Part 9 (1/2)

As Gloria Steinem observed, ”Whoever has power takes over the noun-and the norm-while the less powerful get an adjective.”1 Since no one wants to be perceived as less powerful, a lot of women reject the gender identification and insist, ”I don't see myself as a woman; I see myself as a novelist/athlete/professional/fill-in-the-blank.” They are right to do so. No one wants her achievements modified. We all just want to be the noun. Yet the world has a way of reminding women that they are women, and girls that they are girls.

In between my junior and senior years of high school, I worked as a page in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., for my hometown congressman, William Lehman. The Speaker of the House at the time was the legendary Ma.s.sachusetts representative Tip O'Neill, and Congressman Lehman promised to introduce me to him before the summer ended. But as the days ticked by, it didn't happen. And it didn't happen. Then, on the very last day of the session, he made good on his promise. In the hall outside the House floor, he pulled me over to meet Speaker O'Neill. I was nervous, but Congressman Lehman put me at ease by introducing me in the nicest way possible, telling the Speaker that I had worked hard all summer. The Speaker looked at me, then reached over and patted my head. He turned to the congressman and remarked, ”She's pretty.” Then he turned his attention back to me and asked just one question: ”Are you a pom-pom girl?”

I was crushed. Looking back, I know his words were intended to flatter me, but in the moment, I felt belittled. I wanted to be recognized for the work I had done. I reacted defensively. ”No,” I replied. ”I study too much for that.” Then a wave of terror struck me for speaking up to the man who was third in line for the presidency. But no one seemed to register my curt and not-at-all clever response. The Speaker just patted me on the head-again!-and moved along. My congressman beamed.

Even to my teenage self, this s.e.xism seemed retro. The Speaker was born in 1912, eight years before women were given the right to vote, but by the time I met him in the halls of Congress, society had (mostly) evolved. It was obvious that a woman could do anything a man could do. My childhood was filled with firsts-Golda Meir in Israel, Geraldine Ferraro on the Mondale ticket, Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, Sally Ride in s.p.a.ce.

Given all these strides, I headed into college believing that the feminists of the sixties and seventies had done the hard work of achieving equality for my generation. And yet, if anyone had called me a feminist, I would have quickly corrected that notion. This reaction is prevalent even today according to sociologist Marianne Cooper (who also contributed her extraordinary research a.s.sistance to this book). In her 2011 article, ”The New F-Word,” Marianne wrote about college English professor Michele Elam, who observed something strange in her Introduction to Feminist Studies course. Even though her students were interested enough in gender equality to take an entire cla.s.s on the subject, very few ”felt comfortable using the word 'feminism.' ” And even ”fewer identified themselves as feminists.” As Professor Elam noted, it was as if ”being called a feminist was to suspect that some foul epithet had been hurled your way.”2

It sounds like a joke: Did you hear the one about the woman taking a feminist studies cla.s.s who got angry when someone called her a feminist? But when I was in college, I embraced the same contradiction. On one hand, I started a group to encourage more women to major in economics and government. On the other hand, I would have denied being in any way, shape, or form a feminist. None of my college friends thought of themselves as feminists either. It saddens me to admit that we did not see the backlash against women around us.3 We accepted the negative caricature of a bra-burning, humorless, man-hating feminist. She was not someone we wanted to emulate, in part because it seemed like she couldn't get a date. Horrible, I know-the sad irony of rejecting feminism to get male attention and approval. In our defense, my friends and I truly, if navely, believed that the world did not need feminists anymore. We mistakenly thought that there was nothing left to fight for.

I carried this att.i.tude with me when I entered the workforce. I figured if s.e.xism still existed, I would just prove it wrong. I would do my job and do it well. What I didn't know at the time was that ignoring the issue is a cla.s.sic survival technique. Within traditional inst.i.tutions, success has often been contingent upon a woman not speaking out but fitting in, or more colloquially, being ”one of the guys.” The first women to enter corporate America dressed in manly suits with b.u.t.ton-down s.h.i.+rts. One veteran banking executive told me that she wore her hair in a bun for ten years because she did not want anyone to notice she was a woman. While styles have relaxed, women still worry about sticking out too much. I know an engineer at a tech start-up who removes her earrings before going to work so coworkers won't be reminded that she is-shhh!-not a man.

