People assume Wall Street is a certain culture and tech is a certain culture. But if you look at the (gender) numbers at the top of (those) industries, they don't vary very much. I think in finance, women hold 19 percent of the top jobs, and women are 21 percent of the leaders in nonprofits.
I was grateful that Facebook already had generous bereavement policies . Now Facebook employees receive 20 days paid leave to grieve the loss of an immediate family member and 10 days for an extended family member. I'm proud that we're able to do this and I hope more businesses do the same. Only 60 percent of private sector workers get paid time off after the death of a loved one, and then it's usually just a few days. Workers and families deserve better than that.
There's no easy path through grief and trauma. Learning from the experiences of people who'd been through similar losses was helpful.
After my husband, Dave, died, I called my friend Adam, a psychologist who studies how people find meaning in our lives, and I asked him what, if anything, I could do to help myself and my kids get through this. We started talking about resilience, then reading about it, then talking to other people who had gotten through grief and other huge challenges. In time, those conversations and that research helped me heal.
If I didn't write in my journal every couple of days, I felt like I was going to burst. Later I learned the research about how important journaling can be to recovering from trauma and grief. That was definitely true for me.
I had heard that when people lost people, there was anger. But I definitely experienced it a lot more than I was prepared for it. Anger was not something I'd ever really felt in my life and I was not prepared for it.
Grief comes and goes, it ebbs and flows. I think one of the lessons of this for me is that there's no one way to grieve. Everyone does it in their own way, in their own time, and we all process life and its challenges and its ups and downs as they come.
The reason I wrote Lean In is I think people weren't actually noticing that we had stopped making progress. I gave a TED talk and said: "It turns out men still run the world." And the audience gasped as if that was news.
My goal is very clear, and I wrote about it in Lean In, which is that women run half our companies and countries and men run half our homes. As much as I wish that could happen in four years, I don't think that's a likely time period. But I think it can happen sooner than we think. Part of it is having that aspiration and that goal. I think we too often suffer from the tyranny of low expectations.
We're the only developed country in the world that doesn't have paid maternity leave. Paternity leave is just as important. Paid family medical leave so that you can take care of a parent, a child, a grandparent, whatever you need to do. I think we're shortsighted when we don't invest in our employees as companies, and as an economy, because we invest in them and they invest back in us.
Our aspirations are really for women to be in half the leadership roles and men to be doing half the work of parenting.
