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Women Can't Actually Have It All
Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry

Burberry’s CEO Says Women Can’t Actually Have It All

Category: Business

Angela Ahrendts, one of Britain’s most successful businesswomen, has admitted that women “can’t do it all”, adding fresh fuel to the debate about whether women can combine harmony in the home with business success.

Mother of three teenagers, Ms Ahrendts is credited with reviving the fortunes of Burberry, the fashion brand where she is chief executive, and establishing herself as one of the most astute in the sparse ranks of female bosses.

Does she achieve a balance that suits the family as well as shareholders? She thinks so but works hard at it.

burberry ceo

Her working day starts at 4.35am, but she rations out-of-hours work to one evening a week and insists on arriving home on Friday after travelling.

She has turned down invites to the Oscars because: “It’s not more important than my husband. It’s not more important than my kids. It’s not more important than Burberry”.

She said in an interview with The Sunday Times: “I don’t want to be a great executive without being a great mum and a great wife. I don’t want to look back and say I wish I had done things differently. Balance is a really big word for me.

“It’s one of the most important parts of my job, showing that you can’t do it all.”

Ms Ahrendts’ comments are the latest in a debate led by Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. Ms Sandberg has called for working women to “lean in” to their careers and demand husbands bear a greater share of the domestic burden.

While both are American, they appear to have different takes on the issue.

Sandberg believes women are penalised at work because of gender stereotypes, one of the themes in her book ‘Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead.”

She has said: “Give us a world where half our homes are run by men and half our institutions are run by women. I’m pretty sure that would be a better world. Our culture needs to find a robust image of female success that is first, not male and second, not a white woman on the phone, holding a crying baby.”

Ms Ahrendts says it is impossible to have it all. “I’m here to run Burberry and I’m here to be a really great wife to my husband. And we have three amazing teens so that’s three really big jobs,” she said.

She tries to lead by example. “We have a lot of women working here and I always tell them they are mothers first. Those children are their legacy and they have partners and that’s a big obligation.”

Why Are 83.4 Percent of Fortune 500 Board Seats Held By Men?

Category: Business

The vast majority of Americans, regardless of gender, are never going to serve on a Fortune 500 company’s board of directors. Consequently the gross gender imbalance in board seats is not necessarily something that the woman on the street spends a lot of time fuming about. Nonetheless, the imbalance is striking, and I think people ought to pay more attention to it.

fortune 500 board

The main reason is that here we have a field of American life where I think we can say pretty clearly that meritocracy is not an important factor. Nothing is ever purely about anything, but corporate boards in the United States are about as close as it gets to a pure case of privilege reproducing privilege. The key criteria for serving on a corporate board is to seem like the kind of person who would serve on a corporate board—which is to say a white man of a certain age. But there are no actual job qualifications or performance criteria for nonexecutive directors. So the CEO of the Washington Post Company (Slate‘s parent) is on the board of Facebook, and Al Gore is on the board of Apple, and a former high-level BMW executive is on the board of Microsoft. Yet if you want to put women on your board, this very same open-endedness makes it easy. Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College, is also on the Microsoft board. And good for her.

Now my best guess is that women’s underrepresentation on boards doesn’t have huge practical consequences. There is some evidence that more diverse boards outperform less diverse ones, and probably some downstream gender-equity issues would get addressed better if firms had better gender equity on their boards.

But the lack of board diversity is important primarily because it’s a huge tell—and not because it has huge consequences. A company that can’t manage to have half its board seats filled with women simply isn’t trying. Which is to say that the vast majority of large American companies simply aren’t trying. And yet most of those countries would say they think diversity and gender equality are important. But given a fairly simple, straightforward, and low-consequence way of making a statement about gender equity, virtually no firms do it. Most other corporate staffing decisions are a good deal more complicated, and the barriers to gender inclusion may be more real or more robust. But when you see a corporate board that’s not even close to half women—and nine times out of 10 that’s what you’ll see—you shouldn’t trust any assurances you receive about anything else the company is doing.

The secret to higher earnings for women: marry poor

Category: Business

Working women: what’s the secret to higher earnings? Marry poor. The male/female earning gap has many sources. One notable one is that some women aren’t aggressive enough. They don’t ask for raises and promotions; enter the “lean-in” mantra.

