As the title indicates, this is a rant about denying reality, not an attack on working mothers. Many mothers I know work because they have to. My comments in (bold parenthesis) because apparently WordPress struggles with the color red.
Sheryl Sandberg: ‘There’s No Such Thing As Work-Life Balance’
The Huffington Post | By Bianca Bosker Posted: 04/ 7/2012 9:58 am Updated: 04/12/2012 12:18 am
Pasted from <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/06/sheryl-sandberg_n_1409061.html?view=print&comm_ref=false>
Sheryl Sandberg is the chief operating officer of Facebook, a mother of two, and an outspoken advocate for women leaders. (Uh, not all of us, OK, HuffPo? Stop treating women like some homogeneous bloc. Didn’t work for our policy for Yugoslavia – won’t work here either. Idiots.)
Here’s one more reason she rocks: (SS rocks? I’ll be the judge of that, thanks.) she doesn’t pretend it’s easy.
“So there’s no such thing as work-life balance. There’s work, and there’s life, and there’s no balance,” (Now this is probably the most insightful thing SS has said in this interview. And I argue that b/c “there’s no balance” is exactly why mothers working full-time in very powerful jobs like SS’s are kidding themselves that their family is not neglected. The US corporate structure is a large, hungry beast that must be fed with resources, time, energy. It is a beast that makes only a glancing, token gesture toward providing “work/life balance.” Rubbish. The beast wants its pound of flesh, and it really does not care if you are married, single, parenting or not. It wants what it wants. And if you want to give it what it wants, you do so at the peril of your family.) said Sandberg in an interview for the Makers series from PBS and AOL, The Huffington Post’s parent company. Sandberg described pumping breast milk while on conference calls at the office during her time at Google.
The Facebook COO acknowledged the difficulties of being a working mother trying to juggle family responsibilities with a high power job. She also shared practical things women — and, importantly, men — can do to help women succeed in their careers and make a challenging situation work a bit better. (How about this for “practical,” SS? How about your family tries living on the meager salary of your husband? Come on – try it. I bet you wouldn’t even have to move to East Bay. There’s gotta be some house in Palo Alto you could afford. But then, if you quit Facebook, would Barry still choose you to host $30K a plate fundraisers at your house? Hmmmmmm…)
Women should choose a spouse who will support their ambitions, not only by offering words of encouragement, but by doing half of the work at home, from changing half of the diapers to doing half of the laundry, Sandberg advised. (Well, a spouse should probably be doing this anyway, regardless of the job arrangement. But what do I know?)
“The most important thing — and I’ve said it a hundred times and I’ll say it a hundred times — if you marry a man, marry the right one,” (Again, wise words. Girlfriend has a bit of yenta, which is nice to see. At least she didn’t say “Keep getting divorced and remarried until you find the right one.”) she said. “If you can marry a woman, that’s better because the split between two women in the home is pretty even, the data shows.” (Um, ok, wait a minute: WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY? Men and women are interchangeable, sayeth all-powerful-Oz. How utterly ridiculous, and just more proof that the Bay Area is a hellhole of amorality, where the rich make the rules, and recycle their garbage to feel less guilty about their latest IPO. But ask them a moral question? They’ll answer it in cultural Marxist terms, every time. That is because they live in a fantasyland echo chamber of their own making. Fantasyland, CA 90210.)
Women face two key challenges men do not, Sandberg argued: they experience guilt for working full time, and the more they succeed, the less they’re liked. (I’d like these people more if they weren’t so insufferable.)
“I feel guilty when my son says, ‘Mommy, put down the BlackBerry, talk to me’ and that happens far too much. (If this line is not one of the most heartbreaking things you have read in the past few years, then I don’t know what is. Go back and read it again. Here is a woman’s offspring begging her to mother him. Can she not figure this out on her own? Why does her son have to tell her? I thought she was all smart and stuff?) I think all women feel guilty. I think what’s interesting is I don’t know many men who feel guilty,” Sandberg said. (Pay attention folks – this is what 2 degrees from Harvard will buy you: The capability to regard biological roles and the emotions inherently attached to them as “interesting.” Look, I am not a mother and if I were, I don’t know if I’d be a very good one. All I know is, one day in 1998, I was on a train from Munich to Garmisch-Partenkirchen. There was a young couple with their infant sitting next to me. I heard the baby cry a certain way, and immediately thought: “Oh he’s tired.” Immediately thereafter I thought: “Where did that come from?” There is only one place that thought can come from, people, and it wasn’t from a Harvard education, lemmetellya. It’s from something far more lasting — it’s called gender.)
“I don’t know a lot of men who feel guilty for working full time, it’s expected that they’ll work full time…(Again, some remedial coursework is clearly required here. Why on earth would men feel guilty for working full time? It’s only if a man is not working full time that he would feel guilty! Why? Because not working full time means he is not taking care of his family. See how that works? Man: work full time – fulfill need and role to take care of family. Woman: work full time – feel guilty for not fulfilling need and role of taking care of family. This is only hard because people deny the truth. Sheesh, it is so annoying.) I wonder if there were more shared responsibility if more men would feel guilty too and women would feel less of it.” (Sorry I missed that one. Is the goal now to make men feel guilty too? So that women feel less guilty? What the hell is going on here? Is this about making more gender war, or raising healthy, well-adjusted children?)
Sandberg noted that for years she’s left work at 5:30 PM so she could be home for dinner with her children, but has only recently started saying so publicly. Her hope, she said, is that discussing it openly will encourage others to feel comfortable doing the same. (Maybe when they are grown up at least the kids will say “We used to see Mom at dinnertime, and sometimes she would even put down the Blackberry to talk to us.” Dunno if that would make me feel great as a Mom but hey, what do I know?)
Helping women to reach their full potential requires the world to become more accepting of powerful and successful women, Sandberg argued, adding that women face a tradeoff between success and likability that men do not. (Agreed. Again, I would argue that this occurs PRECISELY BECAUSE men and women are different. Is the answer to make us interchangeable? I don’t think so. Let’s try to stick to reality, Fantasyland dwellers. Please.)
“A woman, if you’re most intelligent or most likely to succeed, that’s an embarrassing thing or something that’s not considered attractive, and that’s something we need to change,” said Sandberg.
The Facebook COO was herself voted “most likely to succeed” in high school. She forced the yearbook editor to bury the title and pick someone else for the award, she said.
Sandberg added, “I want to tell any young girl out there who’s a geek, I was a really serious geek in high school. It works out. Study harder.” (Again, an area on which I agree with Mme. Sandberg. But if a girl studies hard, gets into great schools, and finishes one or more degrees, then goes on to get married and have a family, DON’T YOU DARE make her feel stupid or inadequate for wanting to be a stay-at-home Mom to raise her children, rather than outsource this crucial role to paid help.)
Hear Sandberg in her own words below, or check out Makers.com for the full interview, in which Sandberg remembers meeting Mark Zuckerberg for the first time, (Zzzzzzzzzz) discusses not heeding her own advice, and more.
Pasted from <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/06/sheryl-sandberg_n_1409061.html?view=print&comm_ref=false>
