A Uterus Is a Feature, Not a Bug

Sarah Lacy

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780062641823
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Frauen in Unternehmen

A rallying cry for working mothers everywhere that demolishes the "distracted, emotional, weak" stereotype and definitively shows that these professionals are more focused, decisive, and stronger than any other force.

Working mothers aren't a liability. They are assets you—and every manager and executive—want in your company, in your investment portfolio, and in your corner.

There is copious academic research showing the benefits of working mothers on families and the benefits to companies who give women longer and more flexible parental leave. There are even findings that demonstrate women with multiple children actually perform better at work than those with none or one.

Yet despite this concrete proof that working mothers are a lucrative asset, they still face the "Maternal Wall"—widespread unconscious bias about their abilities, contributions, and commitment. Nearly eighty percent of women are less likely to be hired if they have children—and are half as likely to be promoted. Mothers earn an average $11, 000 less in salary and are held to higher punctuality and performance standards. Forty percent of Silicon Valley women said they felt the need to speak less about their family to be taken more seriously. Many have been told that having a second child would cost them a promotion.

Fortunately, this prejudice is slowly giving way to new attitudes, thanks to more women starting their own businesses, and companies like Netflix, Facebook, Apple, and Google implementing more parent-friendly policies. But the most important barrier to change isn't about men. Women must rethink the way they see themselves after giving birth. As entrepreneur Sarah Lacy makes clear in this cogent, persuasive analysis and clarion cry, the strongest, most lucrative, and most ambitious time of a woman's career may easily be after she sees a plus sign on a pregnancy test.

1
Your Uterus Is Not a Ticking Time Bomb

I started this book with the “lie” my mother told me in part because it had such an impact on me, but also because it’s hard to imagine a better-intentioned lie. My mom, after all, wanted me to have children and be successful in my career. If the innocuous, well-meaning lies from people who love us can undermine the power of motherhood, imagine the impact of actual institutionalized sexism.

There’s another word for “institutionalized sexism” that you’re going to have to get comfortable with if you are going to fight it: the patriarchy.

Data shows that men dominate American politics and business, that they outearn women, that they are the gatekeepers in nearly every industry. We all know we live in a patriarchy, but somehow saying the word “patriarchy” makes you sound like some kind of unhinged extremist.

It has become my new swear word in Silicon Valley, packing greater shock value than an expertly placed f-bomb. You can use it casually in a meeting—“Yeah, I decided to wear pants because I just wasn’t feeling the patriarchy today”—or save it for real full-throated outrage.

Who is the patriarchy? It is a collective of both everyone—to a degree—and no single person in particular. Old white men who don’t believe women should have basic reproductive rights are part of the patriarchy. The 40 percent of Americans who believe women working is bad for society are part of the patriarchy, whether they are men or women. Employers who pay women less money because the market allows it are part of the patriarchy. Politicians who blame society’s ills on single mothers are part of the patriarchy. Twitter trolls who say you are the “wrong” kind of feminist are part of the patriarchy. Even the nice greeter at Disneyland who automatically refers to your daughter as “princess” is part of the patriarchy.

The patriarchy is the general organizing principle of the past and sadly, the present. It’s the backdrop behind everything in American life, and its tentacles reach into every part of your life: how much you get paid, whether you get promoted, whether it’s OK if you have sex with someone, how high your heels should be for you to be considered desirable, and whether you get pregnant. You know, the things that simply shouldn’t be up to other people.

Not everyone in the patriarchy means ill. But the dominance of the patriarchy makes it impossible for women to be treated equally. And so the patriarchy must be overthrown.

There is only one way to do that: We have to stop asking permission and negotiating with men to live the lives we want to live. Women have to take back their rights to all those very personal things that the patriarchy has so rudely butted itself into. We need to start believing that we have a right to live the lives we want, that having a career isn’t a negotiation you win with your “50/50” spouse. That you will be paid equally. That you have the right to have a baby when you want to, or not have a baby at all.

And we have to help one another. We have to stop being our own worst enemy. We are both victims of the patriarchy . . . and part of it. We do the patriarchy’s dirty work every time we tell ourselves we aren’t enough, every time we lift ourselves up at the expense of other women, and especially every time we allow ourselves to feel guilt.

Guilt is the most effective weapon the patriarchy has. It both keeps us from achieving and makes us feel bad about it when we do achieve. Guilt pits us against “patriarchs” like spouses and male bosses. Guilt is so effective because it’s self-inflicted. Guilt makes you doubt everything you know in your heart, in your head, in your gut. Guilt is the patriarchy’s evil little voice inside you. It has to go.

This book will help you dismantle the patriarchy by exposing what it is and how it works. It will examine my own journey from “cool dude patriarchy enabler” to “badass feminist warrior.” It will destroy the idea that something as remarkable as having children makes you weaker. It will make an argument for why you need more women in your company, immediately. And it will explain why single moms may be the most badass, politically transformative force in America’s future. It will show you why America is far from the feminist envy of the world.

