Professional Women Quotes & Sayings

I realized that searching for a mentor has become the professional equivalent of waiting for Prince Charming. We all grew up on the fairy tale "Sleeping Beauty," which instructs young women that if they just wait for their prince to arrive, they will be kissed and whisked away on a white horse to live happily ever after. Now young women are told that if they can just find the right mentor, they will be pushed up the ladder and whisked away to the corner office to live happily ever after. Once again, we are teaching women to be too dependent on others. — Sheryl Sandberg

I don't have to work extra hard, but that's because there are a lot of women in my professional network and I have hired a lot of women as full-time writers and part-time columnists. — Ann Friedman

I want to shine a spotlight on a new generation of women, who are creating, funding and managing some of the hottest companies in tech today. But I wanted to do more than share their professional stories. I wanted to share their personal journeys, too. — Willow Bay

Women have more inner power for creation, starting from family and home and ending with professional activity and politics. — Dalia Grybauskaite

-when he thinks of the starry-eyed puerility and narcissism of these fantasies now, a rough decade later, Schmidt experiences a kind of full-framed internal wince, that type of embarrassment-before-self that makes our most mortifying memories objects of fascination and repulsion at once, though in Terry Schmidt's case a certain amount of introspection and psychotherapy had enabled him to understand that his professional fantasies were not in the main all that unique, that a large percentage I bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful
what else could explain the fact that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact that thy themselves have been at the exact center of all they've experienced for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives? — David Foster Wallace

Sexual exploitation within professional relationships sometimes has been referred to as "professional incest." (...) the consequences to victims are remarkably similar to the effects observed in incest survivors. Women who are abused by someone whom they know and trust demonstrate distinct symptoms which usually are not present in victims of violence who did not know the offenders. They usually view their own participation as voluntary and therefore are likely to experience feelings of shame and guilt about having consented to the sexual conduct. They may feel anger at the perpetrator, but the anger is also turned inward to themselves, often leading to self-doubt and depression. As a result, they frequently demonstrate severely lowered self-esteem, social isolation, and sometimes self-destructive behavior, including suicide. — Joel Friedman

I love being a woman and I was not one of these women who rose through professional life by wearing men's clothes or looking masculine. I loved wearing bright colors and being who I am. — Madeleine Albright

Women have a tendency not to give up realms once they take over new ones. We are still proprietary over the domestic realm even as we take over new professional realms, and that is a real problem. — Hanna Rosin

He stepped back, away from her. He shook his head in disbelief. "You know, I shouldn't try to go out with career women. You're all stricken. A guy can really tell what life has done to you. I do better with women who have part-time jobs."

"Oh, yes?" said Zoe. She had once read an article entitled "Professional Women and the Demographics of Grief." Or no, it was a poem: If there were a lake, the moonlight would dance across it in conniptions. She remembered that line. But perhaps the title was "The Empty House: Aesthetics of Bareness." Or maybe "Space Gypsies: Girls in Academe." She had forgotten. — Lorrie Moore

I think I'm very blessed to have been raised by so many intelligent and impressive women, and now continuing that on a professional level, having people like Sarah and Nadia to guide me through this new phase of my career, is extremely significant. — Zayn Malik

I think I'm the only professional horse rider from the movie industry. Strangely, I've seen no men from the industry at equestrian events. Though I've seen some ladies like Diya Mirza and Lara Dutta at the race course. Women, by the way, make superior horse riders. — Randeep Hooda

Only 74 percent of professional women will rejoin the workforce in any capacity, and only 40 percent will return to full-time jobs [after taking time out of the workforce to raise children]. Those who rejoin will often see their earnings decrease dramatically. — Sheryl Sandberg

I've been so amazed at the number of really professional top-of-their-game women who I know to be intelligent, well educated and brilliant who have said, 'What was it like to snog Matt LeBlanc?' — Tamsin Greig

There's a horrible stereotype of both the romance writer and the romance reader as somehow undereducated and unprofessional, when in fact there are a number of incredibly well-educated professional women who have chosen to leave their other careers and go into writing romance. — Lauren Willig

A woman can plan. A woman thinks she needs a man for nothing in this world but soon realizes she is wrong. The same way every black- owned business has to acquire goods from a white distributor, women have to do business with men, be it professional or personal, to achieve too many of our goals. — Eric Jerome Dickey

I fought all my life for women to make their own choices, in their personal and professional lives. I made mine. — Hillary Clinton

