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1

The Leadership Ambition Gap

What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?

MY GRANDMOTHER Rosalind Einhorn was born exactly fifty-two years before I was, on August 28, 1917.
Like many poor Jewish families in the boroughs of New York City, hers lived in a small, crowded
apartment close to their relatives. Her parents, aunts, and uncles addressed her male cousins by their
given names, but she and her sister were referred to only as “Girlie.”

During the Depression, my grandmother was pulled out of Morris High School to help support the
household by sewing fabric flowers onto undergarments that her mother could resell for a tiny profit.
No one in the community would have considered taking a boy out of school. A boy’s education was
the family’s hope to move up the financial and social ladder. Education for girls, however, was less
important both financially, since they were unlikely to contribute to the family’s income, and
culturally, since boys were expected to study the Torah while girls were expected to run a “proper
home.” Luckily for my grandmother, a local teacher insisted that her parents put her back into school.
She went on not only to finish high school but to graduate from U.C. Berkeley.

After college, “Girlie” worked selling pocketbooks and accessories at David’s Fifth Avenue. When
she left her job to marry my grandfather, family legend has it that David’s had to hire four people to
replace her. Years later, when my grandfather’s paint business was struggling, she jumped in and took
some of the hard steps he was reluctant to take, helping to save the family from financial ruin. She
displayed her business acumen again in her forties. After being diagnosed with breast cancer, she beat
it and then dedicated herself to raising money for the clinic that treated her by selling knockoff
watches out of the trunk of her car. Girlie ended up with a profit margin that Apple would envy. I have
never met anyone with more energy and determination than my grandmother. When Warren Buffett
talks about competing against only half of the population, I think about her and wonder how different
her life might have been if she had been born half a century later.

When my grandmother had children of her own—my mother and her two brothers—she
emphasized education for all of them. My mother attended the University of Pennsylvania, where
classes were coed. When she graduated in 1965 with a degree in French literature, she surveyed a
workforce that she believed consisted of two career options for women: teaching or nursing. She chose ▼本▼作▼品▼由▼▼網▼提▼供▼下▼載▼與▼在▼線▼閱▼讀▼
teaching. She began a Ph.D. program, got married, and then dropped out when she became pregnant
with me. It was thought to be a sign of weakness if a husband needed his wife’s help to support their
family, so my mother became a stay-at-home parent and an active volunteer. The centuries-old
division of labor stood.

Even though I grew up in a traditional home, my parents had the same expectations for me, my
sister, and my brother. All three of us were encouraged to excel in school, do equal chores, and engage
in extracurricular activities. We were all supposed to be athletic too. My brother and sister joined

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sports teams, but I was the kid who got picked last in gym. Despite my athletic shortcomings, I was
raised to believe that girls could do anything boys could do and that all career paths were open to me.

When I arrived at college in the fall of 1987, my classmates of both gender