My story takes place in the tech world of Silicon Valley, a place that is in some ways not as overtly sexist as other industries. Silicon Valley, at least, pretends it’s a meritocracy. We’ll explode that myth as well and explain why micro-indignities and unconscious bias can be even more pernicious to root out than men chasing women around desks.

Silicon Valley matters as a microcosm on gender equality because it is a young industry. It is an idealistic industry of people who want to remake the world and the way it operates. There aren’t centuries of “the way things have been done” in an ecosystem that’s only about seventy years old. Silicon Valley rapidly changes leaders as hot young companies devour the old. In Silicon Valley, data and results are supposed to be all that matters. Silicon Valley should be the one place that gets this right.

Motherhood is central to my story because it was only by becoming a mother that I had this badass feminist awakening. But it’s also central to all of us taking on the patriarchy, whether we are mothers or not, or even want to become mothers or not. Motherhood is the reason that women have value in a patriarchy. Giving birth is the one thing men can’t do. And that’s a big reason it’s used to hold back so many women economically.

When a woman returns to work—frequently without taking the full maternity leave she was entitled to, if she was lucky enough to get any—she is thrust into a no-win dichotomy: Are you a good employee or a good mother? Pick one.

The patriarchy believes—as fact—that a good mother must be constantly available to her children and a good employee must be constantly available to her bosses. By definition, no one can do both. This belief justifies why nearly half of Americans feel it’s bad for society if women have careers: because working women are necessarily horrible mothers. It also justifies employers denying mothers career advancement, bonuses, raises, or sometimes jobs altogether, because you’d be aiding them in becoming bad mothers, and you simply can’t expect them to be good workers. This is called the “Maternal Wall.”1

For their book What Works for Women at Work, authors Joan C. Williams and Rachel Dempsey conducted interviews with 127 successful working women, more than half of whom were women of color. They discovered a near-universal playbook to the bias women face at work, falling into four major buckets: the “Prove-It-Again!” bias, the “Tightrope” bias of being too masculine or too feminine, the “Tug of War,” and the “Maternal Wall.” Of the four, the Maternal Wall bias was the most blatant, in part because many people don’t see it as a bias; they see it as biology.2

This bias is measurable. Williams and Dempsey cite a study by sociologists that found when subjects were given identical résumés, one identified as being from a mother and one not, “non-mothers got 2.1 times as many callbacks as equally qualified mothers and were recommended for hire 1.8 times more frequently than mothers.” They quote one sociologist who worked on the study as excitedly saying, “I have been studying these kinds of gender biases for years and I have never seen effects this large.”3

The Maternal Wall even affects women who never become mothers, who never want to become mothers. It frequently starts as soon as a woman gets engaged. Your years of being totally devoted to your bosses suddenly have an expiration date.

I faced this when I interviewed at BusinessWeek. I was engaged but had no plans to have children anytime soon. Just before they sent me to New York to interview with the magazine’s editor in chief, a New York–based editor sat down with me. He admitted that what he was about to ask me was illegal, but he wanted to know if I was planning to have kids. I answered honestly that I had no intention to.

Worse: I so totally believed the lies about motherhood that I wasn’t even offended by the question. My competition for the job was all men. It was clear that if I’d said I was planning to start a family, I wouldn’t have been hired. And because I believed the lie, that seemed rational to me. Even fair.

Just as with guilt, women have so internalized this that we even enforce it ourselves. In “The Elephant in the Valley,” a recent survey of women in the tech industry, 75 percent of women said they were asked about family or marital life on job interviews; 40 percent reported feeling the need to talk about their families less in order to be taken seriously at work. And of the women who took maternity leave, more than 50 percent shortened it because they felt that doing otherwise would have a negative impact on their career. Sheryl Sandberg called her book Lean In because she observed that young women take themselves off their career paths before they have children, in many cases before they are even married.

Why? They believe the same lie I did.

Implicit in Maternal Wall bias are several of the other biases women face at work, according to Williams and Dempsey. Mothers experience a heightened form of the “Prove-It-Again!” bias, frequently having to prove their commitment and work ethic over and over again with each subsequent child they have. Because the idea that motherhood changes you is so deeply accepted in society, employers and coworkers are constantly on guard that this pregnancy could be the one.

Because this form of sexism is so generally accepted, employers attribute anything that might signal a female employee’s decreased commitment—even things that could happen to anyone—to her being a mother. Williams and Dempsey cite an example where an attorney became a partner and was able to read all her past performance reviews. In her second year at the firm, she missed a meeting to take a child to the emergency room, and she suffered from it for years afterwards.

After that incident, year after year, there was a question about my ability to become a partner, my commitment to the law, and whether, because I had three children, it would just be too much . . . I traveled all the time, I was in court all the time. I missed one meeting because I had to take my ch...