But even among high achievers, top tier MBAs like Sheryl Sandberg, not everyone wants it all—if they can afford to eschew it. Economists Marianne Bertrand and Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence Katz tracked the careers of University of Chicago MBAs from 1990 to 2000 to untangle wage disparities among potentially high earners. They hoped to understand why there are so few women CEOs and hedge fund managers. They found a significant earnings gap between men and women which grew over time.

graph mba

“Dynamics of the Gender Gap for Young Professionals in the Financial and Corporate Sectors.” Marianne Bertrand, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence F. Katz

The large and growing gap is not due to timid female MBAs. Some of it is attributed to different skills, jobs before the MBA and that male business students typically take more finance classes and women more marketing classes. But a majority of the difference is due to women taking time out of the labor force and then working less after having children. Women without children usually don’t take time off and most of their earnings disparity with men can be explained by differences in their skills.

It’s notable that the earnings of some women did not fall very much after they had children and any drop in income did not persist after a few years. But these women often had a “lower” earning spouse (income under $100,000). A large and sustained drop in income is highly correlated with having children and a high-earning husband.

It’s not clear why that might be. It could be high-achieving women chose less ambitious husbands, anticipating that they’ll be more available to help with childcare. Sheryl Sandberg concedes that leaning in and having a family requires a supportive partner. Or it could be once some women had children they took less demanding jobs simply because they had the luxury of more work life balance. In light of this, advice that urges women to marry well seem all the more antiquated. If you want to have it all, best not aspire to being one half of a power-couple.

You can follow Allison on Twitter at @AllisonSchrager.

Six crazy ideas for saving the city of Detroit

Category: Business

Detroit’s bankruptcy filing is designed to solve the city’s short-term financial crisis and give city leaders a bit of fiscal breathing room. But the city’s long-term prospects still look bleak.

Over the past 60 years, the city has lost more than half of its residents. As its tax base declined, the city struggled to pay for basic city services. As service quality declined, the city became an even less appealing place to live and so more people left.

Really turning Detroit around will require some outside-the-box thinking. And there’s been some. Here are six big ideas to revitalize America’s most troubled city.

Jack Kemp, Detroit’s savior? (AP)

And all the regulations: Jack Kemp, the former congressman and housing secretary, 1996 Republican vice-presidential nominee and 1988 presidential candidate, had an idea for America’s inner cities. He wanted to make them “enterprise zones,” where federal taxes and regulations were greatly relaxed, to spur outsiders to come and do business. That’s been tried to varying degrees, including a federal program creating “empowerment zones,” but why not go all the way? Eliminate all taxes for year-round residents of Detroit, with the federal government paying the cost of the abolition of state and local taxes. Get rid of zoning, parking requirements, occupational licensing and other cumbersome regulations while you’re at it. See how many businesses come.

2. Make it into a tax shelter

Sort of like the Caymans. (Roger Wollstadt/Creative Commons)

Delaware’s strategy of structuring its corporate tax code to favor corporate headquarters has brought billions of dollars of investment into the state. It’s possible to do that with catastrophic insurance reserves, as a former insurance commissioner once proposed for the District. They’re currently taxed as income in the United States, so tens of billions of dollars are sitting in bank accounts in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. If the federal government allowed Detroit to host that money at a much-reduced rate, it could create a small but significant financial industry to manage it.

3. Create a Detroit Visa

(bigstockphoto)

What Detroit needs, more than anything else, is to replace the million people it lost over the past six decades. The easiest way to do that would be to import them. Most Americans don’t want to live in Detroit. But as Matt Yglesias has noted, there are about 165 million foreigners would like to become Americans. Presumably some of them would be willing to live in Detroit if that’s what it took to get a green card.

The proposal would work like this: Immigrants would get a visa that would be good for five years, during which they’d be required to maintain residence within the city limits. After that, immigrants would get normal green cards and could live where they liked. But hopefully, as they put down roots and Detroit as a whole prospered, many would choose to stay.

It might seem like these new Detroiters would have trouble finding work, but population growth tends to create job opportunities. Immigrants tend to be highly entrepreneurial; some of them would not only create jobs for other immigrants, but for some native-born Americans too.

4. Go vegan

Save pigs, save money? (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Facebook page)

The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have a proposal, too. They say they’ll give the city $100,000 to make all meals in government buildings — mostly schools, hospitals and jails — meat free. As if that weren’t enough, they’ll also plaster trash and fire trucks with vegan-boosting advertisements, supporting a strapped public transit system. PETA President Ingrid Newkirk notes that vegans are less prone to obesity, which would lower health-care costs. And think of the chickens! “I don’t know if you know, but twenty thousand chickens an hour being killed for Detroit,” Newkirk says. “So if we could make all government workers try a vegan diet, that’s a lot of chickens not having their throats cut.”