Early in my career, my gender was rarely noted (except for the occasional client who wanted to fix me up with his son). Manly suits were no longer in fas.h.i.+on, and I neither hid nor emphasized femininity. I have never reported directly to a woman-not once in my entire career. There were higher-level women at the places I worked, but I wasn't close enough to see how they dealt with this issue on a daily basis. I was never invited to attend a single meeting that discussed gender, and there were no special programs for women that I can recall. That all seemed fine. We were fitting in, and there was no reason to call attention to ourselves.

But while gender was not openly acknowledged, it was still lurking below the surface. I started to see differences in att.i.tudes toward women. I started noticing how often employees were judged not by their objective performance, but by the subjective standard of how well they fit in. Given that the summer outing at McKinsey was a deep-sea fis.h.i.+ng trip and most company dinners ended with whiskey sipping and cigar smoking, I sometimes struggled to pa.s.s the ”fitting in” test. One night, encouraged by the male partners, I puffed away on a cigar-just one of the guys. Except that the smoking nauseated me and I reeked of cigar smoke for days. If that was fitting in, I stuck out.

Others also seemed aware that I was not one of the guys. When I was named the Treasury Department's chief of staff in 1999, several people remarked to me, ”It must have helped that you were a woman.” It was infuriating. Their intent may not have been malicious, but the implication was clear: I had not gotten the job on merit. I also figured that for every person pointing out my ”advantage” to my face, there were probably a dozen others saying it less politely behind my back. I considered my possible responses. I could explain that the last time I checked there was no affirmative action for women at Treasury. I could mention that my credentials lined up with those of the men who had previously held this position. If there was enough time, I could recount centuries of discrimination against women. Or I could just slap the person across the face. I tried all these options at least once. Okay, not the slap. But of the responses I did try, none of them worked.

It was a no-win situation. I couldn't deny being a woman; even if I tried, people would still figure it out. And defending myself just made me seem ... defensive. My gut and the signals I received from others cautioned me that arguing the issue would make me sound like a strident feminist. And I still did not want that. I also worried that pointing out the disadvantages women face in the workforce might be misinterpreted as whining or asking for special treatment. So I ignored the comments. I put my head down and worked hard.

Then, as the years ticked by, I started seeing female friends and colleagues drop out of the workforce. Some left by choice. Others left out of frustration, pushed out the door by companies that did not allow flexibility and welcomed home by partners who weren't doing their share of the housework and child rearing. Others remained but scaled back their ambitions to meet outsized demands. I watched as the promise my generation had for female leaders.h.i.+p dwindled. By the time I had been at Google for a few years, I realized that the problem wasn't going away. So even though the thought still scared me, I decided it was time to stop putting my head down and to start speaking out.

Fortunately, I had company. In 2005, my colleagues Susan Wojcicki and Marissa Mayer and I all noticed that the speakers who visited the Google campus were fascinating, notable, and almost always male. In response, we founded [email protected] and kicked off the new series with luminaries Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda, who were launching the Women's Media Center. As a former aerobics instructor, I was excited to meet Jane Fonda-and sucked in my stomach the whole time. From what I knew about the women's rights movement, I expected Gloria Steinem to be formidable and brilliant, which she was. But she was also charming and funny and warm-the absolute opposite of my childish image of the humorless feminist.

After the [email protected] event, Gloria invited me to speak at the Women's Media Center in New York. I said yes without hesitating. The day before the talk, I headed to the airport with Kim Malone Scott, who ran the Google publis.h.i.+ng teams. Kim is an experienced writer, so I figured she would help me craft a speech during the long flight. By the time I got through all of my backlogged e-mails, it was almost midnight. I turned to Kim for help and saw that she had fallen asleep. Long before Facebook made it popular, I thought about giving her a poke. But I couldn't bear to wake her up. Staring at the blank computer screen, I was at a complete loss. I had never spoken about being a woman in public before. Not once. I had no talking points or notes to turn to. Then I realized how striking this was ... and that I actually had quite a lot to say.

I began my talk the next day by explaining that in business we are taught to fit in, but that I was starting to think this might not be the right approach. I said out loud that there are differences between men and women both in their behavior and in the way their behavior is perceived by others. I admitted that I could see these dynamics playing out in the workforce, and that, in order to fix the problems, we needed to be able to talk about gender without people thinking we were crying for help, asking for special treatment, or about to sue. A lot poured out of me that day. Then I returned to Northern California and put the conversation on hold.

