Sheryl Sandberg Quotations | Page 2

I think now is our time. My mother was told by everyone that she had two choices: She could be a nurse or a teacher. The external barriers now are just so much lower. If we start acknowledging what the real issues are, we can solve them. It's not that hard.

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.

Its time to cheer on girls and women who want to sit at the table

The cost of stability is often diminished opportunities for growth.

Talking can transform minds, which can transform behaviors, which can transform institutions.

Excel and you will get a mentor.

Nobody can succeed on their own.

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.

I would love to meet J.K. Rowling and tell her how much I admire her writing and am amazed by her imagination. I read every 'Harry Potter' book as it came out and looked forward to each new one. I am rereading them now with my kids and enjoying them every bit as much. She made me look at jelly beans in a whole new way.

The reason I don't have a plan is because if I have a plan I'm limited to today's options

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.

The promise of equality is not the same as true equality.

Aggressive and hard-charging women violate unwritten rules about acceptable social conduct. Men are continually applauded for being ambitious and powerful and successful, but women who display these same traits often pay a social penalty. Female accomplishments come at a cost.

The gender stereotypes introduced in childhood are reinforced throughout our lives and become self-fulfilling prophesies. Most leadership positions are held by men, so women don't expect to achieve them, and that becomes one of the reasons they don't.

Don't be afraid to ask the 'dumb' question, everyone else will be relieved you had the guts to ask!

I wish I were strong enough to ignore what others say, but experience tells me I often can't. Allowing myself to feel upset, even really upset, and then move on - that's something I can do.

The most important career decision you'll make is who your life partner is.

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.

Go to a playground: Little girls get called 'bossy' all the time, a word that's almost never used for boys. And that leads directly to the problems women face in the workforce. When a man does a good job, everyone says, 'That's great.' When a woman does that same thing, she'll get feedback that says things like, 'Your results are good, but your peers just don't like you as much' or 'maybe you were a little aggressive.'

Women systematically underestimate their own abilities.

No one gets to the top, if they sit on the sidelines, or if they don't believe in themselves.

I want my daughter to have the choice not just to succeed, but to be liked for her accomplishments.

You need to feel that you're making a difference.

Believe in yourself and negotiate for yourself. Own your own success.

Everyone needs to get more comfortable with female leaders-including female leaders themselves.

Without fear, women can pursue professional success and personal fulfillment-and freely choose one, or the other, or both.

The best way to make room for both life and career is to make choices deliberately-to set limits and stick to them.

I'm a feminist because I believe in women... it's a heavy word, feminism, but it's not one I think we should run from. I'm proud to be a feminist.

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.

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.

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.

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.

...parents who work outside the home are still capable of giving their children a loving and secure childhood. Some data even suggest that having two parents working outside the home can be advantageous to a child's development, particularly for girls.

Today, despite all of the gains we have made, neither men nor women have real choice. Until women have supportive employers and colleagues as well as partners who share family responsibilities, they don't have real choice. And until men are fully respected for contributing inside the home, they don't have real choice either.

I have never met a woman, or man, who stated emphatically, "Yes, I have it all.'" Because no matter what any of us has—and how grateful we are for what we have—no one has it all.

She explained that many people, but especially women, feel fraudulent when they are praised for their accomplishments. Instead of feeling worthy of recognition, they feel undeserving and guilty, as if a mistake has been made. Despite being high achievers, even experts in their fields, women can't seem to shake the sense that it is only a matter of time until they are found out for who they really are- impostors with limited skills or abilities.

I realized that searching for a mentor has become the professional equivalent of waiting for Prince Charming. We all grew up on the fairy tale "Seeping Beauty," which instructs young women that if they just wait for their prince to arrive, they will be kissed and whisked away on a white horse to live happily ever after. Now young women are told that if they can just find the right mentor, they will be pushed up the ladder and whisked away to the corner office to live happily ever after. Once again, we are teaching women to be too dependent on others.

We need to stop telling [women], "Get a mentor and you will excel." Instead, we need to tell them, "Excel and you will get a mentor.

And anyway, who wears a tiara on a jungle gym?

The more women help one another, the more we help ourselves. Acting like a coalition truly does produce results. Any coalition of support must also include men, many of whom care about gender inequality as much as women do.

we compromise our career goals to make room for partners and children who may not even exist yet

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.

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.

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.

A woman, if you're Most Intelligent or Most Likely to Succeed, that's an embarrassing thing. Or something that's not considered attractive, and I think that's what we need to change.

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.

We have a problem with women in leadership across the board. This leadership gap - this problem of not enough women in leadership - is running really deep and it's in every industry. My answer is we have to understand the stereotype assumptions that hold women back.

Let's acknowledge that men reach for opportunities more quickly and more easily than women. So often as managers, we give the job to whoever starts solving the problem, to whoever jumps in. Since we know men will jump in faster than women in so many circumstances, we have to slow down and encourage more women to sit at more tables.

