Louisa's blog: An important lesson

"Like many thousands of others, I hoovered up ‘Lean In’ when it was published in 2013, eager to absorb the thoughts, musings and advice of Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg; ready to be inspired. And whilst I certainly enjoyed her many anecdotes and reflections on women in the workplace, and cringed occasionally at times at what felt like ‘oversharing’, it was her opinions on coordinating work with family life and the balance of parental responsibilities that struck a particular chord.

Within Citymothers and Cityfathers one of the most common concerns I hear raised, is that the combined ‘to do list’ of working parents is incredibly poorly split; the division between domestic chores such as childcare, housework, maintenance, administration, finances often play to traditional gender roles and mean, invariably, that one half of a couple feels over-loaded at any one point in time. And indeed, my own household situation is no different; with my own husband working very full time in finance and travelling abroad often, my more-flexible but no less demanding schedule means that our collective ‘balancing act’ trips up regularly – and more often than not, it’s me who falls over.

So the part of Lean In that resonated the most, for me, was ‘Make Your Partner a Real Partner’, a chapter in which Sandberg encouraged men to lean in to their families as much as women should lean into their careers. She referred repeatedly to her own family situation and relationship with her husband, Dave Goldberg – a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur, noting that they had arrived at a place where they were ‘partners not just in what we do, but who is in charge’. She writes, ‘in the coming years, our balancing act may get harder...as the kids get older, we will have to adjust. Many of my friends have told me that teenage children require more time from their parents. Every stage of life has its challenges. Fortunately, I have Dave to figure it out with me’. Indeed, Lean In is dedicated to Dave ‘for making everything possible’.

Hearing, then, the news that Dave Goldberg passed away suddenly at the age of 47 whilst on a family holiday last week, moved me and many others considerably. Through the pages of Sandberg’s accessible book, we felt like we had got to know him. Ann-Marie Slaughter, president and chief executive of the New America Foundation and author of the controversial 2012 thought-piece Why Women Still Can’t Have it All said after the tragedy was publicised this weekend that: ‘He supported Sheryl Sandberg and thus all women.’

Perhaps that’s why it caused a real wake-up moment for me. Sandberg opened up her life to women everywhere in order to motivate and inspire, and we collectively admired her strength, ability and relationships. Re-reading her views on love, and her life partner again as I did last night was incredibly poignant, and a constant reminder that life is short. We cannot now understand the immense loss she and her children must feel and my heartfelt sympathies go to them.

We can, though, learn from Dave’s actions. Sandberg’ words in Lean Inwere a call to action, and so it’s time we stopped listening, nodding and thinking ‘that’s a nice idea’, and started to make positive changes, and redefine how we think about our loved ones and partnerships. We need to remember it’s not just women who will gain from this; men will benefit too as the gender stereotypes that constrain them at home and at work are lifted.

As much as being a working mother is not easy, being a working father is maybe harder. I know fathers who say goodbye to their children on a Sunday night and greet them again on a Saturday morning, an unsurprising but sad side-effect of a City job with long hours and a commute. Flexible working arrangements remain, culturally, a ‘female’ option; women, as a result, make an exhaustive effort to be more present and involved in their children’s lives - working part-time, from home, or full time with a structured gap each evening to put the children to bed before resuming work remotely. And so women who work and have children are labelled 'working mothers', whilst the equivalent label is rarely applied to men. It’s high-time that changed."

This blog was first published at www.telegraph.co.uk/women

Louisa Symington-Mills is the founder of Citymothers and Cityfathers. Louisa works part-time in private equity, and has two children aged 21 months and 3.5 years. She runs Citymothers & Cityfathers in her spare time and is a weekly columnist at The Telegraph online covering women, networking, work and business topics.