expect to achieve them, and that becomes one of the reasons they don’t.
And in situations where a man and a woman each receive negative feedback, the woman’s self-confidence and self-esteem drop to a much greater degree. The internalization of failure and the insecurity it breeds hurt future performance, so this pattern has serious long-term consequences.
Success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively for women. When a man is successful, he is liked by both men and women. When a woman is successful, people of both genders like her less.
It’s more pressure on women to – if they marry or partner with someone, to partner with the right person. Because you cannot have a full career and a full life at home with your children if you are also doing all of the housework and child care.
I’m not pretending I can give advice to every single person or every single couple for every situation; I’m making the point that we are not going to get to equality in the workforce before we get to equality in the home. Not going to happen.
I’m not telling women to be like men. I’m telling us to evaluate what men and women do in the workforce and at home without the gender bias.