In China, women who are single past the age of twenty-seven are stigmatized as sheng nu, or "leftover women." They face severe pressure from their families to marry, stemming from the widespread belief that regardless of education and professional achievement, a woman is "absolutely nothing until she is married." One thirty-six-year-old economics professor was rejected by fifteen men because she had an advanced degree; her father then forbade her younger sister from going to graduate school. — Sheryl Sandberg

Most people aren't familiar enough with what actually goes on in professional wrestling to know just how badly women are treated in WWE narratives. — Jackson Katz

The bicycle ... has been responsible for more movement in manners and morals than anything since Charles the Second. Under its influence, wholly or in part, have blossomed weekends, strong nerves, strong legs, strong language ... equality of sex, good digestion and professional occupation - in four words, the emanicipation of women. — John Galsworthy

One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women's choices concerning childbirth. — Adrienne Rich

When you're a professional athlete, you get paid millions of dollars for doing something that's not only fun, but also physical and badass. You have fans: pathetic people without their own lives or hopes or dreams that measure their happiness on your weekly performance (this still boggles my mind, but in the best way possible - however, my role as a fan now is quite detached). You get to travel around to different cities and fuck their most beautiful women. You are given license to do pretty much whatever you want all the time, and are forgiven easily and often instantly when caught doing anything illegal. Professional athletes can literally get away with murder. — A.D. Aliwat

Men and women of high professional standing have been reduced to the status of vagrants. — Elmer Rice

When a man helps a colleague, the recipient feels indebted to him and is highly likely to return the favor. But when a woman helps out, the feeling of indebtedness is weaker. ( ... ) Professor Flynn calls this the "gender discount" problem, and it means that women are paying a professional penalty for their pressumed desire to be communal. — Sheryl Sandberg

Simply put, when there is no home birth in a society, or when home birth is driven completely underground, essential knowledge of women's capacities in birth is lost to the people of that society - to professional caregivers, as well as to the women of childbearing age themselves. — Ina May Gaskin

I know some women go in for excitement and danger. It must make them feel more alive. It's my professional judgment that you're a dangerous man. — Margaret Way

If sexuality is beginning in such a skewed way: that boys expect to receive sexual pleasure and girls are expected to give it without reciprocation, is that why young women, even unintentionally, turn to getting something else in return for sex? Whether it be popularity, career success, professional attention. — Cris Mazza

If he could not restore her to the status of a respectable woman, then Sohrab would make her into something else entirely, something hitherto unknown in their entire extended family, an educated woman, a professional woman. — Jasmin Darznik

Feminism and femininity are not mutually exclusive. It is misogynistic to suggest that they are. Sadly, women have learned to be ashamed and apologetic about pursuits that are seen as traditionally female, such as fashion and makeup. But our society does not expect men to feel ashamed of pursuits considered generally male - sports cars, certain professional sports. In the same way, men's grooming is never suspect in the way women's grooming is - a well-dressed man does not worry that, because he is dressed well, certain assumptions might be made about his intelligence, his ability, or his seriousness. A woman, on the other hand, is always aware of how a bright lipstick or a carefully-put-together outfit might very well make others assume her to be frivolous. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I feel like a young adult. In high school I never felt like my professional life and my personal life were at odds, because my job has never been to be a role model for young women or teenagers. — Tavi Gevinson

When did my house turn into a hangout for every grossly overpaid, terminally pampered professional football player in northern Illinois?"
"We like it here," Jason said. "It reminds us of home."
"Plus, no women around." Leandro Collins, the Bears' first-string tight end emerged from the office munching on a bag of chips. "There's times when you need a rest from the ladies."
Annabelle shot out her arm and smacked him in the side of the head. "Don't forget who you're talking to."
Leandro had a short fuse, and he'd been known to take out a ref here and there when he didn't like a call, but the tight end merely rubbed the side of his head and grimaced. "Just like my mama."
"Mine, too," Tremaine said with happy nod.
Annabelle spun on Heath. "Their mother! I'm thirty-one years old, and I remind them of their mothers."
"You act like my mother," Sean pointed out, unwisely as it transpired, because he got a swat in the head next. — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

The Nightside CSI is only one man, pleasant enough, calm and easy going, and very professional. It probably helps that he has multiple personality disorder with a sub-personality for every speciality and discipline in his profession. One to handle fingerprints, another to examine blood splatter or look for magical residues ... He's really quite good at his job though he does tend to argue with himself.
Between himself he knows everything he needs to know. Each sub-personality has a different voice. Some of them are women. I've never asked. — Simon R. Green