A lot of people will say, "what's Facebook's business model?" I always find that a kind of funny question. Our business model is out there, which is: we monetize largely through advertising and a little bit through the gift revenue, the virtual gifts we have on our site. I think those continue to be the most promising avenues going forward.

Facebook is a really exciting place trying to do something really important that I really believe in. And it matters.

It is illegal to discriminate on the basis of pregnancy or gender. It is not illegal to talk about it.

The social web can't exist until you are your real self online. I have to be me. You have to be you. Once we are online as ourselves, connected to each other and our other friends, then you can have the evolution of what becomes the social web.

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.

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.

I gave a talk on gender stuff at Facebook one morning and a man didn't come. It was optional; he didn't have to come. But he sent a note saying, "I missed your meeting because I drove my kids to school so my wife could do something else. Thank you for making that possible." I think that employee is a loyal employee for Facebook and I think more companies should want that kind of loyalty.

I believe we need affordable child care. I believe we need flexibility. I believe we need institutional reform and public policy reform.

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.

At Facebook we feel a lot of affinity not just for this community but for any community that is trying to do what Davos is trying to do, which is to share information. And Davos is doing it in a particular way - I think the Facebook approach is obviously more broad-based, we're trying to include everyone in the world. But the goal is the same: bring people together, to share information and make the world more connected, and have people have a deeper understanding of themselves, others, the communities of which they want to be a part and can be a part.

When we get feedback on women, we ask, "Is that real or is that the gender bias at play?" Everyone could start doing that today and I think we'd see really big results.

In our performance reviews with women, we need to be saying, "Are you reaching enough? Are you applying for jobs when you meet some of the criteria like men, or are you waiting to meet all the criteria like women do?" There's so much we can do to encourage women to take on more and believe in themselves.

We need to start talking about child-rearing in the workplace.

We need to talk more openly about mentorships and sponsorships. Women don't get the mentoring, and particularly the sponsors, they need to succeed as much as men.

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.

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.

There's a lot that needs to be fixed in dating for men and women in the U.S. - there's a lot of pressure on women to do things they may not want to do. And if you start out unequal, you are not going to end up with equality.

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.

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.

I'm excited that more people, especially men, are understanding that equality is good for them. I don't want men to want equality for women because they're being nice to their colleagues and daughters. I want men to want it because it's better for their companies and their lives.

Sixty-four percent of managers in the U.S. are afraid to be alone in a room with a woman. Mentoring is all about being alone in a room with someone. Let's start talking about this honestly. The lack of equal access is the silent killer for women and no one wants to talk about it.

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.

All of us want the same things. We want to be good to the people around us and for our lives to have meaning. For me that means making the world a little bit easier for women.

We cannot change what we are not aware of, and once we are aware, we cannot help but change.

If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat! Just get on.

Feeling confident - or pretending that you feel confident - is necessary to reach for opportunities. It's a cliché, but opportunities are rarely offered; they're seized.

In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders.

Being confident and believing in your own self-worth is necessary to achieving your potential.

So please ask yourself: What would I do if I weren't afraid? And then go do it.

Trying to do it all and expecting that it all can be done exactly right is a recipe for disappointment. Perfection is the enemy.

Presenting leadership as a list of carefully defined qualities (like strategic, analytical, and performance-ori ented) no longer holds. Instead, true leadership stems from individuality that is honestly and sometimes imperfectly expressed.... Leaders should strive for authenticity over perfection.

When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. 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.

Done is better than perfect.

The time is long overdue to encourage more women to dream the possible dream.

But the upside of painful knowledge is so much greater than the downside of blissful ignorance.

The most important thing we're doing differently is that we talk openly about gender at Facebook.

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

Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence." (Harvard Business School definition of leadership)

It's hard to visualize someone as a leader, if she is always waiting to be told what to do.

There is no perfect fit when you're looking for the next big thing to do. You have to take opportunities and make an opportunity fit for you, rather than the other way around. The ability to learn is the most important quality a leader can have.

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 hope you find true meaning, contentment, and passion in your life. I hope you navigate the difficult times and come out with greater strength and resolve. I hope you find whatever balance you seek with your eyes wide open. And I hope that you - yes, you - have the ambition to lean in to your career and run the world. Because the world needs you to change it.

Real change will come when powerful women are less of an exception. It is easy to dislike senior women because there are so few.

Women need to shift form thinking "I'm not ready to do that" to thinking "I want to do that- and I'll learn by doing it.

The path to change is best traveled when we travel together.

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,

Fortune does favor the bold and you'll never know what you're capable of if you don't try.

No industry or country can reach its full potential until women reach their full potential. This is especially true of science and technology, where women with a surplus of talent still face a deficit of opportunity.

Fear is at the root of so many of the barriers that women face. Fear of not being liked. Fear of making the wrong choice. Fear of drawing negative attention. Fear of overreaching. Fear of being judged. Fear of failure. And the holy trinity of fear: the fear of being a bad mother/wife/daughter.

We [Facebook] really believe in enabling people to be their authentic selves on the web, and enabling people to communicate directly with each other in a very personal way.

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.

Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder.