“Done is better than perfect.”
— Sheryl Sandberg
“What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”
“Speak up. Believe in yourself. Take risks.”
“Build your skills not your resume.”
“So please ask yourself: What would I do if I weren’t afraid? And then go do it.”
“If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on.”
“You need to feel that you’re making a difference.”
“Your life’s course will not be determined by doing the things that you are certain you can do. Those are the easy things. It will be determined by whether you try the things that are hard.”
“Aiming for perfection causes frustration at best and paralysis at worst.”
“Getting from point A to point Z can be daunting unless you remember that you don’t have to get from A to Z. You just have to get from A to B. Breaking big dreams into small steps is the way to move forward.”
“Don’t be afraid to ask the ‘dumb’ question, everyone else will be relieved you had the guts to ask!”
“If you do please everyone, you are not making enough progress.”
“Believe in yourself and negotiate for yourself. Own your own success.”
“Bring your whole self to work. I don’t believe we have a professional self Monday through Friday and a real self the rest of the time. It is all professional and it is all personal.”
“Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder.”
“In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders.”
“The cost of stability is often diminished opportunities for growth.”
“Leadership is not bullying and leadership is not aggression. Leadership is the expectation that you can use your voice for good. That you can make the world a better place.”
“I’ve seen over and over how much self-belief drives outcomes. And that’s why I force myself to sit at the table, even when I am not sure I belong there – and yes, this still happens to me. And when I’m not sure anyone wants my opinion, I take a deep breath and speak up anyway.”
“It is the ultimate luxury to combine passion and contribution. It’s also a very clear path to happiness.”
“If more women are in leadership roles, we’ll stop assuming they shouldn’t be.”
“Fortune does favor the bold and you’ll never know what you’re capable of if you don’t try.”
“We cannot change what we are not aware of, and once we are aware, we cannot help but change.”
“There is no such thing as work-life balance. There is work, there is life, and there is no balance.”
“The reason I don’t have a plan is because if I have a plan I’m limited to today’s options.”
“Real empathy is sometimes not insisting that it will be okay but acknowledging that it is not.”
“Women attribute their success to working hard, luck, and help from other people. Men will attribute that – whatever success they have, that same success – to their own core skills.”
“Trying to do it all and expecting that it all can be done exactly right is a recipe for disappointment. Perfection is the enemy.”
“We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in.”
“The most important career decision you’ll make is who your life partner is.”
“There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”
“I feel really grateful to the people who encouraged me and helped me develop. Nobody can succeed on their own.”
“Excel and you will get a mentor.”
“The path to change is best traveled when we travel together.”
“Its time to cheer on girls and women who want to sit at the table.”
“The best way to make room for both life and career is to make choices deliberately-to set limits and stick to them.”
“The time is long overdue to encourage more women to dream the possible dream.”
“I want my daughter to have the choice not just to succeed, but to be liked for her accomplishments.”
“Without fear, women can pursue professional success and personal fulfillment-and freely choose one, or the other, or both.”
“Social media has created a historical shift from the historically powerful to the historically powerless. Now everyone has a voice.”
“Being confident and believing in your own self-worth is necessary to achieving your potential.”
“When you’re more valuable, the people around you will do more to make it work.”
“Nobody can succeed on their own.”
“The promise of equality is not the same as true equality.”
“We need women at all levels, including the top, to change the dynamic, reshape the conversation, to make sure women’s voices are heard and heeded, not overlooked and ignored.”
“The most important thing – and I’ve said it a hundred times and I’ll say it a hundred times – if you marry a man, marry the right one.”
“As a country and as a world, we are not comfortable with women in leadership roles. We call little girls bossy.”
“Most people assume that women are responsible for households and child care. Most couples operate that way – not all. That fundamental assumption holds women back.”
“I’m not writing about things other women do. I’m writing for other women to have more self-confidence because I need it myself! And if more women were in power, I would feel more comfortable.”
“At Facebook, we try to be a strengths-based organization, which means we try to make jobs fit around people rather than make people fit around jobs. We focus on what people’s natural strengths are and spend our management time trying to find ways for them to use those strengths every day.”
“The things that hold women back, hold them back from sitting at the boardroom table and they hold women back from speaking at the PTA meeting.”
“No industry or country can reach its full potential until women reach their full potential.”
“It’s more pressure on women to – if they marry or partner with someone, to partner with the right person. Because you cannot have a full career and a full life at home with your children if you are also doing all of the housework and child care.”
“Men can comfortably claim credit for what they do as long as they don’t veer into arrogance. For women, taking credit comes at a real social and professional cost.”
“Success for me is that if my son chooses to be a stay-at-home parent, he is cheered on for that decision. And if my daughter chooses to work outside the home and is successful, she is cheered on and supported.”
“Don’t make decisions too far in advance, particularly ones you’re not even conscious you’re making.”
“It turns out that a husband who does the laundry, it’s very romantic when you’re older. And it’s hard to believe when you’re younger. But it’s absolutely true.”
“Men feel like they can be a professional and a father. For women it’s “or.” That’s offensive to me. The concept that it’s not possible is crazy.”
