50/50: The Dual Career Life

CareerCast - Life-long Career Development

Is there a successful approach to the dual-career life? According to Sharon Meers, a former managing director of Goldman Sachs and coauthor of Getting to 50/50, the answer is yes. In this CareerCast, Sharon shares her experience, insights, and practical tips on finding common ground where men and women succeed together.

Aired December 17, 2010

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Biography

Sharon Meers is coauthor of Getting to 50/50, a book about how men and women find common ground and share power so that men can be full parents and women can have full careers. Launched on the Today Show in 2009, Getting to 50/50 has been featured in the New York Times, Time magazine, the Washington Post, and BusinessWeek, and lauded by leading academics and business executives for what the Huffington Post called its “Obama-like” approach with solutions to cut work/life stress, retain female talent, and improve productivity. Of the thousands of employees and students who’ve attended Getting to 50/50 talks, half have been male.

Prior to writing Getting to 50/50, Sharon was a managing director at Goldman, Sachs & Co. In her 16-year career at Goldman, Sharon ran several businesses. She now works at HP-Palm. Sharon lives in the Bay Area with her husband, Steve, a real-estate developer, and their two children. With her husband, Sharon founded the Partnership for Parity at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, which supports Stanford’s work on workplace parity, and a similar effort at Harvard University called the Dual-Career Initiative. Sharon also serves on the board of the National Women’s Law Center and on the advisory council of Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Research on Gender and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Sharon holds a BA in history from Harvard College and an MA in economics from New York University.

Read an excerpt of Getting to 50/50 by Sharon Meers.

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50/50: The Dual Career Life

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