Category Archives: Women in Business

The Danger of Assumptions

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An assumption is something we take for granted or accept as true without proof.  Assumptions are a necessary and important part of life – without them we would waste a tremendous amount of time verifying every detail of life’s operations. Assumptions make daily living more practical in matters ranging from interacting with our family to driving a car and doing complex projects at work.

But assumptions can be dangerous – they can limit our options and creativity, even our growth and development.  My focus here, however, is when assumptions lead us to errors in our actions and judgement with negative consequences.  I’ll give an example.

Early on at SugarSync we identified the need to improve many of our written documents – marketing, support articles, product documentation etc.  We were still small and only had  budget for a part time contractor.  One of our team members knew of such a person from a prior technical company where she also was a part-time contractor.  She is a mother with young children, her husband traveled quite a bit for work and at the time she wanted a part-time flexible arrangement.  This was a great mutual fit and she joined our team in this capacity.  She was highly competent and well liked by her colleagues.  As SugarSync grew we realized that we really needed full-time efforts on this function.  It didn’t occur to us that she would be interested in such a role so we started recruiting.  A couple of months later (we hadn’t hired the full-time person, in part because they didn’t measure up) our contractor gave notice that she had a full-time offer.  How could this be?  She assumed that we must not have liked her very much if we didn’t offer her the position.  We assumed that she was not interested in full-time work or would have spoken up when the workload increased or when we posted the position.  Fortunately this situation had a happy ending and she joined SugarSync full-time but it was an unnecessarily close call with a lot of avoidable heartache and time spent by both sides on recruiting.

This was a reminder to all involved about the need for extra communication and especially about the need to validate assumptions.  These types of assumptions about an individual’s career goals are particularly risky and can be incorrectly influence by gender.  Assumptions that were once valid can become erroneous in even short periods of time.  People change, their situations change.  Marketplaces and business, especially in technology, are extremely dynamic making assumptions particularly risky.

I believe that consciousness of our assumptions is one of the key foundations of critical thinking skills.  Engaging in a Socratic thought process of “what are we assuming” “how did we choose those assumptions” and “what could we assume instead” can raise this consciousness and open up creative avenues for solving existing problems with new ideas.

Assumptions are at the heart of bias and stereotypes and recognizing and questioning our assumptions is the key to change.  I believe the overwhelming evidence that diverse teams create better results is founded on the higher likelihood of those teams to overcome false assumptions and biases.  Successful leaders foster an environment that challenges assumptions and associated limits.  Innovative companies by definition have successfully challenged widely-held assumptions.  That’s why my favorite saying on the topic is this one by Ken Olson “The best assumption to have is that any commonly held belief is wrong”

I’d love to hear any examples you want to share of interesting or important false assumptions!

Why Read “Lean In”

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I was fortunate last week to spend four straight days of focus on women in business and education.  One of the highlights was getting to hear Sheryl Sandberg talk about “Lean In.”  I had just finished reading the book a couple of weeks ago – most of the material in her talk came straight out of the book but it was nice to hear it directly.

My takeaway is this – the messages in the book are truly important for both women and men to hear.  They are well researched and presented with personal examples which makes the book enjoyable to read.

The messages that I found most significant that I wanted to reiterate are these:

1. Be cognizant of the negative images presented of working mothers in the media.  After all, it’s not a very interesting story to talk about how people are functioning well.  The vast majority of working mothers are portrayed negatively – either as having no personal life or as “always harried and guilt ridden think Sarah Jessica Parker in I Don’t Know how She Does It” (p.23).  Women are surrounded by headlines warning them that they can’t do it all, even though the data actually contradicts this – “Employed women reap rewards including greater financial security, more stable marriages, better health, and, in general, increased life satisfaction” (p.24).

Reminding ourselves that there is tremendous bias in this portrayal and noticing the role models who are thriving can help us aspire to the same.  As parents we can point them out to our children and remind our friends and colleagues. These societally driven negative perceptions will be self-fulfilling prophecies if we don’t guard against them.

2. Multiple research studies show that women underestimate themselves and society underestimates them.  When women underestimate themselves and when they attribute their success not to themselves but to others or luck (a related tendency) they, not surprisingly, do not aspire as high.  Our culture and the media confirmation perpetuates this.

