Why we have too few women leaders

Sheryl Sandberg: Why we have too few women leaders | Video on TED.com

I saw this TED talk recently and a couple of things stayed with me. I liked her third message of "Don't leave before you leave". I could very well relate to that. For me personally, just getting married and changing from I to We was a lot too handle, forget about children. It seemed like I had more things to do, more people to attend to but in the same amount of time as before. When I was at Grace Hopper a new mother had actually asked a similar question "How do I compete with peers who don't have these responsibilities?". But then I realized that it was not so bad. As I became more experienced both at work and living with someone who needed my attention (:-)) I found out that I could achieve the same results in lesser time. I also kept reminding myself that other people have "other" responsibilities, they don't have "none". Not that I would have thought of leaving my job for any reason, but just listening to this talk made me feel better.

Another good point that she made in the same segment was how when you start leaning back your job gets less challenging and there's lesser reason to come back to work and more compelling reasons (children) to stay back at home. That's probably true no matter what. While many colleagues I know usually seek to get the same prep every semester, that bores me to death after a few semesters. I have spent almost every summer prepping for a new course, usually from scratch. I think leaning back at any time is bad. Although I will agree that sometimes I am lazy and wish that I hadn't taken on so many things.

Third point that I liked about this talk was the point about true equality. It took us a long time to come to terms with the fact that women can and should be allowed to do a "man's" job, but it is taking us way too longer t0 accept that a man can and should also be allowed to do a "woman's" job. So, just like there's nothing wrong in having a female COO at a tech company, there's also nothing wrong in being a male home-maker.