I Call Bullshit

Maybe you’ve heard the news: you can leave work every day at 5:30 and still go on to become one of the most successful women in business history. Or so says Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook COO who recently claimed that she has been getting home for dinner at 6 since she had children.

The former Barnard graduation speaker continued that while she’s been cutting out early for years, she has only recently begun talking about it openly. She also admits that she regularly sends late night and early morning emails to colleagues to “show everyone” she is still putting in her hours.

As much as I initially celebrated Sandberg’s announcement, I now find myself cringing at the imagined autonomy she believes is available to women in the workplace, the sense that mothers are more deserving of work-life balance than everyone else, and that staying up til the wee hours at home to answer emails is necessarily less stressful or terrible than doing it at the office at a more reasonable time.

If you’ve worked in a competitive corporate environment, then you know that it takes years to be at the point where you choose your own hours (there’s no way Sandberg has always been leaving at 5:30), that everyone — mothers, fathers, the childless — craves and deserves better “work-life balance,” and that when you are at a popular mega-company like Google or Facebook (or even an unpopular non-hip company, like a law firm), there are always twenty other people who would gladly take your position for half the pay and double the hours.

So while I’d love to applaud Sandberg for talking about the conflicts between being a corporate powerhouse and an attentive mother, I also want her to recognize that not all of us can do what she does. We haven’t reached that level of success or wealth where we call all the shots and make our own hours. Instead of telling us how awesome she is in both her career and her family, she might do more good by, I don’t know, setting a company policy that everyone goes home at 5:30, not just the people with the power to make that decision for themselves.

(All that said, she is an amazing woman, and her Barnard graduation speech is still one of the most inspiring twenty minutes you’ll ever see. Trust me, watch it.)