Awareness of this self talk, boosting our female colleagues, friends and family and debunking unfair reviews by media and others are important to balance this tendency.  Keeping these biases in mind, women can ask themselves are they not applying for or accepting the promotion due to unsubstantiated insecurities?  Similarly, as managers we may need to seek out women and suggest they consider expanded roles, and certainly not hold it against them if they don’t apply as readily.

3.  Sandberg describes the success/likeability double standard that pervades our culture.  The research clearly shows that “success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women” (p.40).  Women are intuitive enough to sense this double standard and either consciously or unconsciously hold themselves back.  I’ve seen devastating consequences of this double standard for my women friends and colleagues – both socially and professionally.  It takes a very thick skin to put yourself in the fray and there is a price to pay.  This ties back to the underestimation point (above) as stated by to author Ken Auletta in the New Yorker “self-doubt becomes a form of self-defense”

This barrier is a tough one to get over – we are social creatures, we want and even need to be liked.  Unfortunately, for now, we need to learn to withstand this criticism – not ignore it  – it is ok to let the feelings exist, but by not dwelling we can prove this myth wrong and work to change it – once again, awareness is the most important step.

There are other important messages in the book and I applaud Sandberg for putting herself out there in writing the book and for including her many personal stories.  Of course, her resources gives her options and support that most working mothers don’t have.  I found myself chuckling that her description of her and her husband’s marital division of household labor doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of things like laundry and cleaning (p.111).  Nevertheless, the main points and issues she describes and certainly the ones above are true for women of all socioeconomic positions.

As far as the criticism and controversy that has surrounded the book, especially at first (I note that it has died down – I think now that more people have actually read it) I find it to be the height of irony.  Many of the critics are displaying exactly the kind of biases  Sandberg writes about – certainly the likeability one.  I see no reason not to assume her absolute best intentions.  We should applaud her for applying her talents and ambition and “Leaning In” to support and encourage women and families.

Working From Home

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The recent Yahoo policy banning working from home has become quite controversial spawning many articles and even a highway 101 billboard.  Over the years I’ve managed teams using a range of policies so I have some definite views about what works and what doesn’t in different situations.  And that is the key point…this is not a one size fits all theory but one that is specific to the business and it’s situation at the time.

It wasn’t so long ago that we did not have the tools to make working from home practical.   As I’ve written about here previously, in my early days at Informix – pre laptop, pre internet at home, I would need to go back to the office to work in the evening or weekends.  Those tools and technologies enhanced by web and video conferencing allow us to be extremely effective even when not in the office.

I’ve experienced varying degrees of remote work effectiveness during my career.  When I was at Netscape (post IPO 97-03), the success of the Mozilla project and browser development in general was strongly impacted by key developers who worked remotely.  Their talents would become obvious from their open source contributions and either they would participate long term as key volunteers or in several cases we hired them as employees.  Most of those individuals stayed working in their locations as far away as Europe and New Zealand.  We also had some star employees who had to move out of the area for personal reasons.  What made these situations work well was the proven talent and work ethic of these individuals plus the open source infrastructure to manage their contributions and assess their performance.  There was a critical mass of remote employees that meant that large group meetings were always set up with dial-in numbers and managers were trained to facilitate.  We even had one director who effectively managed a multi-location team from Boulder.  That being said, most employees were in the office most of the time and it was a very collaborative culture.

My next role, ironically given the impetus for this post was at Yahoo.  I was there from 2003-2004 – during the heyday.  It is interesting to note that people rarely worked from home during that time.

When I got to Check Point to manage the Zone Labs division I inherited a very liberal work from home policy.  In addition, Wednesday and Friday were supposed to be “no-meetings” days.   Early on my manager Eyal Desheh expressed concern about the productivity and work ethic of the team.  My first assumption was that he didn’t understand Silicon Valley culture and how this could actually work.  Unfortunately, his warnings were correct.  The issue wasn’t the work from home as much as a lack of drive related to many typical post acquisition HR issues.  The work ethic issues were far from universal but they were contagious and affected everyone and working from home accentuated the problems.  I quickly changed the work from home policy for the people who reported to me.  The “no meetings” policy was changed to not apply to my team nor managers in the engineering organization and it eventually fell away (although managing the amount of time spent in meetings, particularly for engineers is critical).  The transition was difficult and created lots of handwringing but it improved productivity quickly and morale soon after.

When I started at SugarSync I was glad to see that our culture was one of people working primarily in the office.  In January of 2009 we were 13 people – the challenge was great to just get the job done with such a small team.  We couldn’t afford missteps anoffice spaced missed communication and collaboration possibilities by not being together.  We kept that policy going as we hired – it is much easier if the ground rules are clear from the start.  We designed our new office to be a very open setup to foster collaboration.

