Smashing the Glass Ceiling
I have found myself doing
some innocent professional stalking as of late.
I do this now and again; I
become fixated on someone who I, on some level relate to and feel a
professional admiration for.
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook
is my most recent target. Not only is she a Harvard grad, she worked with the
World Bank on health projects involving blindness, Aids and leprosy in India. That’s
only the foundation of her career. She continued on to work with the Clinton
administration, moved over to Google and then took the COO position at
Facebook.
And of course it was just
announced that she will become a director – “adding the first woman
to a seven-man board.”
Not a bad resume….
But that’s not what impresses
me.
She is one of the only senior female executives who is actively talking about the lack of female presence in C-suites. She is using her platform whenever possible to create momentum for her peers as well as younger generations. She acknowledges there is still a problem and in direct, yet gracious ways, she is asking all of us to continue to ask “Why and what can we do as both men and women to create change?”
In a ted talk she speaks
about “Why they’re aren’t more women leaders.”
Find a moment to listen; she offers more than the ole’ recycled glass
ceiling speech.
“Of the 190 heads of states,
9 are women.”
“Of all of the people in
parliament in the world, 13% are women.”
“Corporate or c-suite
positions, 15-16% are held by women.”
“In the not-for-profit sector, where it’s thought that there is a higher number of women in top positions, only 20% are held by women.”
And she says all this with
the conviction of a soldier and the softness of a woman. She speaks as an
executive and a mother – rarely separating the two. “Kid talk at the office” is
a common debate behind closed doors across all industries. Sandberg herself has
struggled with the same issue.
In the video below she speaks
of her commitment to leave the office at 5:30 pm everyday to have dinner with
her kids. What I found interesting is her confession that only in the last
couple of years, has she admitted to it publicly.
As she states, and I
wholeheartedly agree, this is an issue for both men and women. Although she
also says that women have to make harder decisions to keep a place at the boardroom
table. Part of the issue is the division of labor at home.
In the earlier Ted video she
talks about “marking your partner a real partner” referencing a US study that
outlines “of the senior managers who are married shown in the study, 2/3 of the
men are married without kids and only 1/3 with kids. “If both men and women
work full time, the woman does twice the amount of housework, and three times
that amount of childcare.”
All of this suggesting that
we put more pressure on our boys to succeed (as defined by status and material
gain) than our girls. And her concluding statement is a good one, although I’m
not sure how likely “If we’re going to make the playing field more equal, we
have to make it easy for men to stay home (to rear children.)”
There isn’t just one issue
with equality of men and women at work. For
now, we can give it our best effort to understand how we can mitigate the
problem by being mindful of the messages we send and our delivery of those
messages.
Most importantly, we should
consider the messages we send to the ones closest to us. After all, the future
leaders who will be sitting around the boardroom table in 20, 30, 40 years, are
the ones sitting around our kitchen table tonight.
Best,
Shoana Prasad
Glenwood Consulting Group Inc.
www.glenwoodinc.com
shoana@glenwoodinc.com
416 722 6124
