雪莉桑德伯格演讲

(1)Congratulations everyone, you made it

And I don't mean to the end of college, I mean to class day

because if memory serves

some of your classmates had too many scorpion bowls at the Kong last night

and are with us today

Given the weather

the one thing Harvard hasn't figured out how to control

some of your other classmates are at someplace warm with a hot cocoa

so you have many reasons to feel proud of yourself as you sit here today

Congratulations to your parents

You have spent a lot of money

so your child can say she went to a "small school" near Boston

And thank you to the class of 2014 for inviting me to be part of your celebration

It means a great deal to me

and looking at the list of past speakers was a little daunting

I can't be as funny as Amy Poehler

but I'm gonna be funnier than Mother Teresa

25 years ago

a man named Dave I did not know at the time but who would one day become my husband was sitting where you are sitting today

23 years ago

I was sitting where you are sitting today

Dave and I are back this weekend

with our amazing son and daughter to celebrate his reunion

and we both share the same sentiment

Harvard has a good basketball team

Standing here in the yard brings memories flooding back for me

I arrived here from Miami in the fall of 1987

with big hopes and even bigger hair

I was assigned to live in one of Harvard's historic monuments to great architecture Canaday

My go-to outfit, and I'm not making this up, was a jean skirt

white leg warmers and sneakers and a Florida sweater

because my parents who were here with me then as they're here with me now

told me everyone would think it was awesome that I was from Florida

At least we didn't have Instagram

For me, Harvard was a series of firsts

My first winter coat, we needn't need those in Miami

My first 10 page paper, they didn't assign those in my high school

My first C

after which my proctor told me that she was on the Admissions Committee and I got admitted to Harvard for my personality

not my academic potential

The first person I ever met from boarding school

I thought that was our really troubled kids

The first person I ever met who shares the name with a whole building

or so I met when the first classmate I met was Sarah Wigglesworth

who bore no relation at all to the dorm

which would have been nice to know with that very intimidating moment But then I went on to meet others

Francis Strauss, James Wells

Jessica Science Center B

My first love, my first heartbreak

the first time I realized that I love to learn

and the first and very last time I saw anyone read anything in Latin

When I sat in your seat all those years ago

I knew exactly where I was headed. I had it all planned out

I was going to the World Bank to work on global poverty

Then I would go to law school

And I would spend my life working in a nonprofit or in a government

At Harvard's commencement tomorrow as your dean described

each school is gonna stand up and graduate together

the college, the law school, the med school and so on

At my graduation, my class cheered for the PhD students

and then booed the business school

Business school seemed like such a sellout

18 months later, I applied to business school

It wasn't that I was wrong about what I would do decades after graduating

I had it wrong a year and a half later

And even if I could have predicted I would one day work in the private sector I never could have predicted Facebook

because there was no internet

and Mark Zuckerberg was at elementary school

already wearing his hoody

Not locking into a path too early

gave me an opportunity to go into a new and life changing field

And for those of you who think I owe everything to good luck

after Canaday I got Quaded

What's that? Barron

(2)

There is no straight path from your seat today to where you are going

Don't try to draw that line. You will not just get it wrong

You'll miss big opportunities and I mean big, like the Internet

Careers are not ladders. Those days are long gone

but jungle gyms

Don't just move up and down. Don't just look up

Look backwards, sideways, around corners

Your career and your life will have starts and stops and zigs and zags Don't stress out about the white space, the path you can try

because there in lives both the surprises and the opportunities

As you open yourself up to possibility

the most important thing I can tell you today

is to open yourself up to honesty

to telling the truth to each other

to being honest with yourselves

and to being honest about the world we live in

If you watched children, you will immediately notice how honest they are My friend Betsy was pregnant and her son

for the second child, son Sam was 5

he wanted to know where the baby was in her body

So yes Mommy, are the babies arms in your arms?

And she said, no no Sam, baby's in my tummy

whole baby

Mom, are the baby's legs in your legs?

No, Sam, whole baby's in my tummy

Then Mommy, what's growing in your butt?