This didn’t mean it was easy – SugarSync has several people commuting long distances.  We always have had flextime – working slightly earlier or later schedules to avoid the traffic but still we were generally in the office together during the main part of the day.  Of course this doesn’t mean we didn’t recognize that people have life issues that require occasional work from home – a sick child, dentist appointments, plumbing emergencies but those are the exception not the norm.

For a startup in a fast moving industry such as the cloud, the work environment is dynamic and high-pressure.  Challenging problems require creativity and quick teamwork to solve.  I believe we were much more effective at SugarSync by being together.  As the team grew the learning curve was shortened dramatically for newcomers working alongside the experienced people.  Once people were working in our environment and saw the benefits of close proximity and collaboration they understood why it was needed and embraced it.  One of my favorite questions to ask new hires was what surprised them the most about SugarSync – a frequent answer was how they thought we were a much larger team than we in fact were.  I think this was a reflection of the team’s productivity.

Is it always better to be together in the office?  For certain tasks that require extended, uninterrupted time, working away from the office can be more productive (assuming you have an appropriate environment for concentration at the alternate location).  Some roles, like sales or field support by their nature are not in the office.  Many people have critical points in time where they need more time away from the office perhaps due to a health or other personal issue for them or a family member.  Allowing them to work remotely allows key people to stay with the company and maintain project continuity.

So what’s my net on this important debate?  For me it’s clear.  If at all possible, have the team primarily working together in the office during work hours.  If there are critical hires you can only make (or keep) it might be worth considering exceptions recognizing the consequences and need to manage around them.  For a company in crisis or a turnaround situation (like Yahoo) or where there is reason to believe there are productivity issues (again like Yahoo) having everyone much more together in the office may be one of the keys to the turnaround.   For a fast growing startup in a very intense space requiring collaboration and team problem solving working in the office together is important.

Does this make juggling work and personal life less easy – perhaps.  This is why companies need to be reasonably consistent.  If the reports of Marissa Mayer’s in the office nursery are true I would find that to be insensitive to the other parents of babies who are coming to the office without that close access.  We must, after all,  lead by example.  The example that I tried to set was to work hard and collaborate together during the workday.  When not in a crunch time, to leave early enough to have a few hours, including dinner, with the family and then, if needed, get back on line after the kids went to bed (or were doing their homework independently).    As managers and leaders we need to figure out what works best for our businesses and our teams.  These observations are what I have found to be most effective.

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Transition Time

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I’ve written quite often on this blog about transitions – they are a natural part of life and any business ecosystem, and embracing change is part of making the most of new opportunities.  2013 marks a transition for SugarSync, and myself.  We have launched a search for a new CEO.

SugarSync has undergone a wonderful transition over the last several months.  SugarSync 2.0 launched successfully to great reviews including PCWorld and PCMagazine.  I couldn’t be more proud of this product.  Our team of designers and engineers took our highly-rated core sync foundation and rearchitected the user experience for simplicity while continuing to innovate around sharing.  The goal was to better serve an ever-expanding set of users, including businesses and larger enterprises who are rapidly moving to the cloud. Consumerization of IT is real and we are experiencing this phenomenon first hand at SugarSync.

Simultaneously, the mass-market consumer space is experiencing a competitive environment that poses challenges for any company who wants to invest in growth.  SugarSync is in a prime position to continue our growth trajectory serving business customers in addition to consumers. From a product perspective, our strategy remains strong. The vast majority of upcoming features will serve both audiences extremely well.

From a company prospective, SugarSync needs to evolve its strategy to better serve business customers. This means dramatically expanding SaaS channel opportunities and corporate sales functions, among other changes.

After quite a bit of thoughtful introspection, I came to the realization that SugarSync would be best led by a CEO with deep and recent expertise in this type of SaaS enterprise environment.  After further discussion with our board of directors, we agreed to begin the search for a new CEO for SugarSync.

It’s impossible to fully express my gratitude to and appreciation of the entire SugarSync team. What an amazing group of professionals and technologists. I will continue to serve as CEO and Board member during this transition and will do everything in my power to support the Board and new CEO.  After four years of building such an exciting business, I am committed to doing everything possible to make sure we realize SugarSync’s maximum potential.

