By Mona Charen
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
If there’s one sure way to capture the attention of the
usual suspects in the press, it’s to highlight the problems of women with
high-powered careers, as billionaire Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has done.
In her TED talk three years ago, and now in a book that
has received lavish attention, Sandberg laments that women “are not making it
to the top of any profession anywhere in the world. The numbers tell the story
. . . 190 heads of state — nine are women. Of all the people in parliaments in
the world, 13 percent are women. In the corporate sector, women at the top . .
. 15, 16 percent.”
Sandberg appears not to be complaining about sexism so
much as encouraging women to stop sabotaging their own success. “Studies show,”
she reports, that women are less likely to attribute their success to their own
merit than are men. They are less likely to ask for raises or to negotiate for
better terms in a job search. When they are successful, they are less likely
than comparable males to be considered “likable.”
Those statistics ring true to me, as I’ve noticed both
from personal experience and from studies that women tend to judge themselves
more harshly than do men on other matters too. Women, for example, are less
likely than men to consider themselves good-looking. If Sandberg wants to
agitate to help women think better of themselves and get the raises that are
due to them, good for her.
But that’s not the whole agenda. Though she denies that
she is judging any woman’s decisions, and acknowledges that she struggles with
the work/family balance every day, there is a planted assumption in her advice
to women that work should prevail over family. Noting the small numbers of
women in top executive positions at Fortune 500 firms, Sandberg says, “The
problem, I am convinced, is that women are dropping out.”
There is no doubt that women drop out, though Sandberg
neglects to consider the 30 percent of small-business owners who are women.
Many more women than men prefer part-time work or no work when their children
are young. There is doubt as to whether this constitutes a problem. Women
students at Yale Law School, for example, have published a guide to top law
firms that rates them on family-friendliness. As students, these women, who can
certainly command some of the highest salaries in the American economy, are
thinking ahead about finding workplaces that permit flexibility.
Sandberg sees this phenomenon, and appears to condemn it.
“Don’t leave before you leave,” she advises, warning that women forego
promotions and more challenging assignments because they’re thinking about
having kids. This, she argues, makes it less likely that the woman will have a
fulfilling job to return to. “I’m here to tell you that once you have a child
at home, your job better be really good to go back, because it’s hard to leave
that kid at home.”
Leaving the kid appears to be the goal. But why? “I think
a world that was run where half our countries and half our companies were run
by women, would be a better world.”
Maybe. But I haven’t noticed that women heads of
government or women heads of companies behave differently from men. She’s
treating her preference as an assumed good. This is one of those little
vanities that is permitted to women but would be unacceptable coming from the
mouth of a man. No man would dare to suggest, for example, that the field of
nursing or teaching would be improved if men were more equally represented.
Isn’t it odd that people who exhort us to increase the
number of women in powerful, high-paying jobs, on the speculative grounds that
this will be good for the world, discount the roles of women as mothers, which
are (usually) of undeniable benefit to their kids? Many women have figured this
out. One put it this way: “The world will not be affected one way or another if
it has one more accountant during the next decade. But my kids will be
profoundly affected by having me raise them.”
Many women also find that devoting their time to raising
happy, ethical, and responsible children is more rewarding than spending 60 hours
a week at the office. Why should they be made to feel that they are letting
down the team?
“I hope that . . . you have the ambition to run the
world,” Sandberg told Barnard graduates, “because this world needs you to run
it.” But the world can wait. Kids can’t.
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