Career women need a better half who does his half

Joanna Strober (left) and Sharon Meers have rereleased their 2009 book, "Getting to 50/50," with a new foreword by Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg. Joanna Strober (left) and Sharon Meers have rereleased their 2009 book, "Getting to 50/50," with a new foreword by Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg. Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Career women need a better half who does his half 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

Sharon Meerslikes to tell young women that the most important career decision they make is whom they marry.

Men, in the book Meers co-authored with entrepreneur Joanna Strober, should be chosen for their enthusiasm about doing (or, at least, potential willingness to do) chores - the laundry-doing, diaper-changing, dinner-making routine of domestic life.

"Getting to 50/50," written in 2009 but rereleased this month with a foreword by Sheryl Sandberg, uses hard data to argue that ambitious women need men who can be equal partners.

Meers is the head of Magento Enterprise Strategy, which is eBay's global e-commerce platform. The book, based on a series of talks she and Strober gave to Stanford students, is a feminist how-to guide for the professional set, with advice on how to find or (if already found) train a 50/50 partner. And the benefits they cite are quite appealing: When couples split chores, their marriages are happier and they have more sex.

Both based in the South Bay, they paused on a recent morning to talk about how this might apply to young women and why, really, we need to keep talking about feminism.

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Q: The idea of 50/50 seems pretty logical. Are there people who disagree?

Strober: There's definitely a belief that their kids are going to be better off if one parent stays home. And it's hard, as a mother, to believe that anyone can take care of your child as well as you can. But the research is 100 percent clear that children raised by working parents do just as well.

Q: What inspired you two - both mothers and executives - to add writing to your schedule?

Meers: We were watching women that we knew leave jobs that they had worked very hard to get. And then an article came out in New York Times Magazine that basically said women just don't want to work. Which was crazy! Lots of women we saw were either leaving because they had inflexible jobs or were prioritizing their husband's career over theirs. They wanted to work.

Q: It's a data-heavy book. Why'd you want to do that?

Meers: Well, I don't believe anything unless I go to the source data, so I went straight to the people at the (National Institutes of Health) who commissioned the largest study on child care to look at what kids really need from their parents - it turns out it's happy parents, parents who get along with each other, the involvement of men. Study after study shows that.

Strober: It's hard to get the conversation started until you put data in front of someone.

Q: Why is the discussion around women and careers reaching such a fever pitch?

Strober: You look at the Twitter IPO board (which has zero women) and you're like, "Wow, nothing is changing." There should be some women on that board, right? It's 2013 and there aren't. Those of us who graduated college 20 years ago didn't expect this. We all thought there was going to be more of us! So I think a lot of us are reflecting on that.

Meers: When we were in college, we all thought it would be 50/50 by now.

Q: Why did you start this project through talks to Stanford students?

Meers: A lot of the big surprises happen between 25 and 45. You see how many people you thought were invested in having a dual-career life and then suddenly think they can't do it. Our goal is to get people more focused on what the research really says.

Q: Sheryl Sandberg wrote the introduction. How is this book different from "Lean In"?

Strober: We tried to be very practical and give concrete suggestions on how to make it work - assume you're leaning in, and now how can we make it work?

Q: Sharon, you brought up the idea of a 50/50 partnership on your very first date with your husband. How soon is too soon to establish these ground rules? Should women put this on their OkCupid profiles?

Meers: Absolutely! 50/50 required.