Leila Janah Quotes

My hope in writing 'Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead' was to change the conversation from what women can't do to what we can.

I have tried to be a leader. I have tried in my role of being one of the first women at Google, let alone the first woman to have a baby, to really try to set the tone that this is a great place to work for diversity reasons.

I wasn't prepared for the environment I encountered trying to break into television news. In the world of music, where I spent my formative years, we were judged solely on our talent, and gender wasn't a factor.

I guess because there aren't many women working in the kind of variety of spaces that I've had the opportunity and privilege to kind of work in, that there is this extreme scrutiny about my career.

Sponsorship involves putting your own political capital at risk, so they are going to help that person to succeed. Women get promoted; they don't get sponsored. Women know they are on their own if they get that promotion.

And so when I moved to IBM, I moved because I thought I could apply technology. I didn't actually have to do my engineer - I was an electrical engineer, but I could apply it. And that was when I changed. And when I got there, though, I have to say, at the time, I really never felt there was a constraint about being a woman. I really did not.

You must develop personal contacts if you want to be successful.

You go to a technology conference or an engineering conference, there are very few women there. At the same time it's a blessing in the fact that you do get noticed. People tend to remember you as the only woman in the room 'who said that', or the only woman in the room who was an engineer.

If more women want to be a part of the computer industry today, they have to do more to put themselves there. Nobody is keeping them out.

I have faced challenges during the initial stages of my career, and I see Run Adam as filling a vacuum.

The key thing for me has always been how we realize the mission - enabling every professional in the world to change their own economic curve by the strength of their alliances and connections with other people.

Often, people wonder if she can give the time required at work, given also her responsibilities at home. So a woman has to prove her worth over and over again each time she's given a new responsibility, especially when she is at junior to mid-level positions.

Many, if not most, career opportunities come to you through people you know. So the more people you know, the more opportunities you have. Improving your social network is a great example of a system for moving from lower odds to better odds without having a specific goal.

The kind of career that I want is not easy as a lady to manifest, because everyone wants a lady to be likable.

Without a doubt, I wholeheartedly support programs at Microsoft and in the industry that bring more women into technology and close the pay gap.

The ability to network successfully can be one of the greatest assets in business. It allows some people to find incredible opportunities, while others just watch from the sidelines.

One of my passions is women in business and helping women to get ahead in business. For women, that feedback loop can be broken. Women won't get as much feedback from male bosses as men will get. Therefore, they have to make an extra effort, whether that is unfortunate, good, bad, indifferent.

There's a lot of 'who you know' in this business, and I don't think I skipped a step on the journey.

The biggest barrier for women is the thought that they can't have it all.

I am no longer a scientist as I stopped in 2000. Science was quite a testing place to be as a working-class woman.

I think there is really something we need to examine about the notion of careers, and are women encouraged and given the same opportunities to have vital healthy careers in which they are challenged by certain things, they try new things, they struggle, maybe they stumble, maybe they fail, and then there's more room to succeed as well.

When it comes to nurturing professional relationships and developing a community, LinkedIn is one of the best resources.

What I see around the management team meetings and the conference tables I sit at is that there isn't that same comfort level in other women who are rising the ranks. And I don't know how to fix that.

Sometimes I speak out on women in tech issues.

I am a woman, and I am proud to say that I work in technology. But I also recognise that the combination of those two facts puts me in the minority.