5. Move federal workers to Detroit

The federal buildings in D.C. are ugly. We can do better. (Photo by NCinDC)

Another way to increase Detroit’s population would be to move federal workers to the city. There’s a precedent for this: the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office opened a satellite office in Detroit last year.

The feds could do this on a larger scale. There are about 2.7 million federal civilian workers. If 10 percent of them moved to Detroit over the next decade, that would be an extra quarter-million people. Many workers would bring their families with them, and their spending would create additional jobs in the city.

Federal agencies could open satellite offices in Detroit and require most new federal workers to work there. Existing workers could be offered financial incentives to relocate voluntarily. Detroit’s extremely low cost of living would be an added draw. And not only would this help to save Detroit, but the federal government would save money on office space.

6. Give Detroit to Canada

President Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Charles Dharapak/Associated Press)

Detroit is one of the few parts of the United States (other than Alaska) that’s actually north of Canada: The city of Windsor, Ontario, lies south of it. So why not make this Canada’s problem? Much of the city’s fiscal problems boil down to retiree benefits. For example, it has $5.7 billion in unfunded retiree benefits and $3.5 billion in unfunded pensions. Luckily, Canada has a single-payer health-care system and not one but two publicly funded pension systems. Let those pay off the debt!

Canada’s provinces do more for municipalities than our states do for cities. Toronto gets 19 percent of its budget from the Ontario and Canadian federal governments. That’s much more than U.S. cities typically get. Ontario’s generally in better shape than Michigan, which is good news for tax money going to Detroit. Toronto and Ottawa are better cities to have helping you out than, say, Flint.

via Ezra Klein at wonkblog

Detroit becomes largest US city to file for bankruptcy in historic ‘low point’

Category: Business

Michigan governor laments lowest point in city’s history after emergency manager fails to broker deal between city’s bondholders and pension funds.

Sinking under huge debts and decades of mismanagement, Detroit formally filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, becoming the biggest US city ever to take such a drastic measure.

Kevyn Orr, Detroit’s emergency manager, took the decision after failing to broker a deal between the city’s bondholders and its pension funds.

The filing sets a new record for municipal bankruptcies and dwarfs the previous record filings by Jefferson County, Alabama, and Stockton, California. No other city of Detroit’s size has ever gone bust.

Orr and the city’s creditors and pensioners will now begin a fraught legal consultation period while a court determines whether the city is eligible for “chapter 9″ bankruptcy protection for its $18.5bn debts and liabilities.

In a letter posted with the filing, the Michigan governor Richard Snyder confirmed he had received Orr’s request to start the bankruptcy proceedings. He said it was “clear that the financial emergency in Detroit cannot be successfully addressed outside of such a filing, and it is the only reasonable alternative that is available.”

Snyder said he hoped the bankruptcy would be the beginning of the end of Detroit’s woes. “This decision comes in the wake of 60 years of decline in the city, a period in which reality was often ignored. I know that many will see this as a low point in the city’s history. If so, I think it will also be the foundation of the city’s future,” he wrote.

The governor painted a picture of a city in collapse. Citizens wait 58 minutes for the police to respond to calls, compared to a national average of 11 minutes. Only a third of ambulances were in service in the first quarter of 2013. There are approximately 78,000 abandoned buildings in the city. The unemployment rate had nearly tripled since 2000 and the homicide rate was at its highest level in 40 years, he said. Detroit is unable to meet its most basic obligations to its residents, let alone its creditors.

“The citizens of Detroit need and deserve a clear road out of the cycle of ever-decreasing services,” Snyder wrote.

Orr had set out a restructuring plan in June for the city, which has been plagued by corruption and plummeting revenues for years. But pension groups and bondholders balked at the terms. This week, pension funds objecting to Orr’s plan sued to stop him from making the move.

At a press conference in Detroit on Thursday evening, Orr said the city’s debts were currently claiming 38 cents on every $1 it receives in revenue. That figure would rise to 65 cents by 2017. “This is the right thing to do,” he said of the bankruptcy filing.

The White House said it was monitoring the situation but stopped short of offering any federal aid. Spokeswoman Amy Brundage said: “While leaders on the ground in Michigan and the city’s creditors understand that they must find a solution to Detroit’s serious financial challenge, we remain committed to continuing our strong partnership with Detroit as it works to recover and revitalize and maintain its status as one of America’s great cities.”

Matt Fabian, the managing director of bond expert Municipal Market Advisors, said the filing had been widely anticipated. “Detroit’s story has been terrible for 50 years. This is just the latest terrible thing to happen.”