As adults

we are almost never dishonest

and that can be a very good thing

When I was pregnant with our first child

I asked my husband Dave if my butt was getting big

At first, he didn't answer but I pressed

So he said, yeah, a little

For years my sister-in-law said about him what people

will now say about you for the rest of your life when you do something done

and that guy went to Harvard

Hearing the truth at different times along the way would have helped me

I would not have admitted it easily when I sat where you sit

But when I graduated, I was much more worried about my love life than my career I thought I only had a few years very limited time to find one of the good guys before he was to, or before they were all taken

or I got too old

So I moved to DC, and met with guy

and I got married at the nearly decrepit age of 24

I married a wonderful man but I had no business making that kind of commitment I didn't know who I was or who I wanted to be

My marriage fell apart within a year

something that was really embarrassing and painful at the time

and it did not help that so many friends came up to me and said

I never knew that, never thought that was going to work or

I knew you weren't right for each other

No one had managed to say anything like that to me

before I marched down an aisle when it would have been far more useful

And as I lived through these painful months of separation and divorce

boy, did I wish they had?

And boy, did I wish I had asked them?

At the same time in my professional life, someone did speak up

My first boss out of college was Lant Pritchett

an economist who teaches at the Kennedy School who is here with us today

After I deferred to law school for the second time

Lant sat me down and said

I don't think you should go to law school at all

I don't think you want to go to law school

I think you think you should because you told your parents you would many years ago He noted that he had never once heard me talk about the law with any interest

I know how hard it can be to be honest with each other

even your closest friends, even when they're about to make serious mistakes

but I bet sitting here today, you know your closest friends' strength, weaknesses

what cliff they might drive off

and I bet for the most part you've never told them

and they've never asked

Ask them

Ask them for the truth because it will help you

and when they answer honestly

you know that that's what makes them real friends

Asking for feedback is a really important habit to get into

as you leave the structure of the school calendar and exams and grades behind

On many jobs if you want to know how you're doing

if you're going to have to ask and

then you're gonna have to listen without getting defensive

Take it from me, listening to criticism is never fun

(3)

but it's the only way we can improve

A few years ago, Mark Zuckerberg decided he wanted to learn Chinese

and in order to practice

he started trying to have work meetings with some of

our Facebook colleagues who are native speakers

Now you would think his very limited language skills

would keep these conversations from being useful

One day he asked a woman who was there

how it was going, how did you choose the Facebook

She answered with a long and pretty complicated sentence

So he said, simpler please

She spoke again

Simpler please

This went back and forth a couple of times

So she is blurted out in frustration, my manager is bad

That he understood

So often the truth is sacrificed to conflict avoidance

or by the time we speak the truth, we've used so many caveats

and preambles that the message totally gets lost

So I ask you to ask each other for the truth and other people

can you list it in simple and clear language?

And when you speak your truth

can you use simple and clear language?

As hard as it is to be honest with other people

it can be even more difficult to be honest with ourselves

For years after I had children

I would say pretty often I don't feel guilty working even when no one asked Someone might say, Sheryl, how's your day today?

And I would say, great I don't feel guilty working

Or do I need a sweater?

Yes, it's unpredictably freezing and I don't feel guilty working

I was kinda like a parrot with issues

Then one day on the treadmill, I was reading this article on Sociology Journal about how people don't start out lying to other people

they start out lying to themselves

and the things we repeat most frequently

are often those lies

So the sweat was pouring down my face

I started wondering what do I repeat pretty frequently

and I realized I feel guilty working

I then did a lot of research

and I spent an entire year with my dear friend Nell Scovell

writing a book talking about how I was thinking and feeling

and I'm so grateful that so many women around the world connected to it My book of course was called Fifty Shades of Grey

I can see a lot of you connected to it as well

We have even more work to do in being honest about the world we live in We don't always see the hard truths

and once we see them, we don't always have the courage to speak out When my classmates and I were in college

we thought that fight for gender equality was one that was over

Sure, most of the leaders in every industry were men

but we thought changing that was just a matter of time

Lamont Library right over there

one generation before us didn't let women through its doors

But by the time we sat in your seat, everything was equal

Harvard and Radcliffe was fully integrated

We didn't need feminism because we were already equals

We were wrong

I was wrong

The world was not equal then

and it is not equal now

I think nowadays

we don't just hide ourselves from the hard truth

and shut our eyes to the inequities

but we suffer from the tyranny of low expectations

In the last election cycle in the United States

women won 20% of the Senate seats

and all the headlines started screaming out

women take over the Senate

I felt like screaming back, wait a minute everyone

50% of the population getting 20% of the seats

That's not a takeover. That's an embarrassment

Just a few months ago this year

a very well respected and well-known business executives in Silicon Valley invited me to give a speech to his clu

