Sheryl Sandberg on Why More Women Are Leaving Corporate Leadership

More than a decade after telling women to “lean in,” Sheryl Sandberg is concerned that more are leaning out — but not because they lack ambition.

Sandberg, Meta’s former COO and author of the 2013 bestseller “Lean In,” told Business Insider that there’s a gender gap when it comes to leadership ambitions in 2026. “This is not the women who are saying, ‘I don’t want to do it,'” Sandberg, 57, said. “It’s the women saying, ‘I don’t want to do it because I’m not wanted, I’m not getting the same opportunities and the same support, and I face an unfair burden at home.'”

Lean In, the nonprofit organization Sandberg founded in tandem with her book’s publication, has been releasing its annual Women in the Workplace reports with McKinsey since 2015. In its 2025 Women in the Workplace report, which surveyed 9,500 US employees across 124 organizations, Lean In found that, despite having practically identical levels of career motivation as men, women were less likely to want a promotion.

When asked why, 25% of the women who didn’t want to advance cited “personal obligations,” compared to 15% of men who said the same. The report also found gaps in household labor as well as opportunities for mentorship for women.

At Business Insider, we’ve been covering this trend. Amid mass layoffs and newly enforced RTO mandates, some women who have moved up in the corporate world during the “Lean In” era are feeling burnt out and are stepping back. They have shared their stories with us, of starting their own businesses, going freelance, or, in one case, moving to Antarctica.

Sandberg finds this shift “concerning” — both for women and companies at large.

“We’re at a critical moment in time for women, because what a lot of women are seeing is that commitment to them in leadership pulling back,” Sandberg said. “Then what’s happening to them is their ambition is pulling back. And that’s a loss. It’s a loss for our economy. It’s a loss for our companies. It’s a loss for our children.”

Why corporate women never ‘had it all’

One of the most common critiques leveled against Sandberg and the “Lean In” movement is that it unrealistically encourages women to “have it all” — though the book argued the opposite.

“Lean In” had a chapter titled “The Myth of Doing it All,” and in a 2013 McKinsey Quarterly interview, Sandberg denounced the idea of women feeling pressure to be everything all at once: “No one can have it all,” she said. “That language is the worst thing that’s happened to the women’s movement.”

Sandberg told Business Insider that it’s easy to “overly characterize the words ‘lean in.'”

“What I mean by them is very clear,” she said. “I think women should make decisions based on believing in their own abilities, based on believing that they should and can have the same opportunities as men.”

Recent data shows trouble in that department, particularly for working moms. Matthew Nestler, a senior economist at KPMG, recently found that labor force participation between 2023 and 2026 decreased the most among women with children under 5, regardless of their education level. Meanwhile, participation increased for almost all groups of men, college-educated women with kids old enough to go to school, and women with no kids.

Sandberg said some trends have remained consistent over time. “We know women do more of the housework at home,” she said. “We know women do more of the childcare.” This is doubly true for women in the sandwich generation, caring for both their kids and aging parents or in-laws.

For women facing short (or nonexistent) maternity leaves, inflexible schedules, and paychecks that pale in comparison to daycare costs, leaning out can feel like the best option.

When women are in corporate, they push for policies that retain more women

Sandberg said there are a few big benefits to having more women in charge. “We know when companies have more women in leadership, performance is better,” she said. “We also know they have better work-life balance, better policies, better care for their employees.”

One 2025 working paper from the IZA Institute of Labor Economics in Germany studied how gender diversity impacted retention in US companies using US Census data. It found that adding a woman to the board of directors increased female employment and earnings at public companies by 1-2%, driven by retention of existing female workers rather than hiring more women.

“What’s really interesting is that the ambition gap in our data collapses when women believe companies really want them in senior leadership,” Sandberg said of Lean In’s annual reports.

More specifically, she said it’s female leaders who are more likely to advocate — or even consider — policies that would keep other women around, from longer maternity leave options to lactation rooms.

Throughout her career, Sandberg said her personal experiences as a woman drove her to change her workplace culture. In the early 2000s, when she was the VP of global online sales and operations at Google, Sandberg was pregnant and nauseous as she hunted for a parking space before a meeting. After learning that Yahoo had pregnancy parking, she asked then-CEO Sergey Brin if Google could do the same. He agreed. Google did not respond to a request for comment on whether the policy still exists.

“You kind of need a pregnant woman to think of that in order for that to happen,” Sandberg, who had two kids with her late husband Dave Goldberg and has three stepchildren with her husband Tom Bernthal, said.

Later, when she was at Meta (then Facebook) in 2014, an employee with cancer was seeking fertility preservation prior to starting treatment. Because the company didn’t cover egg freezing, she couldn’t afford it, she told Sandberg.

When Sandberg looked into adding egg freezing coverage for cancer-related infertility, the head of HR wanted to go even further. “She said, ‘We should just cover egg freezing. Why should we decide why people need it?'” Sandberg said. Meta, through Progyny, a fertility benefits program, covers up to four “Smart Cycles” that can be used for IVF, egg freezing, and related care, as well as adoption and surrogacy assistance.

In 2012, when she publicly shared that she left the Facebook office at 5:30 p.m. every day to have dinner with her family and put her kids to bed, she said she got thank-yous from her competitors.

“I got flowers from the Yahoo legal team — I didn’t know anyone on the Yahoo legal team,” Sandberg said. “Someone said to me: I couldn’t have gotten more press if I had murdered someone with an ax.”

She believes companies need to do a lot more

When asked what companies can do to improve, Sandberg quipped: “How long do you have?” She listed better parental and bereavement leave and opportunities for more flexible schedules among some of the policies that could retain more women.

There were also changes in workplace culture that could help. She said she still talks to people who won’t take a meeting with a woman alone.

“Who’s ever been promoted by someone they’ve never had a meeting with? No one ever. You can have a meeting alone with a woman: Keep the door open,” she said. “Let’s not find cultural reasons to give better opportunities to men than women. We absolutely shouldn’t be sexually harassed, but we shouldn’t be ignored, either.”

For now, Sandberg, who stepped down from Meta in 2022 to focus on her other ventures, the Sandberg Goldberg Bernthal Family Foundation (which runs Lean In) and the early-stage VC firm Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, said she supports the choices women make, even when it includes bowing out of corporate leadership.

“I think being at home with your children is great,” she said. “Going back to school, great. Starting a company, great. Going part-time, great. Anything you want to do is great.”

Sandberg just thinks it’s a shame if fewer stick around at all.

“I just hope that enough women want those senior leadership roles,” she said, “that we get the environment for women that they deserve.”