ion Gap:

What Would You Do if You Weren’t Afraid?

2. Sit at the Table

3. Success and Likeability

4. It’s a Jungle Gym, Not a Ladder

5. Are You My Mentor?

6. Seek and Speak Your Truth

7. Don’t Leave Before You Leave

8. Make Your Partner a Real Partner

9. The Myth of Doing It All

10. Let’s Start Talking About It

11. Working Together Toward Equality

Let’s Keep Talking …

Acknowledgments

Notes

A Note About the Author

Reading Group Guide





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INTRODUCTION

Internalizing the Revolution

I GOT PREGNANT with my first child in the summer of 2004. At the time, I was running the online sales
and operations groups at Google. I had joined the company three and a half years earlier when it was
an obscure start-up with a few hundred employees in a run-down office building. By my first
trimester, Google had grown into a company of thousands and moved into a multibuilding campus.

My pregnancy was not easy. The typical morning sickness that often accompanies the first trimester
affected me every day for nine long months. I gained almost seventy pounds, and my feet swelled two
entire shoe sizes, turning into odd-shaped lumps I could see only when they were propped up on a
coffee table. A particularly sensitive Google engineer announced that “Project Whale” was named
after me.

One day, after a rough morning spent staring at the bottom of the toilet, I had to rush to make an
important client meeting. Google was growing so quickly that parking was an ongoing problem, and
the only spot I could find was quite far away. I sprinted across the parking lot, which in reality meant ☆☆
lumbering a bit more quickly than my absurdly slow pregnancy crawl. This only made my nausea
worse, and I arrived at the meeting praying that a sales pitch was the only thing that would come out
of my mouth. That night, I recounted these troubles to my husband, Dave. He pointed out that Yahoo,
where he worked at the time, had designated parking for expectant mothers at the front of each
building.

The next day, I marched in—or more like waddled in—to see Google founders Larry Page and
Sergey Brin in their office, which was really just a large room with toys and gadgets strewn all over
the floor. I found Sergey in a yoga position in the corner and announced that we needed pregnancy
parking, preferably sooner rather than later. He looked up at me and agreed immediately, noting that
he had never thought about it before.

To this day, I’m embarrassed that I didn’t realize that pregnant women needed reserved parking
until I experienced my own aching feet. As one of Google’s most senior women, didn’t I have a
special responsibility to think of this? But like Sergey, it had never occurred to me. The other pregnant
women must have suffered in silence, not wanting to ask for special treatment. Or maybe they lacked
the confidence or seniority to demand that the problem be fixed. Having one pregnant woman at the
top—even one who looked like a whale—made the difference.

Today in the United States and the developed world, women are better off than ever. We stand on
the shoulders of the women who came before us, women who had to fight for the rights that we now
take for granted. In 1947, Anita Summers, the mother of my longtime mentor Larry Summers, was
hired as an economist by the Standard Oil Company. When she accepted the job, her new boss said to
her, “I am so glad to have you.