In the following four years, I gave two talks on women in the workplace, both behind closed doors to professional women's groups at nearby Stanford. Then one day, Pat Mitch.e.l.l called to tell me that she was launching TEDWomen and invited me to speak on social media. I told her I had another subject in mind and started pulling together a talk on how women can succeed in the workforce (a talk that TED later named ”Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders”). Very quickly, I became excited. And just as quickly, I learned that no one else shared my excitement. Friends and colleagues-both male and female-warned me that making this speech would harm my career by instantly typecasting me as a female COO and not a real business executive. In other words, I wouldn't be blending in.

I worried they might be right. Speaking at TED would be different from my previous keynotes. Although I would be addressing a sympathetic room, the talk would be posted on the web, where anyone could watch, and judge, and criticize.

Inside Facebook, few people noticed my TEDTalk, and those who did responded positively. But outside of Facebook, the criticism started to roll in. One of my colleagues from Treasury called to say that ”others”-not him, of course-were wondering why I gave more speeches on women's issues than on Facebook. I had been at the company for two and a half years and given countless speeches on rebuilding marketing around the social graph and exactly one speech on gender. Someone else asked me, ”So is this your thing now?”

At the time, I didn't know how to respond. Now I would say yes. I made this my ”thing” because we need to disrupt the status quo. Staying quiet and fitting in may have been all the first generations of women who entered corporate America could do; in some cases, it might still be the safest path. But this strategy is not paying off for women as a group. Instead, we need to speak out, identify the barriers that are holding women back, and find solutions.

The response to my TEDTalk showed me that addressing these issues openly can make a difference. Women forwarded the video to their friends, colleagues, daughters, and sisters. I began receiving e-mails and letters from women all over the world who wanted to share their stories of how they gained the courage to reach for more opportunities, sit at more tables, and believe more in themselves.

One of my favorite letters came from Sabeen Virani, a consultant in Dubai and the only woman in an office of more than three hundred employees. She responded to my story about the executive who could not point me to the women's bathroom because, as she explained, in her workplace, the women's bathroom did not even exist. Sabeen described how during her first week on the project, the client took her team out to dinner, but she couldn't join because the restaurant didn't allow women. Talk about not sitting at the table-she couldn't even get into the restaurant! Some of the men were openly hostile to Sabeen. Others just ignored her. But rather than give up and transfer to a friendlier office, she decided that she could demonstrate to everyone that women are competent professionals. In the end, she won her coworkers over and the client converted a bathroom into a women's bathroom just for her. She sent me a photo of her standing in front of a door with a printed sign that read simply and powerfully ”Toilets for women only.”

It was also enormously gratifying that men reacted positively to the talk too. Dr. John Probasco of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine told me that my story about women being more reluctant than men to raise their hands rang true for him so he decided to do away with the old hand-raising system during rounds. Instead, he started calling on male and female students evenly. He quickly realized that the women knew the answers just as well-or even better-than the men. In one day he increased female partic.i.p.ation. By making one small change to his behavior, he changed a much larger dynamic.

Major changes can result from these kinds of ”nudge techniques,” small interventions that encourage people to behave in slightly different ways at critical moments.4 The simple act of talking openly about behavioral patterns makes the subconscious conscious. For example, Google has an unusual system where engineers nominate themselves for promotions, and the company found that men nominated themselves more quickly than women. The Google management team shared this data openly with the female employees, and women's self-nomination rates rose significantly, reaching roughly the same rates as men's.

All the feedback from TED convinced me that I should keep speaking up and encouraging others to do the same. It is essential to breaking the logjam. Talking can transform minds, which can transform behaviors, which can transform inst.i.tutions.

I know it isn't easy. Anyone who brings up gender in the workplace is wading into deep and muddy waters. The subject itself presents a paradox, forcing us to acknowledge differences while trying to achieve the goal of being treated the same. Women, especially those at junior levels, worry that raising gender issues makes them appear unprofessional or as if they are blaming others. I have listened to women vent frustration over being undervalued and even demeaned on a daily basis at work. When I ask if they have aired any of these complaints to their superiors, they've responded, ”Oh no! I couldn't.” There is so much fear that speaking up will make the situation worse or even result in being penalized or fired. It seems safer to bear the injustice.

For men, raising this subject can be even harder. A male friend who runs a large organization once confided in me, ”It's easier to talk about your s.e.x life in public than to talk about gender.” The fact that he wouldn't go on record with this quote shows he meant it. Vittorio Colao, CEO of Vodafone, told me that he showed my TEDTalk to his senior management team because he shares my belief that women sometimes hold themselves back. He also believed this message was easier to hear from a woman than a man. His point is valid. If a man had delivered the same message or even gently pointed out that women might be taking actions that limited their options, he would have been pilloried.