1、So for any of us in this room today, lets start out by admitting were lucky. We dont live in the world our mothers lived in, our grandmothers lived in, where career choices for women were so limited. And if youre in this room today, most of us grew up in a world where we had basic civil rights. And
2、amazingly, we still live in a world where some women dont have them. But all that aside, we still have a problem, and its a real problem. And the problem is this: women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world. The numbers tell the story quite clearly. 190 heads of state
3、- nine are women. Of all the people in parliament in the world, 13 percent are women. In the corporate sector, women at the top, C-level jobs, board seats - tops out at 15, 16 percent. The numbers have not moved since 2002 and are going in the wrong direction. And even in the non-profit world, a wor
4、ld we sometimes think of as being led by more women, women at the top: 20 percent.We also have another problem, which is that women face harder choices between professional success and personal fulfillment. A recent study in the U.S. showed that, of married senior managers, two-thirds of the married
5、 men had children and only one-third of the married women had children. A couple of years ago, I was in New York, and I was pitching a deal, and I was in one of those fancy New York private equity offices you can picture. And Im in the meeting - its about a three-hour meeting - and two hours in, the
6、re kind of needs to be that bio break, and everyone stands up, and the partner running the meeting starts looking really embarrassed. And I realized he doesnt know where the womens room is in his office. So I start looking around for moving boxes, figuring they just moved in, but I dont see any. And
7、 so I said, “Did you just move into this office?“ And he said, “No, weve been here about a year.“ And I said, “Are you telling me that I am the only woman to have pitched a deal in this office in a year?“ And he looked at me, and he said, “Yeah. Or maybe youre the only one who had to go to the bathr
8、oom.“(Laughter)So the question is, how are we going to fix this? How do we change these numbers at the top? How do we make this different? I want to start out by saying, I talk about this - about keeping women in the workforce - because I really think thats the answer. In the high-income part of our
9、 workforce, in the people who end up at the top - Fortune 500 CEO jobs, or the equivalent in other industries - the problem, I am convinced, is that women are dropping out. Now people talk about this a lot, and they talk about things like flex time and mentoring and programs companies should have to
10、 train women. I want to talk about none of that today - even though thats all really important. Today I want to focus on what we can do as individuals. What are the messages we need to tell ourselves? What are the messages we tell the women that work with and for us? What are the messages we tell ou
11、r daughters?Now at the outset, I want to be very clear that this speech comes with no judgments. I dont have the right answer; I dont even have it for myself. I left San Francisco, where I live, on Monday, and I was getting on the plane for this conference. And my daughter, whos three, when I droppe
12、d her off at preschool, did that whole hugging the leg, crying, “Mommy, dont get on the plane,“ thing. This is hard. I feel guilty sometimes. I know no women, whether theyre at home, or whether theyre in the workforce, that dont feel that sometimes. So Im not saying that staying in the workforce is
13、the right thing for everyone.My talk today is about what the messages are if you do want to stay in the workforce. And I think there are three. One, sit at the table. Two, make your partner a real partner. And three - dont leave before you leave. Number one: sit at the table. Just a couple weeks ago
14、 at Facebook, we hosted a very senior government official, and he came in to meet with senior execs from around Silicon Valley. And everyone kind of sat at the table. And then he had these two women who were traveling with him who were pretty senior in his department. And I kind of said to them, “Si
15、t at the table. Come on, sit at the table.“ And they sat on the side of the room. When I was in college my senior year, I took a course called European Intellectual History. Dont you love that kind of thing from college. I wish I could do that now. And I took it with my roommate, Carrie, who was the
16、n a brilliant literary student - and went on to be a brilliant literary scholar - and my brother - smart guy, but a water polo playing pre-med, who was a sophomore.The three of us take this class together. And then Carrie reads all the books in the original Greek and Latin - goes to all the lectures
17、 - I read all the books in English and go to most of the lectures. My brother is kind of busy; he reads one book of 12 and goes to a couple of lectures, marches himself up to our room a couple days before the exam to get himself tutored. The three of us go to the exam together, and we sit down. And
