Interesting article about how female executives in California’s tech industry work flexibly, successfully, and how women still lag behind men at the top of most careers, through a mixture of gender psychology, predispositions, and family time. Anything that could be applicable to the Indian legal profession here?

Without a lot of official committees and HR red tape, Silicon Valley is figuring out the single most vexing problem for ambitious working women, one everyone thought was unsolvable: how to let them spend time with their children without ruining their careers…

In a chart comparing the “career cost of family” in elite workplaces – meaning the price people pay for taking time off – the economist Claudia Goldin floats the tech companies high above the rest. Women and men there can take time off and not take a big salary hit. Other industries, by contrast, suffer from “inertia” or “resistance to change”…

She was just doing that thing young women tend to do, which is hesitate before she’d even got started. “I watch it all day long,” Sandberg told me. “Women are making room for kids they don’t have, years before they try to get pregnant. Then, when they do get pregnant, they would be coming back to a job they no longer want.” The men, meanwhile, are “super-aggressive and focused. They are in your office every day. ‘Can I do that? Can I lead this?’ They don’t have to be talked into things.”

[The Guardian]