eason that well-functioning groups are stronger than individuals. Teams that work together
well outperform those that don’t. And success feels better when it’s shared with others. So perhaps
one positive result of having more women at the top is that our leaders will have been trained to care
more about the well-being of others. My hope, of course, is that we won’t have to play by these
archaic rules forever and that eventually we can all just be ourselves.

We still have a long way to go. In November 2011, San Francisco magazine ran a story on female
entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and illustrated it by superimposing the featured women’s heads onto
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male bodies. The only body type they could imagine for successful entrepreneurship was wearing a
tie or a hoodie. 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. In fact, these “bad mother with a
briefcase” images are so prevalent that writer Jessica Valenti collected them in a funny and poignant
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blog post called “Sad White Babies with Mean Feminist Mommies.”

Until we can get there, I fear that women will continue to sacrifice being liked for being successful.
When I first arrived at Facebook, a local blog devoted some serious pixels to trashing me. They posted
a picture of me and superimposed a gun into my hand. They wrote “liar” in big red letters across my
face. Anonymous sources labeled me “two-faced” and “about to ruin Facebook forever.” I cried. I lost
some sleep. I worried that my career was over. Then I told myself it didn’t matter. Then everyone else
told me it didn’t matter—which only reminded me that they were reading these awful comments too. I
fantasized about all sorts of rejoinders, but in the end, my best response was to ignore the attacks and
do my job.

Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post, believes that learning to withstand criticism is
a necessity for women. Early in her career, Arianna realized that the cost of speaking her mind was
that she would inevitably offend someone. She does not believe it is realistic or even desirable to tell
women not to care when we are attacked. Her advice is that we should let ourselves react emotionally
and feel whatever anger or sadness being criticized evokes for us. And then we should quickly move

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on. She points to children as her role model. A child can cry one moment and run off to play the next.
For me, this has been good advice. 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.

It also helps to lean on one another. We can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that the attacks
are not personal. We can joke, as Marlo Thomas did, that “a man has to be Joe McCarthy in order to
be called ruthless. All a woman needs to do is put you on hold.” Real change will come when
powerful women are less of an exception. It is easy to dislike senior women because there are so few.
If women held 50 percent of the top jobs, it would just not be possible to dislike that many people.

Sharon Meers was motivated to write Getting to 50/50 after observing this kind of tipping point
firsthand. In the late 1990s, Amy Goodfriend was chosen to lead Goldman Sachs’s U.S. derivatives
team (and later became the first female partner in the Equities Division). It was a seismic event and
caused four senior men to quit the group. Amy faced a lot of skepticism and criticism. Bef