18、we sit there for three hours - and our little blue notebooks - yes, Im that old. And we walk out, and we look at each other, and we say, “How did you do?“ And Carrie says, “Boy, I feel like I didnt really draw out the main point on the Hegelian dialectic.“ And I say, “God, I really wish I had really
19、 connected John Lockes theory of property with the philosophers that follow.“ And my brother says, “I got the top grade in the class.“ “You got the top grade in the class? You dont know anything.“The problem with these stories is that they show what the data shows: women systematically underestimate
20、 their own abilities. If you test men and women, and you ask them questions on totally objective criteria like GPAs, men get it wrong slightly high, and women get it wrong slightly low. Women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce. A study in the last two years of people entering the workf
21、orce out of college showed that 57 percent of boys entering - or men, I guess - are negotiating their first salary, and only seven percent of women. And most importantly, men attribute their success to themselves, and women attribute it to other external factors. If you ask men why they did a good j
22、ob, theyll say, “Im awesome. Obviously. Why are you even asking?“ If you ask women why they did a good job, what theyll say is someone helped them, they got lucky, they worked really hard. Why does this matter? Boy, it matters a lot because no one gets to the corner office by sitting on the side, no
23、t at the table. And no one gets the promotion if they dont think they deserve their success, or they dont even understand their own success.I wish the answer were easy. I wish I could just go tell all the young women I work with, all these fabulous women, “Believe in yourself and negotiate for yours
24、elf. Own your own success.“ I wish I could tell that to my daughter. But its not that simple. Because what the data shows, above all else, is one thing - which is that success and likability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. And everyones nodding, because we all
25、know this to be true.Theres a really good study that shows this really well. Theres a famous Harvard Business School study on a woman named Heidi Roizen. And shes an operator in a company in Silicon Valley, and she uses her contacts to become a very successful venture capitalist. In 2002 - not so lo
26、ng ago - a professor who was then at Columbia University took that case and made it Howard Roizen. And he gave case out - both of them - to two groups of students. He changed exactly one word: Heidi to Howard. But that one word made a really big difference. He then surveyed the students. And the goo
27、d news was the students, both men and women, thought Heidi and Howard were equally competent, and thats good. The bad news was that everyone liked Howard. Hes a great guy, you want to work for him, you want to spend the day fishing with him. But Heidi? Not so sure. Shes a little out for herself. She
28、s a little political. Youre not sure youd want to work for her. This is the complication. We have to tell our daughters and our colleagues, we have to tell ourselves to believe we got the A, to reach for the promotion, to sit at the table. And we have to do it in a world where, for them, there are s
29、acrifices they will make for that, even though for their brothers, there are not.The saddest thing about all of this is that its really hard to remember this. And Im about to tell a story which is truly embarrassing for me, but I think important. I gave this talk at Facebook not so long ago to about
30、 a hundred employees. And a couple hours later, there was a young woman who works there sitting outside my little desk, and she wanted to talk to me. I said, okay, and she sat down, and we talked. And she said, “I learned something today. I learned that I need to keep my hand up.“ I said, “What do y
31、ou mean?“ She said, “Well, youre giving this talk, and you said you were going to take two more questions. And I had my hand up with lots of other people, and you took two more questions. And I put my hand down, and I noticed all the women put their hand down, and then you took more questions, only
32、from the men.“ And I thought to myself, wow, if its me - who cares about this, obviously - giving this talk - and during this talk, I cant even notice that the mens hands are still raised, and the womens hands are still raised, how good are we as managers of our companies and our organizations at se
33、eing that the men are reaching for opportunities more than women? Weve got to get women to sit at the table.(Applause)Message number two: make your partner a real partner. Ive become convinced that weve made more progress in the workforce than we have in the home. The data shows this very clearly. I
