Sheryl Sandberg: Let’s talk about getting pregnant

via Bloomberg

I’ve been a (semi-conflicted) fangirl of Sheryl Sandberg’s ever since seeing her TED talk in late 2010. Then there was that glowing New Yorker profile in the summer of 2011. Her perspective as a feminist is definitely very white-educated-privileged-wealthy, which is hard to swallow when you hear her say that women are more to blame for their lack of advancement than societal structures are. I mean, not everybody has Larry Summers as a mentor, Gloria Steinem on speed dial and a wealthy tech CEO as a supportive husband.

Still, a lot of what she espouses regarding changing personal attitudes and behaviors and “leaning in” to your work resonates with me, and I deeply admire her brains, discipline and focus on mentorship. I’ll be downloading her upcoming book, “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead” when it comes out in March. Take my money, Sheryl!

But her panel presentation last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos has been bugging me. Here is one summation of her comments (other coverage of Sandberg at Davos is here and here and pretty much everywhere).

[The correlation between success and likeability has a] very practical consequences for women’s chances to get promoted, she noted.

It leads to phrases like “she’s great at her job but she’s just not as well liked by her peers,” or, “she’s a bit aggressive,” being tossed around casually by managers during performance reviews.

“They say this with no understanding that this is the penalty women face because of gender-specific stereotypes.”

Talking about this unintentional discrimination openly is the only way to make people aware of it and eradicate it, the Facebook executive argued.

Harvard, she said turning to Drew Gilpin Faust, who heads the place and was also on the panel, has managed to close the performance gap between male and female business school students doing precisely that. Addressing the “soft stuff”—no big structural changes needed.

Companies can do much the same, she argued. One step in that direction would be to help women cope with that most dreadful of dreaded questions: “should you be working when you have kids at home?”

How about having employers and managers ask women a different question, suggested Sandberg: have you thought about having a family? Let’s talk about how you’re going to manage through your child-bearing years.

Of course, she joked, nobody in their right mind would dare do so—inquiring about a female employee’s reproductive plans is breaking HR Rule No. 1.

And that, she said, is a problem.