Should She Lean In or Pull Back?

Should She Lean In or Pull Back? 

-Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg on a mission to reboot feminism-

Kiyotaka ISHIKAWA

Sheryl Sandberg, leading Facebook with its famous CEO, draws the world’s attention not as the company’s COO but as a woman, wife, and mother. Her first book, Lean In, is still on the bestseller list since published in the U.S. early this year. This raises a question: why are we still arguing about women and success although gender equality in business has been advocated for a few decades? Probably, it is due to the absence of a role model who plays a successful woman both in business and home as we know few female leaders in companies, even fewer of them successful as a partner and working parents. Sandberg is taking that place and refueling feminism. Why does she try to empower business women for success, and is it worth trying?

Why women need to lean in

Statistics show tiny presence of women in executive positions. The percentage of female CEOs at Fortune 500 companies is 4.2 % in 2013, slightly improved from 1.4% in 2003, while women make up almost half the workforce and even exceed men in the rate of holding college degree over the 25-34 age group. When Sandberg refers to what or who is keeping women down from success in business, she puts emphasis on the invisible barrier in women’s minds. Females are raised from birth to have different expectations such as “Don’t be outspoken, aggressive, more powerful than men.” Women internalize these negative messages they get throughout their lives to result in wrecking women’s ability to advance into senior positions. 

How to lean in

Sandberg’s argument in the book is that how to get rid of these internal barriers is critical to gaining power. Most importantly among all tips she shows, we, both men and women, need to be aware of the penalty women pay for success. An experiment suggests that success and likability are positively correlated for men and negatively for women. The examinee students were assigned to read a female successful entrepreneur’s story. Half of them read the original one while the other half read the same story with just a difference—her name was changed to a man’s. As a result, the latter group with the alternation of her name came across as a more appealing colleague. On the other hand, she was seen as selfish and not the type of person the subjects would want to hire or work with.  

By showing both men and women how female colleagues are held to different standards, we can start changing attitudes today. Sandberg is one of such women who have been be said “too aggressive,” “not a term player,” or “a bit political” even in the current manners of gender equality. Sometimes, a manager like her at companies receives feedback that a woman who reported by her colleagues is “too aggressive,” but she asks the people who gave the feedback, “If a man had done those same things, would you have considered him too aggressive?” They always says no. She continues “we have to both fight against the barriers and get them out of our consciousness.”

Leaning in is not the option for all?

Sandberg’s argument is based on her ideal of true equality where women ran half of our countries and companies and men ran half of our home. Do women who she is trying to empower really want that kind power, even if female accomplishment comes at a cost? A lot of working women today might feel happy to lean back from their ambition to play a limited role that has been systematically told they were supposed to do, considering what they have to lose when their colleagues realized their success. It is a highly personal decision so no one should pass judgement on this. However, there’s an ambition gap between men and women because a woman is less likely to have an environment where she can pursuit her ambition than a man is, not because women genetically tend to be not as ambitions as men. Sandberg is just trying to see where boys and girls end up if they get equal encouragement, and she is sure about that we might have some differences in how leadership is done but no difference in its quality. 

Comments

A woman does not necessarily need to be as aggressive as a man at her leading position in companies, but, instead, she would be required to have irreplaceable qualities in order to compete with male rivals, just as Sandberg does. The CEO Zuckerberg admits her unique abilities as the only female top executive in Facebook, especially her high emotional quotient (EQ) as well as efficiency. In a meeting to discuss the purchase of a Web-design company, Sandberg reminded her team that the firm’s founder was about to have a birthday and wanted to get the deal done before the big day. That consideration turned out to be very effective in the company acquisition.

Her episodes support that women can lead companies quite successfully but in different way male leaders do. According to data from McKinsey’s company survey, businesses with more women on their boards are more profitable. It is a benefit of companies for women to come over the internal barriers in their mind, and, of course, it is also the true accomplishment of their ambitions, offsetting what they have to pay for the success and even paying off. So, it’s worth trying. 

*Belinda Luscombe, Confidence Woman, TIME, March 18 issue, 2013, pp.22-31.

**Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, Knopf, 2013.

THE CONFLICT OF THE BILINGUAL MIND

THE CONFLICT OF THE BILINGUAL MIND

The multilingual education raises children nimbler but too language-oriented?

Kiyotaka ISHIKAWA

As the world more globalized, we have a lot of situation in schools, business, and daily lives that requires more than one language. One of the most effective way to learn a multilingual skill is to start early, precisely during a pre-school period when an ability to acquire languages peaks at 9 months and sharply drop off at 6 years. Mastery of multiple languages in this period, according to a study, unexpectedly affects neurological structure of growing brains, which means bilingual children grow nimbler. However, some mothers with a half-blood child concern the brain specialized in multilingual skills might miss his chances to have interest in non-lingual subjects. Does putting children in a multilingual environment necessarily do better than a monolingual education does?

Learning a second language can produce a nimbler mind

A physiological experiment last year in Sweden proved there is detectable growth in the nerve system among a group of children mastering an unfamiliar language as compared to a controlled group studying non-lingual subjects. Most changes were observed in the cognitive areas of the brain, for example, in the hippocampus which governs memory, and in the cerebral cortex, where higher-order reasoning is proceeded. 

This is coherent with a result of the empirical experiment, known as the Stroop test, in which subjects are flashed the names of colors on a screen, with the word matching or mismatching the actual colors of the letters, and are told to say the color’s name. The point  of the test is to examine simultaneous recognition of the color and the letter in the case of mismatch; announcing only the color while ignoring what the word says. At the trial, almost all bilingual subjects are faster and make fewer mistakes than monolinguals. 

These consequences indicate the bilinguals retain a higher cognitive ability and do better at handling multiple tasks simultaneously. A research psychologist attributes the bilinguals’ superiority over the cognitive test to the fewer loss of efficiency when they rotate among tasks, called the global switch cost in psychology. She says, “Everyone slows down some or makes more errors, but multilinguals have less of the drop-off.”

Bilingual education may fail to establish profession

Although it is surely advantageous over monolinguals for children to speak more than one language and even have a smarter brain among classmates and colleagues, they have to give up something everyone has in order to gain what the others do not have. There are time and interest limits over human’s intellectual development, so devoting one’s time and interest mainly to language mastery means missing a chance to learn something else.

An essay writer Sandra Haefelin, a half Germany and half Japanese, analyzes people with mixed blood of Germany and Japanese, comparing those who speak only Germany to those proficient at the both languages, and empirically concludes the German speakers are more likely to be engaged in a highly-specialized job like a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. Contrarily, the bilinguals tend to show a deep interest in language and culture and result in starting their career as a interpreter or translator.

Therefore, multilingual education may possibly spoil a child’s aptitude for non-lingual fields such as science, music, or sports. In other words, once a bilingual brain is developed at expense of time and interest in childhood, he might live the rest of life without begin aware of his talent even if he was a born mathematician, being afraid of wasting those resources already spent.

Conclusions

On the one hand, the neuroscientific evidence proves multilingual training at the primary stage of education enhances a child’s ability to process a few tasks simultaneously at faster pace and greater accuracy than monolinguals do. On the other hand, his inborn capability over non-lingual subjects could be prevented from expression by forcing him to concentrate his attention on language mastery. 

This issue is about a typical dilemma every person involved in education concerns about, that is, do they train a child’s brain so that he gains intellectual advantage at the early stage of life, or do they try not to interfere a child’s interest so as to improve his ability along his aptitude? 

From my case of primary education, I respect how my parents provided me with a variety of opportunity to find out my aptitude by myself. They sent me swimming, gymnastics, piano, and Japanese calligraphy school, and took me a number of foreign countries when summer vacations came, but never forced me after entering the high school. So, I believe I could have established my own core values and trained myself to develop ability for my career, and I would do the same thing as my parents did, for my future child. 

*kluger, Jeferey, “The Power of the Bilingual Brain,” TIME, pp.32-37, July 29, 2013

**Haefelin, Sandra, “The Pitfalls of the Bilingual,” retrieved from http://young-germany.jp/article_315