34、f a woman and a man work full-time and have a child, the woman does twice the amount of housework the man does, and the woman does three times the amount of child care the man does. So shes got three jobs or two jobs, and hes got one. Who do you think drops out when someone needs to be home more? Th
35、e causes of this are really complicated, and I dont have time to go into them. And I dont think Sunday football watching and general laziness is the cause.I think the cause is more complicated. I think, as a society, we put more pressure on our boys to succeed that we do on our girls. I know men tha
36、t stay home and work in the home to support wives with careers And its hard. When I go to the Mommy-and-Me stuff and I see the father there, I notice that the other mommies dont play with him. And thats a problem, because we have to make it as important a job - because its the hardest job in the wor
37、ld - to work inside the home for people of both genders if were going to even things out and let women stay in the workforce. (Applause) Studies show that households with equal earning and equal responsibility also have half the divorce rate. And if that wasnt good enough motivation for everyone out
38、 there, they also have more - how shall I say this on this stage? - they know each other more in the biblical sense as well.(Cheers)Message number three: dont leave before you leave. I think theres a really deep irony to the fact that actions women are taking - and I see this all the time - with the
39、 objective of staying in the workforce, actually lead to their eventually leaving. Heres what happens: Were all busy; everyones busy; a womans busy. And she starts thinking about having a child. And from the moment she starts thinking about having a child, she starts thinking about making room for t
40、hat child. “How am I going to fit this into everything else Im doing?“ And literally from that moment, she doesnt raise her hand anymore, she doesnt look for a promotion, she doesnt take on the new project, she doesnt say, “Me. I want to do that.“ She starts leaning back. The problem is that - lets
41、say she got pregnant that day, that day - nine months of pregnancy, three months of maternity leave, six months to catch your breath - fast-forward two years, more often - and as Ive seen it - women start thinking about this way earlier - when they get engaged, when they get married, when they start
42、 thinking about trying to have a child, which can take a long time. One woman came to see me about this, and I kind of looked at her - she looked a little young. And I said, “So are you and your husband thinking about having a baby?“ And she said, “Oh no, Im not married.“ She didnt even have a boyfr
43、iend. I said, “Youre thinking about this just way too early.“But the point is that what happens once you start kind of quietly leaning back? Everyone whos been through this - and Im here to tell you, once you have a child at home, your job better be really good to go back, because its hard to leave
44、that kid at home - your job needs to be challenging. It needs to be rewarding. You need to feel like youre making a difference. And if two years ago you didnt take a promotion and some guy next to you did, if three years ago you stopped looking for new opportunities, youre going to be bored because
45、you should have kept your foot on the gas pedal. Dont leave before you leave. Stay in. Keep your foot on the gas pedal, until the very day you need to leave to take a break for a child - and then make your decisions. Dont make decisions too far in advance, particularly ones youre not even conscious
46、youre making.My generation really, sadly, is not going to change the numbers at the top. Theyre just not moving. We are not going to get to where 50 percent of the population - in my generation, there will not be 50 percent of people at the top of any industry. But Im hopeful that future generations
47、 can. I think a world that was run where half of our countries and half of our companies were run by women, would be a better world. And its not just because people would know where the womens bathroom are, even though that would be very helpful. I think it would be a better world. I have two childr
48、en. I have a five year-old son and a three year-old daughter. I want my son to have a choice to contribute fully in the workforce or at home. And I want my daughter to have the choice to not just succeed, but to be liked for her accomplishments.对于今天在座的各位，我们首先要承认自己很幸运。我们没有生在我们母亲或是祖母那个时代，当时女性的职业选择非常有限
49、。而你们今天能坐在这里，说明我们大多数人都拥有基本的公民权利。令人惊讶的是，现今世界仍有一些女性得不到这些权利。但撇开这些不谈，我们还面临一个问题，是个真正的问题。问题如下：女性无法做到任何职业的高层，世界各地都如此。数据清楚的说明了一切，190 位国家元首，只有 9 位女性；世界各国的议会成员，女性只占 13%。在企业部门，女性作为领导者，如部门主管、公司董事，至多只有 15%、16%。这一数字自 2002 年来没有变动，并有下降的趋势。即便是在非盈利领域，有时我们认为这一领域会有更多的女性领导者，女性领导者的比例：20%。我们还面临另一个问题，就是女性在职业和家庭之间面临更艰难的选择。美国近期研究表明，已婚的高层管理人员之中，2/3 的已婚男性有孩子，而只有 1/3 的已婚女性有孩子。几年前，我在纽约谈一笔生意。我坐在纽约这间华丽的私募资金公司办公室中，你们想象得到。在会议中，一个长达 3 小时的会议，2 小时过后，因为人的生理需求，需要休息一会儿。所有人都站起来，会议的举办者看上去有些尴尬。我意识到，
