WOMEN SPECIAL...The Sandberg doctrine : JUST GRAB THAT SEAT

The Sandberg doctrine : JUST GRAB THAT SEAT 

Sheryl Sandberg has triggered off fresh debate about women at work

    Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has become one of those 21st century achievers whose picture, accompanied by a motivating quote, adorns laptop screensavers. She is the woman who famously said “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.” Sandberg, who has always been vocal about women at the workplace and who just revealed that she turned down the top job at LinkedIn two years ago to have a second child, has written a book that has stirred up the debate started by Anne Marie Slaughter last year.
    Writing in The Atlantic in July 2012, Slaughter had asserted that women “still can’t have it all”. According to Sandberg, this is because they decide too early that they can’t have it all.
    In her book Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead (out in March), Sandberg says that women are wrecking their own careers by making early choices that are governed too much by their future roles. A young girl, just out of college, may choose a less demanding graduate program because she thinks it will lead to a career that will be easier to handle when she starts a family seven or eight years down the line.
    “We hold ourselves back... by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in,” Sandberg writes, according to an excerpt in The New York Times. “We internalise the negative messages we get throughout our lives, the messages that say it’s wrong to be outspoken, aggressive, more powerful than men. We lower our own expectations of what we can achieve.”
    Sandberg exhorts young women to ‘lean in’ instead of pulling back, and during a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, she told a roomful of CEOs: “We know the childbearing years are a challenge for women, [and for companies] to keep them”. Business Insider quotes Sandberg as saying, “How many managers in this audience have sat down with a woman… and said, ‘You may want to have a child one day, I want to talk to you about that’... Every HR department tells you not to do that… but how are we going to get women through that frame if we can’t have that conversation?”
    The story of an early female corporate employee provides an insight into why women are kept forever tapping at that glass ceiling. In an interview with Huffington Post, mathematician Eleanor Kolchin, who was hired by IBM in 1946, revealed that she had to keep her marriage a secret in order to hold on to her job. “At that time, IBM fired you if you got married. The reason was, it was the end of the war and they wanted to hire people who had fought in the war… I did get married on the sly.”
    Are you still surprised by the fact that until sometime ago, a 200-year-old law prohibiting Parisian women from wearing trousers was officially in effect?

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