Divorce can be a very destructive force and high powered, professional career women, like myself, don't have the luxury of time to fall apart. We want an alternative to months in therapy - something which will hold us together whilst helping us heal around our busy schedules that will also enable us to build healthy, future relationships which are drama-free. — Adele Theron

I am confident that someday in the future The Rock, who was once a professional wrestler, will run for president of the United States, and I think that he will win. I have seen with my own eyes the power of The Rock. The Rock is a uniter, not a divider. When the BOP showed Walking Tall, the turnout for every screening all weekend long was unprecedented. The Rock has an effect on women that transcends divisions of race, age, cultural background - even social class, the most impenetrable barrier in America. Black, white, Spanish, old, young, all women are hot for The Rock. Even the lesbians agreed that he was mighty easy on the eyes. — Piper Kerman

A supportive husband is an absolute requirement for professional women ... He is something she looks for, and when she finds him, she marries him. — Alice S. Rossi

Because we employ no professional preachers, it means that every sermon or lesson in church is given by a regular member - women and men, children and grandparents. — Clayton Christensen

Call it nature or nurture, there are differences in how men and women approach professional conduct, and facing these issues head-on will make us all more equipped to succeed. — Kathryn Minshew

There is also an epidemic of infertility in this country. There are more women who have put off child-bearing in favor of their professional lives. For them, the only way they are going to have a family is to adopt from China. — Iris Chang

The limitations of these methods make it easier to understand why so many women might leap at the prospect of removing hair through prolonged exposure to radiation. First introduced by professional physicians in the late 1890s, x-ray hair removal offered several distinct advantages over other techniques. To begin, x-rays were undeniably effective at removing hair, as even the staunchest critics grudgingly admitted.37 — Rebecca M. Herzig

Surveys of personal values in men and women find that the men assign a lopsided value to professional status compared to all the other pleasures of life.108 — Steven Pinker

Decades of social science studies have confirmed what the Heidi/Howard case study so blatantly demonstrates: we evaluate people based on stereotypes (gender, race, nationality, and age, among others). Our stereotype of men holds that they are providers, decisive, and driven. Our stereotype of women holds that they are caregivers, sensitive, and communal. Because we characterize men and women in opposition to each other, professional achievement and all the traits associated with it get placed in the male column. — Sheryl Sandberg

When I first became a lawyer, only 2% of the bar was women. People would always think I was a secretary. In those days, professional women in the business world wore hats. So I started wearing hats. — Bella Abzug

You'd think (losing his job and degree for having made false claims as a researcher) would be a lesson to him," said Miss Hillyard. "It didn't pay, did it? Say he sacrificed his professional honour for the women and children we hear so much about
but in the end it left him worse of."
But that," said Peter, "was only because he committed the extra sin of being found out. — Dorothy L. Sayers

There are some die-hard male chauvinist pigs and there are some Neanderthal women who are threatened by equality - but the great majority, polls say 65% to 75% of women of America, of all ages, absolutely identify with the complete agenda of the women's movement: equal opportunity for jobs, education, professional training, the right to control your own body - your own reproductive process, freedom of choice, child care-the whole agenda. — Betty Friedan

In short, women who do not opt out of demanding professional positions are more likely to opt out of demanding family obligations. — Barbara Kellerman

I've been a medical and public health professional as well as a mother. I became skilled at juggling a number of priorities and competing interests. Like many other female leaders, I've tried to serve as a role model for the young women at my organization who are trying to balance a high-level leadership position and a family. — Margaret Hamburg

The majority of black women are unmarried today, including 70 percent of professional black women. — Michelle Alexander

I don't know when the cult of conspicuous busyness began, but it has swept up almost all the upwardly mobile, professional women I know. Already, it is getting hard to recall the days when, for example, 'Let's have lunch' meant something other than 'I've got more important things to do than talk to you right now. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Only professional diplomats, inveterate idiots and women view diplomacy as a long-term substitute for war. — David Mitchell

The failure of women to have reached positions of leadership has been due in large part to social and professional discrimination. — Rosalyn S. Yalow

This helps explain why for many women, speaking honestly in a professional environment carries an additional set of fears: Fear of not being considered a team player. Fear of seeming negative or nagging. Fear that constructive criticism will come across as just plain old criticism. Fear that by speaking up, we will call attention to ourselves, which might open us up to attack (a fear brought to us by that same voice in the back of our heads that urges us not to sit at the table). — Sheryl Sandberg