Of course, this was an extremely difficult decision.   I have often said that while I did not give birth to SugarSync (for that I need to thank its visionary founders), I adopted it and have loved it as if I were here from the start.   I joined the company during one of the most challenging economic times in Silicon Valley’s history.  We were near bankruptcy, the broader economy had melted down and employees were fleeing – we were down to 13 people.   I’ve loved pouring my energies into rebuilding the team, launching a successful freemium model, signing and launching many major partnerships with global companies such as Samsung, Lenovo, and many others.  We’ve raised multiple rounds of financing at increasing (more than twenty fold) valuations, and so much more. SugarSync increased its user base five fold last year and experienced a dramatic increase in our revenue. We were proud of achieving 99th in the 2011 Inc500 with $11million of revenue and have continued to exceed a 100% growth rate. More importantly, the business is in an excellent financial position to continue strong growth.  I’ve been honored to be a part of this team.

So…what’s next for me?  SugarSync was a turnaround situation based on an idea and a dream from the original founders.  I have some startup ideas of my own and I’m excited to invest time vetting these possibilities to understand their true potential.   In addition, given my experience leading both direct-to-consumer and partner-oriented successes at SugarSync, I am being approached by several companies to advise or help lead the charge to solve similar go-to-market challenges.  I want to be able to give those opportunities due consideration and I’m really looking forward to helping make a difference in start-up successes.

And finally, as readers here know, I’m deeply passionate about supporting women in startups and technology. Silicon Valley is more welcoming to women entrepreneurs than ever before in my 20+ years here, and it’s an exciting time to support this new generation of leaders. I’m looking forward to having the time to take a more direct and active role in supporting their success.

As CEO of SugarSync I haven’t had the time to participate fully in the broader conversation of women in technology and, even more interestingly, envisioning new experiences on the internet – I look forward to doing that in the coming months.

I’d like to take one last opportunity to thank the amazing SugarSync team, our dedicated board of directors, and most importantly, all of our loyal customers. This has been an amazing and humbling experience, and I’m grateful for every second of it.

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No Excuses Please

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I had the true pleasure of speaking at the Women’s Entrepreneur Festival last week in NY.  It was a great conference organized by Joanne Wilson aka GothamGal and Nancy Hechinger of NYU’s ITP program.  I always find gatherings like this refreshing and energizing.  Here are a couple of pictures from Wednesday morning.wefblog2

The attendees (almost all women) representing all ages and ethnicities, were bright, ambitious and fun to talk to.  The vibe was great – lots of exchange of ideas as well as mutual support.  A significant observation I made, however, was regarding the speakers.  There were 26 speakers – all women.  Mostly entrepreneurs but also several venture capitalists.  The entrepreneurs were from a range of industries, stages and sizes of company, several of them quite substantial.  The investors were primarily early stage but covered a range as well.  A large percentage of the women (many of whom have young children) traveled cross country to participate in the conference.

Women 2.0 has published the agenda for their annual conference on 2/14.  They have a great lineup of (mostly) women speakers as well.

These conference organizers didn’t seem to have any problem filling their program with quality, qualified women speakers.  The women are there.  They are willing to speak.  They will do a phenomenal job.  This idea that there is a choice between quality and diversity is simply another false dichotomy.

My message to those who say they cannot have a gender-balanced conference agenda, you are simply not trying hard enough.  Perhaps you are suffering from an unconscious bias. Perhaps you are unlucky to have interacted in your career only with a narrow group that is not diverse.  Whatever the reason it doesn’t matter – the good news is this problem is proven to be solvable, no excuses please.

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ITP’s Women Entrepreneur Festival Open for Application.

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The NYU Tisch School’s Interactive Technology Program (ITP) is holding it’s third annual Women Entrepreneur Festival this coming January.  I am thrilled to be speaking as part of this great program.  More information about the program is here.  I encourage those interested to apply early.  Last year there were over 600 applicants for 300 spots.  In their words the goal of the WE Festival is “to sow the seeds for a community of women entrepreneurs; to expose women who have not yet taken the entrepreneurial leap, the pre-entrepreneurs, to women who have.”

Thanks to the organizers – Joanne Wilson aka Gotham Gal and Nancy Hechinger of ITP.