He said bankruptcy would allow Orr to renegotiate government contracts and other broad powers to impose draconian costs cuts. But he warned bankruptcy was not an easy path. “This will make it hard for the city to conduct day-to-day business. It will drain a lot of time, it could put people off moving businesses to Detroit and it could last for years,” he said.

Other major cities have teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, including New York in 1975, Cleveland in 1978 and Philadelphia in 1991. But all brokered deals rather than face the dire consequences of going bust. “Detroit has severe difficulties, but this would be an extraordinary event,” said James Spiotto, a chapter 9 expert and head of the bankruptcy unit at Chicago’s Chapman & Cutler, before the bankruptcy was confirmed.

If the filing is approved, Detroit’s cost of borrowing will soar and the city will struggle to raise cash, Spiotto warned. Meanwhile, officials would spend years battling in the court over who is owed what. “Chapter 9 is time-consuming, expensive and uncertain,” Spiotto said.

Orr has said bankruptcy was not his preferred option. But as talks foundered, his options narrowed. His original plan was to slash benefits to retirees, including pensions and healthcare, and cut already minimal services to the bone. Police and firefighters who retire before age 55, for example, would get no healthcare under one proposal. Bondholders would have received cents for every dollar in debt they hold.

Municipal bonds have traditionally been viewed as among the safest available investments. When Central Falls in Rhode Island went bust in 2011, the state passed a law giving bondholders priority over other creditors, including retirees. Detroit’s investors must now be wondering whether bankruptcy would give them a better deal.

Neither side was willing to sign up for Orr’s settlement.

This week, the city’s two pension boards – the General Retirement System and the Police and Fire Retirement System – sued Orr and Michigan governor Rick Snyder in an attempt to block a bankruptcy.

“It appears imminent the governor will grant the emergency manager the unconditional power to proceed under chapter 9, and the emergency manager will seek to have the city’s pension debts impaired unless the retirement systems and their participants accept the emergency manager’s unilateral imposition of significant impairments to their accrued financial benefits,” the lawsuit says.

Orr was appointed in March after Snyder declared a “financial emergency” in Detroit. A lawyer and University of Michigan alumnus, Orr helped steer Chrysler out of bankruptcy, but this is a dilemma of an altogether greater magnitude.

Even after years of decline, Detroit remains the US’s 18th most populous city. The city’s finances may have hit an all-time low but its business is bouncing back. The car firms that made the city are back in rude health, and downtown Detroit is being revitalized by new businesses.

Some local business leaders believe that the city has already hit rock bottom, and that a stronger Detroit is already emerging. Dan Gilbert, founder of the Quicken Loans lender, has rebuilt downtown and encouraged new businesses and old to move into the city. In a recent interview with the Guardian he said he is “finally going to do what needed to be done if not in the last several years then in the past decades. It’s essentially good news for the city because it means this period is coming to an end.”

But for Detroit’s poor, bankruptcy is likely to make life even harder in the short term. About 60% of Detroit’s children live in poverty. Orr had planned to bus creditors to some of the city’s poorest areas so they could see what was at stake. Armed security would have gone along for the ride.

“If they can see what it’s like for Detroiters, what they endure every day in this city, I think they’ll begin to understand what’s at stake,” Orr told the Detroit Free Press. The tour was canceled as bankers became worried about the PR impact of captains of finance touring the city’s poorest neighbourhoods.

The Biggest Myth About the Gender Wage Gap

Category: Business

The real gap isn’t between men and women doing the same job. It’s between the different jobs that men and women take.

It might be the most famous statistic about female workers in the United States: Women earn “only 72 percent as much as their male counterparts.”

It’s also famously false. A new survey from PayScale this morning finds that the wage gap nearly evaporates when you control for occupation and experience among the most common jobs, especially among less experienced workers. It is only as careers advance, they found, that men outpaced female earnings as they made their way toward the executive suite.

So, women aren’t starting off behind their male counterparts, so much as they’re choosing different jobs and losing ground later in their careers.

The irony is that as women advance in their own careers, they might be more likely to fall behind, but they are also more likely to negotiate. That popular refrain that women don’t know how to ask for a raise? That’s bunk, too, the researchers concluded. Nearly a third of women — and 29 percent of men — have asked for raises, and even more female executives have done the same. In female-dominated sectors like health care and education more, half of women have negotiated for salary, benefits, or a promotion .