I didn't know there was such a thing as professional soccer, but I knew that Brazil had a women's team that competed against other countries, and I wanted to be on that team. — Marta

Very few Englishmen ever ask a woman anything about themselves. They choose instead to lecture their dinner neighbors on a new and better route to the M5, or to praise their own professional achievements. So is a man does express any curiosity about a woman sitting next to him, about her feelings, about the life she is leading, she will generally tell him anything he cares to know. — Julian Fellowes

She trained the girls in her Girl Scout troop to believe that they could be anything, and she went to lengths to prevent negative stereotypes of their race from shaping their internal views of themselves and other Negroes. It was difficult enough to rise above the silent reminders of Colored signs on the bathroom doors and cafeteria tables. But to be confronted with the prejudice so blatantly, there in that temple to intellectual excellence and rational thought, by something so mundane, so ridiculous, so universal as having to go to the bathroom...In the moment when the white women laughed at her, Mary had been demoted from professional mathematician to a second-class human being, reminded that she was a black girl whose piss wasn't good enough for the white pot. — Margot Lee Shetterly

The message is clear: a good mother breast feeds. Significantly, this good mother shares a sociocultural profile with women in other developed countries: she is over thirty, is a high earning professional, does not smoke, takes prenatal classes, and benefits from a long maternity leave. — Elisabeth Badinter

Younger women have no problem in reconciling beauty with ambitions as a professional woman. — Camille Paglia

This producer was a woman, a type I became acquainted with at the beginning of my stand-up career in Denver. I cared little for them: blondes in high heels who were so anxious to reach the professional level of the men they worshipped, fawned over, served, built up, and flattered that they would stab other women in the back. They are the ultimate weapon used by men against actual feminists who try to work in media, and they are never friends to other women, you can trust me on that. — Roseanne Barr

However we resolve the issue in our individual homes, the moral challenge is, put simply, to make work visible again: not only the scrubbing and vacuuming, but all the hoeing, stacking, hammering, drilling, bending, and lifting that goes into creating and maintaining a livable habitat. In an ever more economically unequal world, where so many of the affluent devote their lives to ghostly pursuits like stock trading, image making, and opinion polling, real work, in the old-fashioned sense of labor that engages hand as well as eye, that tires the body and directly alters the physical world tends to vanish from sight. The feminists of my generation tried to bring some of it into the light of day, but, like busy professional women fleeing the house in the morning, they left the project unfinished, the debate broken off in mid-sentence, the noble intentions unfulfilled. Sooner or later, someone else will have to finish the job. — Barbara Ehrenreich

women are obtaining undergraduate degrees at a far higher rate than men, and women are earning professional and doctorate degrees at a rate greater or nearly equal to that of men, but they are still vastly underrepresented in top leadership positions. — Peter G. Northouse

When a woman tells me she loves my dresses. These women have nothing to gain to tell you that they love your dresses. A lot of professional women admit dressing for work previously was such a challenge. It's these moments for me that are so rewarding. — Sarah Lafleur

Men seem more bound to the wheel of success than women do. That women are trained to get satisfaction from affiliation rather thanachievement has tended to keep them from great achievement. But it has also freed them from unreasonable expectations about the satisfactions that professional achievement brings. — Phyllis Rose

food has played a central role not only in my professional but also in my emotional life, in all of my dealings with loved ones and most of all in my relationship to myself and my body. I am what feeds me. And how I feed myself at any given moment says a lot about what I'm going through or what I need. I don't believe I am alone. Yes, we eat for our stomachs, but we hunger with our hearts. Like most people and many women, I think about what to eat all the time. I am constantly plotting my next meal, planning how and what I will shop for, and ever hatching new plans to avoid the foods I know will undermine my well-being. Foods are like men: some are good, some are bad, and some are okay only in small doses. But most should be tried at least once. — Padma Lakshmi

Without Police Woman I wouldn't have had a career. The show started about the same time the women's movement was taking off. Ours was the first prime-time one-hour show featuring a strong, professional woman. It paved the way for other series to follow. — Angie Dickinson

Using poise is not being fake; it is being professional, strong, and composed. — Tanya R. Liverman

The kind of people I myself represent in parliament; salary earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers and so on, these are, in a political and economic sense, the middle class. They are for the most part unorganised and unselfconscious. — Robert Menzies

