new areas. I have had countless
conversations where women responded to this encouragement by saying, “I’m just not sure I’d be
good at that.” Or “That sounds exciting, but I’ve never done anything like it before.” Or “I still have a
lot to learn in my current role.” I rarely, if ever, heard these kinds of comments from men.

Given how fast the world moves today, grabbing opportunities is more important than ever. Few
managers have the time to carefully consider all the applicants for a job, much less convince more
reticent people to apply. And increasingly, opportunities are not well defined but, instead, come from
someone jumping in to do something. That something then becomes his job.

When I first joined Facebook, I was working with a team to answer the critical question of how best
to grow our business. The conversations were getting heated, with many people arguing their own
positions strongly. We ended the week without consensus. Dan Rose, leader of our deal team, spent
the weekend gathering market data that allowed us to reframe the conversation in analytics. His effort
broke the logjam. I then expanded Dan’s responsibilities to include product marketing. Taking
initiative pays off. It is hard to visualize someone as a leader if she is always waiting to be told what to
do.

Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s chief technology officer, was asked by The Huffington Post, “What’s
the most important lesson you’ve learned from a mistake you’ve made in the past?” She responded, “I
said no to a lot of opportunities when I was just starting out because I thought, ‘That’s not what my
degree is in’ or ‘I don’t know about that domain.’ In retrospect, at a certain point it’s your ability to
learn quickly and contribute quickly that matters. One of the things I tell people these days is that
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
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important quality a leader can have.”

Virginia Rometty, IBM’s first female CEO, told the audience at the 2011 Fortune Most Powerful
Women Summit that early in her career, she was offered a “big job.” She worried that she lacked the
proper experience and told the recruiter that she needed to think about it. That night, she discussed the
offer with her husband, who pointed out, “Do you think a man would have ever answered that
question that way?”

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“What it taught me was you have to be very confident,” Ginni said. “Even though you’re so self-
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critical inside about what it is you may or may not know. And that, to me, leads to taking risks.”

I continue to be alarmed not just at how we as women fail to put ourselves forward, but also at how
we fail to notice and correct for this gap. And that “we” includes me. A few years ago, I gave a talk on
gender issues to a few hundred employees at Facebook. After my speech, I took questions for as long
as time permitted. Later that afternoon, I came back to my desk, where a young woman was waiting to
talk to me. “I learned something today,” she said. “What?” I asked, feeling good, as I figured she was
about to tell me how my words had touched her. Instead, she said, “I learned to keep my hand up.”
She explained that toward the end of my talk, I had said that I would take only two more questions. I
did so, and then she put her hand down, along with all of the other women. But several men kept their
hands up. And since hands were