b on social media

I've been to this club a few months before when I

have been invited for a friend's birthday

It was a beautiful building and I was wandering around

looking at it, looking for the women's room

(4)

when a staff member informed me very firmly

that the ladies' room was over there

and I should be sure not to go up stairs

because women are never allowed in this building

I didn't realize I was in an all-male club until that minute

I spent the rest of the night wondering what I was doing there

wondering what everyone else was doing there

wondering if any of my friends in San Francisco would invite me to

a party at a clu

b that didn't allow Blacks or Jews or Asians or gays

Being invited to give a business speech at this club

hit me even more egregious

because you couldn't claim that it was only social business that was done there My first thought was, "Really?"

Really

A year after "Lean In"

this dude thought it was a good idea

to invite me to give a speech to his literal all-boys club

And he wasn't alone

there is an entire committee of well respected businessman

who joined him in issuing this kind invitation

To paraphrase Groucho Marx

and don't worry, I won't try to do the voice

I don't want to speak in any club that won't have me as a member

So I said no

and I did it in a way I probably wouldn't have even 5 years before

I wrote a long and passionate email

arguing that they should change their policies

They thanked me for my prompt response and wrote that

perhaps things will eventually change

Our expectations are too low

Eventually needs to become immediately

We need to see the truth and speak the truth

We tolerate discrimination and we pretend that opportunity is equal

Yes we elected an African-American president

but racism is pervasive still

Yes, there are women who run Fortune 500 companies

5 percent to be precise

but our road there is still paved with words like pussy and bossy

while our male peers are leaders and results focused

African-American women have to prove that they're not angry

Latinos risk being branded fiery hot head

A group of Asian-American women and men in Facebook

wore pins one day that said I may or may not be good enough

Yes, Harvard has a woman president

and in two years, the United States may have a woman president

(5)

But in order to get there

Hillary Clinton is gonna have to overcome 2 very real obstacles

unknown and often ununderstood gender bias

and even worse, a degree from Yale

You can challenge stereotypes that's subtle and obvious

At Facebook, we have posters around the wall to inspire us

Done is better than perfect

Fortune favors the bold. What would you do if you weren't afraid?

My new favorite

nothing at Facebook is someone else's problem

I hope you feel that way about the problems you see in the world

because they are not someone else's problem

Gender inequality harms men along with women

Racism hurts Whites along with Minorities

And the lack of equal opportunity keeps all of us

from failing our true potential

So as you graduate today

I want to put some pressure on you

I want to put some pressure on you to acknowledge the hard truths

not shy away from them

and when you see them to address them

The first time I spoke out about what it was like to be a woman in the workforce was less than five years ago

That means that for 18 years from where you sit to where I stand

my silence implied that everything was okay

You can do better than I did

And I mean that so sincerely

At the same time

I want to take some pressure off you

Sitting here today you don't have to

know what career you want or how to get the career you might want

Leaning in does not mean your path will be straight or smooth

and most people who make great contribution start way later than Mark Zuckerberg

Find a jungle gym you want to play and start climbing

not only will you figure out what you want to do eventually

but once you do, you'll crush it

Looking at you all here today

I'm filled with hope

All of you who were admitted to a "small school" near Boston either for your academic potential or your personality or both you've had your first, whether it's a winter coat, a love or a C

you've learned more about who you are and who you want to be And most importantly

you've experienced the power of community

you know that while you are extraordinary on your own

we are all stronger and can be louder together

I know that you will never forget Harvard

and Harvard will never forget you

especially during the next fundraising drive

Tomorrow

you all become part of a lifelong community

which offers truly great opportunity

and therefore comes with real obligation

You can make the world fair for everyone

expect honesty from yourself and each other

demand and create truly equal opportunity

not eventually, but now

And tomorrow by the way

you get something Mark Zuckerberg does not have

a Harvard degree

Congratulations, everyone