Women play a couple of roles. They are in professional schools and increasingly producing the talent to keep the engines of the economy growing, but they're also the nurturers and the caregivers. — Indra Nooyi

At the end of the day I'm just Linda, and Linda is a single professional woman, and a lot of women can relate to what I talk about. — Linda Sanchez

Women need to understand that it is possible to stay in the workforce. A lot of women decide to take a back seat in their professional careers even before they are pregnant or are ready to have children. — Ruchi Sanghvi

Women: I liked the colors of their clothing; the way they walked; the cruelty in some faces; now and then the almost pure beauty in another face, totally and enchantingly female. They had it over us: they planned much better and were better organized. While men were watching professional football or drinking beer or bowling, they, the women, were thinking about us, concentrating, studying, deciding - whether to accept us, discard us, exchange us, kill us or whether simply to leave us. In the end it hardly mattered; no matter what they did, we ended up lonely and insane. — Charles Bukowski

The gospel is absurd and the life of Jesus is meaningless unless we believe that He lived, died, and rose again with but one purpose in mind: to make brand-new creation. Not to make people with better morals but to create a community of prophets and professional lovers, men and women who would surrender to the mystery of the fire of the Spirit that burns within, who would live in ever greater fidelity to the omnipresent Word of God, who would enter into the center of it all, the very heart and mystery of Christ, into the center of the flame that consumes, purifies, and sets everything aglow with peace, joy, boldness, and extravagant, furious love. This, my friend, is what it really means to be a Christian. — Brennan Manning

Not at all. It's why people come. They say it's about looking smart, or beautiful, or professional, but it's not. Gray-haired ladies try to recapture their former brunette. Brunettes want to go blond. Other women go for colors that don't arise in
nature. Each group thinks it's completely different than the others, but I don't see it that way. I've watched them looking at themselves in the mirror, and they're not interested in conforming or rebelling, they just want to walk out of here feeling like themselves again. — Antony John

We live in one of the most complex ages for young, professional women. — Natalie Dormer

Feminism is a way of understanding reality, not just a series of things to do. Feminism challenges our predilection for one right answer, one right God, one size fits all.
As a feminist, one can be spiritual or secular. One can lead an outwardly conservative life and yet, in feminist terms, be profoundly radical. So too, feminist leaders (like everyone else) can be sexist, or racist, or class-blind, in either their professional or personal lives. Or in both.
Feminist of my generation told the truth about women's condition. We were messengers from the past, or from the future. As ever, some people thought that killing, or at least defaming, the messengers was a way of making us and our truths disappear.
I'm counting on you not to do that. — Phyllis Chesler

Most professional women I know - myself included - long since gave up looking for a rulebook or a roadmap; we make it up as we go along. Every day presents a new choice, a new challenge, which makes long-term career planning seem like an especially abstract exercise. — Nancy Gibbs

I despise my own past and that of others. I despise resignation, patience, professional heroism and all the obligatory sentiments. I also despise the decorative arts, folklore, advertising, radio announcers' voices, aerodynamics, the Boy Scouts, the smell of naphtha, the news, and drunks.
I like subversive humor, freckles, women's knees and long hair, the laughter of playing children, and a girl running down the street.
I hope for vibrant love, the impossible, the chimerical.
I dread knowing precisely my own limitations. — Rene Magritte

She had abruptly flipped from the southern belle and was now putting on the extremely businesslike air of those perfectionist women who'd only worked in the professional world for two or three years before stopping to have children and were now terrified of not being taken seriously. — Rebecca Makkai

For many men, the fundamental assumption is that they can have both a successful professional life and a fulfilling personal life. For many women, the assumption is that trying to do both is difficult at best and impossible at worst. — Sheryl Sandberg

I always prayed the same way at night: "Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Please bless my mother, father, sister, everyone in the word, and me. And please make my father quit drinking."
As a child growing up in a family battling alcoholism, this is what I know: Something bad is coming; it always does. I can't ask for help; I'm too ashamed. I can't talk about our secrets; no one understands. I can't trust anyone; they always leave.
Questions bounced off my self-constructed wall of values
a barricade I'd made from the fears I'd pushed into my darkness.
How could Ryan, a professional baseball player, really resist all those women? How could I really trust Jerry, my childhood friend? I'd barely awakened to sex and already boys were the seventh wonder of the world. Did anyone really trust another person? I needed proof. That proof hadn't revealed itself ... yet. — Pamela Taeuffer