Still, inequalities persist. Comparing men and women job-by-job conceals the fact that men still dominate many of the highest-paying jobs. PayScale studied more than 120 occupation categories, from “machinist” to “dietician.” Nine of the ten lowest-paying jobs (e.g.: child-care worker, library assistant) were disproportionately female. Nine of the ten highest-paying jobs (e.g.: software architect, psychiatrist) were majority male. Nurse anesthetist was the best-paid position held mostly by women; but an estimated 69 percent of better-paid anesthesiologists were male.

The highest-paid job in PayScale’s controlled set is anesthesiologists, who are 69 percent male and 31 percent female — creating a 38 percent percentage-point “jobs gap.” Here is the jobs gap for the ten highest-paid positions.

Screen Shot 2013-05-29 at 4.41.59 PM

PayScale’s study is a necessary chaser to BLS and Census data, because the government “compares all weekly earnings, even though women and men do different things,” said PayScale chief economist Katie Bardaro. “We’re trying to compare men and women with the same education, same management responsibilities, similar employers, in companies with a similar number of employees.” After controlling for these factors, “the gender wage gap disappears for most positions,” she said.

In one job, they had enough data to show a statistically significant wage advantage for female workers. That is “dental hygienist.”

But even if the gender gap disappears after controlling for experience and job selection, it’s hard to imagine that men thoroughly dominating the highest-paying positions is a good outcome. For example, the expectation that women more than men bear the responsibility to raise children gently nudges thousands of highly educated women out of full-time work.

There is a wage difference. But it might not be the wage difference that you thought. The real gap isn’t between men and women doing the same job. The real gap is between men and women doing different jobs and following different careers.

That gap should continue to tighten. Women have earned the majority of bachelor’s degrees for the last few years. They’re well-positioned to benefit from a growing professional service economy, and working moms are already the primary breadwinners in 40 percent of households with kids, an all-time high. But if women are more likely to go into health care than manufacturing, more likely to work in human resources than software, and more likely to leave their careers early to start a family, the gaps will persist.

Ideally, some day soon, it won’t take a statistical “control” to show that men and women are fundamental equal partners — and equal competitors — in the work force. It will just be the obvious truth.

Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees business coverage for TheAtlantic.com.

Pew Study Shows Women Leading Breadwinners in 40 Percent of Households

Category: Business

The phenomenon of women bringing home the bacon is nothing new. But a new study shows that women are now the leading – or only — breadwinners in 40 percent of American households.

Women earn more than men in almost a quarter of U.S. households, a huge leap from 50 years ago, when only a handful of women brought home more income, according to a study released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center.

Women are now the leading or solo breadwinners in 40 percent of households, compared with just 11 percent in 1960, according to Census Bureau data analyzed by Pew.

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That’s both good and bad, depending which part of the ladder you’re on: At the top, educated women are catching up with men in the workforce, but on the bottom rungs are more single moms than ever—most of them living near the poverty line.

“It’s a long-term trend since the ’60s that the breadwinner moms have gone up,” said Wendy Wang, a Pew research associate and the lead author of the report.

Seventy-one percent of husbands are working in households where women make more money than their spouses, and they have a median family income of $80,000, according to 2011 data.

In 1960, only 4 percent of women made more than their husbands; it’s now 23 percent. That translates into 5.1 million married “breadwinner moms.” Of those making more than their husbands, 49 percent have at least a college degree, 65 percent are white and 67 percent are between the ages of 30 and 50.

Women, who for generations were not in the workforce in the same numbers as men, are still catching up. The Pew study noted that despite the fact that women are now equally or better educated than their husbands, most men still earn more than their spouses.

While Oprah Winfrey and Marissa Meyer are often mentioned as high-profile examples of that trend, the other end of the economic spectrum is driving the numbers.

The other part of the female breadwinner equation focuses on the steep rise in unwed mothers. In 1960, only 5 percent of women with children were unmarried. In 2010, that number had increased to 41 percent, according to research from the National Center for Health Statistics cited in the Pew report. The median income for a single mother who has never been married was $17,400 as of 2011. That can include income from a job, child support and government assistance.

In 1960, only 4 percent of women made more than their husbands; it’s now 23 percent. That translates into 5.1 million married “breadwinner moms.”

Of the never-married mothers, 49 percent have a high school education or less, and 46 percent are 30 or younger; 40 percent were black, 24 percent Hispanic and 32 percent white.

The Pew survey also gauged opinion on more women becoming the primary breadwinner.”The public is really conflicted about the trend,” Wang said.

