( MORE: TIME’s Cover Story, “Confidence Woman”)īut women rarely make one big decision to leave the workforce. These expectations yield predictable results: among professional women who take time off for family, only 40% return to work full time.

In a survey of Princeton’s class of 2006, 62% of women said they anticipated work/family conflict, compared with 33% of men-and of the men who expected a conflict, 46% expected that their wives would step away from their career track. By the time they are in college, women are already thinking about the trade-offs. She replied that she did not have a husband, then added with a little laugh, “Actually, I don’t even have a boyfriend.”įrom an early age, girls get the message that they will likely have to choose between succeeding at work and being a good wife and mother. I inquired if she and her partner were considering having a child. Here are three examples of how women can lean in.Ī few years ago, a young woman at facebook began asking me lots of questions about how I balance work and family. But women can dismantle the internal barriers holding us back today. We must not ignore the real obstacles women face in the professional world, from sexism and discrimination to a lack of flexibility, access to child care and parental leave. Women internalize the negative messages we get throughout our lives-the messages that say it’s wrong to be outspoken, aggressive, more powerful than men-and pull back when we should lean in. From the moment they are born, boys and girls are treated differently. I rarely, however, heard anything about the ways I was holding myself back. Throughout my career, I was told over and over about inequalities in the workplace and how hard it would be to have a career and a family. ( MORE: TIME’s Complete Coverage on Sheryl Sandberg) The laws of economics and many studies of diversity tell us that if we tapped the entire pool of human resources and talent, our performance would improve. A truly equal world would be one where women ran half of our countries and companies and men ran half of our homes. It is time for us to face the fact that our revolution has stalled.

This means that when it comes to making the decisions that most affect our world, our voices are not heard equally. Women hold around 14% of Fortune 500 executive-officer positions and about 17% of board seats, numbers that have barely budged over the last decade. While women continue to outpace men in educational achievement, we have ceased making real progress at the top of any industry. But the blunt truth is that men still run the world. Follow in the United States and the developed world, women are better off than ever before.

Sheryl sandberg women