Marianne Schnall: Why do you think it is that we’ve not had a woman president so far?

Sheryl Sandberg: I have a great story for you. There’s a song that has all the names of the presidents, and so my kids were learning the names of all the presidents and my daughter, at four, looked at me, and her first question was, “Mommy, why are they all boys?”

I think women in leadership suffer from stereotyping, and when people expect a stereotype and are reminded of a stereotype, that actually makes the stereotype stronger. It’s called stereotype threat, and it’s why when women check off “Miss” or girls check off “Female” before taking a math test, the research shows they actually do worse. What has happened is that there aren’t women in leadership roles, therefore people don’t expect there to be women in leadership roles, therefore, there aren’t women in leadership roles.

MS: What can we do to change that?

SS: It starts young. Girls are discouraged from leading at an early age. The word “bossy” is largely applied to girls, not boys. I think we need to expect and encourage our girls and women to lead and contribute. And I think we are so focused on supporting what we call “choice,” that we don’t mean real choice. When we say choice, we mean women get to choose to work or have families. We don’t mean men choose to work or have families. Real choice would mean that people were choosing based on their interests and personal passions, not based on their gender.

MS: There is also the impact of how we treat women leaders. For example, some of the sexist commentary when Hillary was running, or some of the comments that are always made about women leaders like Nancy Pelosi. When women are in positions of power, or seen as confident or ambitious, they’re often portrayed as unlikable.

SS: They are un-liked. As a woman gets more successful, she is less liked by people of both genders, and as a man gets more successful, he does not take a likability hit.

MS: Where is the entry for change? Is it in the media? Is it in our educational systems? Where can we fix some of these problems?

SS: It’s the classic chicken-and-egg problem. We need more women leaders to show more women they can lead … and we need to show more women they can lead to get more women leaders. I think the first thing we need to do is decide that the status quo is not okay. When I say women have been 15 percent or 16 percent of the leadership in corporate America for ten years and it hasn’t moved, people are astonished: “Really? It hasn’t moved in ten years? We’ve stopped making progress?”
So the first thing is acknowledging there is a problem and deciding we want it to get better. In our society, we don’t talk about gender, at all. I don’t understand how you fix a problem if you can’t acknowledge you have one.

MS: One of the things in particular that I think affects the political sphere—in terms of the dearth of women running for office—is the fact that it’s such a hostile, mud-slinging experience where candidates are subjected to so much criticism. Do you think that’s part of the reason that sometimes women are deterred from entering politics, because women are less likely to want to subject themselves to that?

SS: Yes, but also because women are less liked by running. It is all self-reinforcing, all of which we can change. I really believe we can change it. I think the dialogue on whether or not women can do it—can we have it all—is incredibly harmful. We need to recognize that we can’t do it all, that we face trade-offs every single minute of the day. We have to stop beating ourselves up for not doing everything perfectly.

MS: What I think is so important about what you bring into the whole equation is the connection between a woman’s personal and family life, just the realities of balancing that and how that impacts this whole conversation. How do you see the influence of gender roles? Some of this is not just specific to women, but it involves men changing their gender roles as well, yet we rarely talk about it.

SS: I know. I think that is a problem. We are stuck in our gender-specific roles and so it’s just reinforcing. In my book, Lean In, I tell the story of my friend Sharon. She said that her daughter went to school, she was seven or something, and she was introducing her parents. She said, “This is Steve. He builds buildings and he loves to sing. This is Sharon,” and she shows pictures of her parents, “She works full time. She wrote a book, and she never picks me up.” Steve never picks her up! Sharon picks her up more than Steve, but that’s what kids see.

I wrote a lot in my book about being identified as Facebook’s female COO, and I actually did a Google search for “Facebook’s male CEO” and there are no results, zero. I don’t wake up in the morning and say, “What am I going to do today as Facebook’s female COO?” But that is how I’m viewed by the world. I wrote at the end of my book, it’s one of my favorite lines in the whole book, “One day there won’t be ‘female.’” The word “female,” when inserted in front of something, is always with a note of surprise. Female COO, female pilot, female surgeon—as if the gender implies surprise, which it does. I am a female leader. One day there won’t be female leaders. There will just be leaders. I personally think it’s a numbers game. I basically think the system is broken and there are all kinds of institutional barriers, but if we can get enough women into jobs like yours and jobs like mine, that changes.