Overall, survey respondents liked the economic benefits to their families but also worried that work might take a toll on their children and marriages. About 67 percent said the change made it easier for families to earn enough money to live comfortably; about 28 percent said it was harder for families to earn enough, and 2 percent said it made no difference, according to Pew.

by Amy Langfield

Just do it: Sheryl Sandberg’s feminist manifesto at work

Category: Business

Facebook boss Sheryl Sandberg – one of the world’s most powerful women – shares her secret of career success. Don’t hold back or sell yourself short, she says. Does her advice ring true?

Sheryl Sandberg is the tenth most powerful business woman in the world, according to Forbes, with a net worth of some £530 million, and she’s adamant that she didn’t get where she is today without a healthy dose of assertiveness, determination and ambition.

In her book, Lean in: women, work and the will to lead, Sandberg addresses the dearth of women in leadership roles and investigate just what is holding them back. Her answer: not just extermal, structural problems, but internal obstacles which she says won’t fall down unless women themselves start pushing.

In short, what is holding women back is a thousand small decisions: failing to stand up for yourself when it matters, deferring to others first, being too modest about successes, deliberately holding back because of future plans to have a family.

“A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and men ran half our homes”, she declares: and the reason why this is not so, she believes, cannot simply be blamed on the patriarchal establishment.

Using stories gleaned from her similarly high-flying friends and celebrity acquaintances (there is a lot of name dropping scattered through the book), as well as her own experience, Sandberg offers a solution. Don’t hold back, but commit wholeheartedly to your future success.

A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and men ran half our homes.Sheryl Sandberg

There are practicalities here too, a nod to those struggling to balance career and family life. Getting things done, she counsels, is better than trying to be perfect. Setting obtainable goals is crucial, although “dreaming is not doing”.

There is also advice on negotiating skills, and dealing with criticism wisely: charting that path to success, Sandberg warns, is like “trying to cross a minefield backward in high heels”.

To help chart that tricky course, she has set up a website encouraging women to set up their own “lean in” groups, along with videos and other resources. Jessica Bennett, from New York magazine went to one such group and was impressed.

Feel the fear and do it anyway

“She has labelled a solution for problems that are rampant among a generation raised to believe that we were on level footing – and a pragmatic approach to change it.”

Anne Marie Slaughter, who served as director of policy planning for Hillary Clinton, sparked a fierce controversy over the role of women in the workplace with her Atlantic article declaring “why women still can’t have it all”. She stepped back from her own leadership role because of her family: yet she has been equally complimentary, calling Sandberg a “feminist champion”.

But some of her critics have complained that her highly selective, unashamedly elite experience offers no help whatsoever to those who are less well off, single parents, less well educated, non-white? Women who lack the luxury of making choices?

At least, say supporters, the Facebook executive is trying to offer a partial solution to a compelling problem. In the United States, research shows that just 21 of the top Fortune 500 jobs are held by women.

Women still earn just 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man, despite President Obama’s renewed push for equal pay. In these recessionary times of unemployment and downsizing, women’s participation in the US workforce is starting to decline.

In the UK, the picture is depressingly similar. A report into women in top management positions commissioned by the Government, did reveal this week that the number of women on the boards of FTSE 100 companies is now at a record high: up from 12.5% in 2011 to 18% today.

Decades away from equality

And outside that blue chip elite, the picture is even less rosy: the workplace is still “decades away” from equality.

And as for juggling that family with a high-flying career: that is no easier, either, according to a study of 2,000 women carried out by the Association of Accounting Technicians this week.

They found the overwhelming majority of new mothers feel they haven’t got enough confidence to return to work after maternity leave. Two thirds said they felt drained of self belief, while more than half thought they were no longer capable enough after taking time off. Instead they felt trapped by the drudge work of home life, robbing them of the space for creativity and ambition at work.

Just because routines and priorities change once women have a family, said the AAT, “doesn’t neccessarily mean that one’s career should be negatively affected or sacrificed”.

And that, in essence, is Sandberg’s argument. Stop being afraid. Do it anyway. Don’t shape yourself to fit around the world: make it bend around you.

As for the very real structural, historical barriers that still hold back women’s advancement, the “million cracks” in the glass ceiling that prevented even Hillary Clinton from fulfilling her presidential ambitions, first time round at least – that is not something that finds a solution here.

Men too need a manifesto for change: this burden is not simply on womens’ shoulders. The real struggle for equality is far wider than the Sandberg white, educated, wealthy elite, and it is a struggle which they cannot win on their own.

Category : Business

Feel the fear and do it anyway

Decades away from equality