 

Why Diversity

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There have been several great studies and related articles recently about the improved business results that come from diversity.  According to Credit Suisse Research Institute, over the past six years, companies with at least some female board representation outperformed those with no women on the board in terms of share price performance.  According to a recent study by Dow Jones Venture Source having, a higher proportion of female executives at a venture-backed start-up improves the company’s chances for success.  Specifically:

  • “In comparing successful versus unsuccessful companies, the overall median proportion of female executives is 7.1% and 3.1%, respectively, demonstrating the value that having more females can potentially bring to a management team.
  • We also see that a company’s odds for success (versus unsuccess) increase with more female executives at the VP and director levels.”

The study, based on a very large database of companies (n=20,194) contains a wealth of other interesting data, in particular the fact that companies grow their percentage of female executives over time.  I encourage those with an interest in this topic to read the entire study.

So this is great news and hopefully the publicity about this news will cause people to examine their companies, investments and open more doors.  I’ve always assumed that diversity led to improved results and am thrilled to see such compelling data.  The question still remains though as to why.  I can think of three possible explanations.

My first thought is that perhaps the dramatic absence of diversity at the unsuccessful companies reflects a management team and board that is almost by definition (complete absence of women when there is available talent) horribly biased and closed minded.  This parochialism then impairs their business judgement leading to poorer outcomes.

Another theory assumes significant bias for women during their careers and that those who make it to the executive ranks are higher performing than their peers.  This reminds me of the time (December 1987) our family took a vacation in Israel and Egypt.  One of the highlights was the sightseeing we did in Cairo before heading south for a Nile river cruise.  Before we left a friend gave me a tip to ask for a female tour guide.  She explained to me that competition for the government licensed tour guide positions and discrimination against women was so fierce that any woman who managed to get a position would be particularly well qualified.

Both of these theories don’t ring true to me.  I’m sure the first one exists (hopefully not in large quantity) but there could be other explanations for the absence of women.  Regarding the second idea – it is not clear to me that the biases against women are so strong before the executive level that this would lead to such a positive selection bias.

I believe the truth must lie somewhere in the dynamics of the diverse team itself.  I started researching this topic and came across this Cornell study. Why Differences Make a Difference: A Field Study of Diversity, Conflict, and  Performance in Workgroups.  First off it is interesting the lack of recent studies – this one dates from the 90’s.  I found this study and several of those that predated and led to it to be fascinating.  They break down diversity into 3 components,  informational diversity, social category diversity and value diversity.

Not surprisingly, informational diversity (diversity of, for instance, functional, job and practical experiences) is positively correlated with performance.  Value diversity, due to heightened conflict is negatively correlated with performance.  Social category (e.g. age, gender, race) diversity was less clear.  Counter-intuitively their study showed positive correlation between morale and social category diversity.  Perhaps social category diversity itself is positively correlated with informational diversity which leads to improved performance.

I believe strongly in the benefits of informational and social category diversity.  Avoiding hiring a large percentage of team members from a particular company (though it is a natural tendency) is critical.  I believe that social category diversity helps insure some extra informational diversity plus make day-to-day life in the company more socially interesting.  It is not easy to achieve this – in fact it likely takes extra effort by the stakeholders, particularly to achieve this while ensuring similarity of values and goals, but the results are clearly worth it both in terms of the results and enjoyment along the way.

TechWomen in Washington DC

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I wrote previously about being a TechWomen mentor.  After three weeks Rola Issa wrapped up her project at SugarSync at the end of September.   We celebrated with dinner at our home as well as some cultural indoctriniation attending my son’s high school football game.  She then spent two additional days in various training programs at Google and Fenwick & West then all of the women in the program went to the Grace Hopper Celebration in Baltimore.  Several program participants from last year presented papers.  ­After Grace Hopper the group traveled to Washington DC.  They got to take a tour of the White House and visit some of the more important sites in the Capital.

I met up with the group on Monday.  They were at my masters degree alma mater Georgetown for a leadership training day with Barbara Fittipaldi.  Barbara had some great techniques to encourage the women to think big in terms of their plans and goals – to get beyond self-limiting thinking.

Tuesday and Wednesday we had a variety of briefings at the State Department.  One of the most interesting to me was regarding the web communication and social media strategy and operations at the State Department and White House.  We heard from Macon Phillips, White House New Media Director and Victoria Esser, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State.  Both of them have private sector communications backgrounds.

I found it really interesting to learn about the size and scope of the State Departments web presence.  The main website gets nearly three million unique visitors per day.  They are present on all of the major social media platforms in multiple languages.  For many years technologies such as phone, fax and email had enabled a greater centralization of diplomatic functions in headquarters but it seems to me that the advent of social media has changed that trend to one of greater decentralization.  Most of the Twitter and Facebook presences are managed in-country by the local embassy.  I think this is a healthy phenomenon – particularly in this era of real-time communication and the importance social media has played in such political changes such as the Arab spring.