“Facebook is great for women and men. We are enormously flexible. We care a lot about great opportunities for women, we push ourselves to make things as flexible as possible.”
“I want to tell any young girl out there who’s a geek, I was a really serious geek in high school. It works out. Study harder.”
“Framing the issue of work-life balance – as if the two were dramatically opposed – practically ensures work will lose out. Who would ever choose work over life?”
“A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our homes.”
“Talking can transform minds, which can transform behaviors, which can transform institutions.”
“The most important thing is to have a more open and honest dialogue about gender issues.”
“Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home. These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is sexier.”
“When woman work outside the home and share breadwinning duties, couples are more likely to stay together. In fact, the risk of divorce reduces by about half when a wife earns half the income and a husband does half the housework.”
“Real change will come when powerful women are less of an exception. It is easy to dislike senior women because there are so few.”
“When my mother took her turn to sit in a gown at her graduation, she thought she only had two career options: nursing and teaching. She raised me and my sister to believe that we could do anything, and we believed her.”
“I’m not pretending I can give advice to every single person or every single couple for every situation; I’m making the point that we are not going to get to equality in the workforce before we get to equality in the home. Not going to happen.”
“As a man gets more successful, powerful, he is more liked, and as a woman gets more successful, she is less liked, and that’s true by both women and men.”
“Social gains are never handed out. They must be seized.”
“For any of us in this room today, let’s start out by admitting we’re lucky. We don’t live in the world our mothers lived in, our grandmothers lived in, where career choices for women were so limited.”
“It is illegal to discriminate on the basis of pregnancy or gender. It is not illegal to talk about it.”
“I really think we need more women to lean into their careers and to be really dedicated to staying in the work force.”
“I believe we need affordable child care. I believe we need flexibility. I believe we need institutional reform and public policy reform.”
“Success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively for women. When a man is successful, he is liked by both men and women. When a woman is successful, people of both genders like her less.”
“I have a five year-old son and a three year-old daughter. I want my son to have a choice to contribute fully in the workforce or at home. And I want my daughter to have the choice to not just succeed, but to be liked for her accomplishments.”
“Women don’t take enough risks. Men are just ‘foot on the gas pedal.’ We’re not going to close the achievement gap until we close the ambition gap.”
“We’ve ceased making progress at the top in any industry anywhere in the world. In the United States, women have had 14% of the top corporate jobs and 17% of the board seats for 10 years. Ten years of no progress.”
“Let’s have an honest conversation about what’s going on. A man and a man at a bar looks like mentoring. A man and a woman at a bar looks like dating.”
“We know when we use the full talents of our population we’re more productive. And we know that when people really feel like they can have flexible lives, they’re better employees.”
“Coming from Google, you don’t exactly spend a lot of time at Microsoft.”
“And in situations where a man and a woman each receive negative feedback, the woman’s self-confidence and self-esteem drop to a much greater degree. The internalization of failure and the insecurity it breeds hurt future performance, so this pattern has serious long-term consequences.”
“We’re focused on doing one thing incredibly well. If you look at other companies, all of these companies are doing a lot of different things but we’re still, as we grow, doing exactly one thing.”
“Both men and women react negatively when women negotiate on their own behalf. A man can just negotiate: “I have a better offer. That’s not enough to make my family’s ends meet.” No one feels bad about it. But when a woman does that, there’s a backlash.”
“When the man is traveling with a man, he says, “Let’s stay up late and work on this and get this to be better.” When the man’s traveling with the woman, for the sake of appearances he doesn’t do the work with her. That’s a lost opportunity for her to be a success.”
“The best decision I ever made was to marry Dave.”
“I wish I could just go tell all the young women I work with, all these fabulous women, ‘Believe in yourself and negotiate for yourself. Own your own success.’ I wish I could tell that to my daughter. But it’s not that simple.”
“I just believed. I believed that the technology would change people’s lives. I believed putting real identity online – putting technology behind real identity – was the missing link.”
“When I was in high school, I was voted most likely to succeed.”
“It’s pretty exciting to take real people living in the real world, their opinions, and have people have to react to that. As opposed to their perceptions of what people are thinking, which are often very different.”
“I spent most of my career, including my time at McKinsey, never acknowledging that I was a woman. And, you know, fast forward – I’m 43 now – fitting in is not helping us.”
“Pages on Facebook are allowed to be anonymous. That is really important. People start revolutions; we need anonymity.”
“But I really believe that when you give people authentic identity, which is what Facebook does, and you can be your real self and connect with real people online, things will change.”
“The No. 1 impediment to women succeeding in the workforce is now in the home.”
“You know, there has never been a 24-hour period in five years when I have not responded to e-mail at Facebook. I am not saying it’s easy. I work long hours.”
“Women are not making it to the top. A hundred and ninety heads of state; nine are women. Of all the people in parliament in the world, thirteen per cent are women. In the corporate sector, women at the top – C-level jobs, board seats – tops out at fifteen, sixteen per cent.”
“I go around the room and ask people, ‘What do you think?’”
“Over the last 10 years, women have stalled out at the top.”
“The most important thing we’re doing differently is that we talk openly about gender at Facebook.”
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