Silicon Valley

Featured Speaker(s)

Sharon Meers is the co-author of Getting to 50/50, a book about how men and women find common ground 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 Time magazine, Forbes, BusinessWeek and USA Today and lauded by leading academics and business executives for what the Huffington Post called it’s “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 and worked on diversity efforts in two of the firm’s divisions. Sharon lives in the Bay Area with her husband Steve, a real-estate developer, and their 8-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter. With her husband, Sharon founded the Partnership for Parity at the Stanford Graduate School of Business School 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 B.A. in History from Harvard College and an M.A. in Economics from New York University.