There were also representatives from both major parties who briefed the group on their Foreign Policy initiatives and did some education for the TechWomen about the US election process e.g. electoral college.  Things got a little sticky during the Q&A when several of the TechWomen pressed on our Iran policies.  There was clearly a sentiment amongst some of the TechWomen that nuclear non-proliferation policies were unfair to developing countries and many of them had a very different point of view as compared to almost any mainstream point on the US political spectrum as to the origin of the conflict in Syria.  The speakers were fairly deft in sidestepping some of this given the public forum.  Actually Rola and I had some very open and frank conversations about Middle East politics.  Her family, as is common in Jordan is Palestinian.  We didn’t always agree but we could discuss the topic respectfully which was such a great opportunity for both of us.

While disappointed that Secretary Clinton wasn’t able to meet with our group we enjoyed a formal luncheon in the Benjamin Franklin dining room at the State Department where we were addressed by Assistant Secretary, Ann Stock.  She talked about the various programs  that were part of the Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues.

Overall it is hard to imagine a more educational program being prepared for the TechWomen – from entrepreneurship, leadership, technology, women in technology and public policy I believe they got a tremendous amount of training in 6 weeks.  It is certainly rewarding to participate in people-to-people programs such as this one. How much leverage there is in a program such as TechWomen is hard to know but I do think it can have an impact with the participants and their first level contacts on both sides.  I’m glad I and the rest of the SugarSync team was able to be a part of this program.

In the Loy Henderson Auditorium for our briefings

And on the deck overlooking the mall

The Benjamin Franklin Dining Room
 

TechWomen

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When I learned about the TechWomen Program of the US Department of State I knew immediately I wanted to be involved.  Readers of this blog know of my early career goal to be a diplomat.  I have long been interested in the Middle East and have visited Israel, Egypt and Jordan.  While I love what I’m doing now and the international experiences my career has afforded me (I’m writing this post from my hotel room in Seoul) I do sometimes find myself missing the work I thought I would do in the international development field so when “extracurricular” opportunities to be involved pop up I’m thrilled.

The goal of the TechWomen program is to empower high-potential technical.  The program “brings emerging women leaders in technology sectors from the Middle East and North Africa together with their American counterparts for a professional mentorship and exchange program at leading companies in the United States”.

I applied to be a professional mentor several months ago and was thrilled to learn in July that I was matched with Rola Issa from Amman, Jordan.  Rola works in a software company as a database expert and had traveled throughout the Gulf states for her company on key projects.  She was interested in focusing her internship, however, more on the business and marketing side of Silicon Valley.  I assured her we had plenty of potential projects.  Entry into the program is highly competitive for the TechWomen so I was not surprised at Rola’s competence and initiative.

Rola arrived last Wednesday.  After several days of training they had Sunday free.  I invited Rola to join me for my usual Sunday morning hike with friends.  We enjoyed a gorgeous morning at Hidden Villa then lunch and some errands in downtown Los Altos. Monday was the first day of work as part of our marketing team on a project.

In addition to the internship, the TechWomen are paired with a cultural mentor and participate in several formal training programs.  They will all be attending the Grace Hopper Conference in Baltimore as well as educational programs in Washington, DC.  The program culminates with a visit to the State Department and meeting with Secretary Clinton who is the program sponsor.  I’m looking forward to a fun few weeks!

Moms working Full Time – the Norm not the Exception

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Since a picture’s worth a thousand words this blog post can be short.  Take a look at this chart from the US Department of Health and Human Services website:

Many, many American women to the tune of 10’s of millions are today working full-time while caring for their children under 18.  This number has increased nearly 50% in the last 40 years.

The attention drawn by the Anne Marie Slaughter piece and others are distracting people from this reality.  Most mothers “have it all”, not a mythical idealized “all” but a sleeplessly busy “all” of full-time work as a key breadwinner for the family and loving care of their children.  For many the work is fulfilling and enjoyable, for some it isn’t, just as it ranges for men.

Don’t be fooled by Atlantic headlines or even perhaps your social circle.  The question is not if but how.  And that’s where we should focus our energies – not in debating the “if” but in solving the “how”.  How can we make sure these parents and families live in a society and community that provides the structure and support needed for their health and happiness.