Without fear, women can pursue professional success and personal fulfillment - and freely choose one, or the other, or both. — Sheryl Sandberg

Their task was to film the work of the Allied women. More than 20,000 American women served overseas during the war - 10,000 as nurses in the army and navy and a few thousand under the auspices of the Red Cross, the YMCA, and the Salvation Army. Several hundred women were telephone operators with the Army Signal Corps and still others served as doctors, entertainers, canteen workers, interpreters, dentists, therapists, decoders, and in a myriad of other roles. Most of the one thousand professional entertainers who joined the war effort were connected to either the Overseas Theater League or the YMCA and over half were women. — Cari Beauchamp

According to American sociologist Kristin Park, who has reviewed most of the surveys carried out on child-free men and women in the last twenty years, the primary and most frequently cited reason for their decision (in 79 percent of surveys) is freedom. These people prized their emotional and financial autonomy, their freedom of movement, and their ability to take advantage of every opportunity for personal fulfillment. The second reason, mentioned in 62 percent of surveys, is marital happiness. After that came professional and financial considerations, fear of overpopulation, and lack of interest or a dislike of children. — Elisabeth Badinter

Pregnancy = "the slow, difficult, and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself. The ability to succeed in this path without masochism and without annihilating one's affective, intellectual, and professional personality - such would seem to be the stakes to be won through guiltless maternity. — Julia Kristeva

Before the code, women on screen took lovers, had babies out of wedlock, got rid of cheating husbands, enjoyed their sexuality, held down professional positions without apologizing for their self-sufficiency, and in general acted the way many of us think woman acted only after 1969. — Mick LaSalle

I feel different, better, about my personal life as well as my professional life. So much confidence comes simply because I have reached this very good age. Women my age today are forging new ground. Society stops defining us by our reproductive capacity, sexual attractiveness, or other traditional measures, so we become liberated from stereotype. We are freed to grow into our full selves.

I couldn't have allowed myself to feel so positive in the past. When I was at the height of my film career, I didn't have the kind of respect I now have from the theatrical community. I hadn't yet proved that I have the chops for the stage. But now I have a stature I've never before enjoyed.

Virginia Woolf herself observed that when her Aunt Mary left her enough money to live on, her financial independence meant she "need not hate" or "flatter any man." She said this was of even more value to her freedom and autonomy than the right to vote. — Kathleen Turner

It is usual for a woman, even though she may ardently desire to give herself to a man, to feign reluctance, to simulate alarm or indignation. She must be brought to consent by urgent pleading, by lies, adjurations, and promises. I know that only professional prostitutes are accustomed to answer such an invitation with a perfectly frank assent
prostitutes, or simple-minded, immature girls. — Stefan Zweig

As women professional athletes, you have to have respect for every player and individual. Beyond that, it doesn't matter what your interests are. People can have their own lives. — Hope Solo

You believe in equality for women and men. And that means that, not only do you believe in it kind of in the abstract but you actively think people should seek it when it comes to the way you hire people, the way you compensate people, the way you treat women and men in professional settings and school, whatever the case, giving them equal opportunities without disadvantaging them because of their, for the fact that they're women. And to me that's what it means for me to be a feminist. I don't think it's that controversial. — John Legend

Many women are simply bad at negotiating (their salaries). Many are happy if they succeed in returning to professional life. The main thing for them is that their job is at least somewhat compatible with their family life. But that's exactly where they are wrong. — Kristina Schroder

Professional ambition is expected of men but is optional - or worse, sometimes even a negative - for women. "She is very ambitious" is not a compliment in our culture. — Sheryl Sandberg

From joblessness to lack of education and professional skills to sexual and gender-based violence, women face a multi-faceted oppression. — Zainab Salbi

Men can comfortably claim credit for what they do as long as they don't veer into arrogance. For women, taking credit comes at a real social and professional cost. — Sheryl Sandberg

For men, professional success comes with positive reinforcement at every step of the way. For women, even when they're recognized for their achievements, they're often regarded unfavorably. — Sheryl Sandberg

In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-class citizens. It would be a great service to tell girls who plan to work in society to expect this subtle, uncomfortable discrimination
tell them not to be quiet, and hope it will go away, but fight it. A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she "adjust" to prejudice and discrimination — Betty Friedan

So accustomed have male media leaders become to the wealth and decision-making power they command they just can't parse the notion of equality between the sexes. They have never understood the world feminists actually envision, in which women and men share equal educational, economic, and professional opportunities, live free of abuse, can be fully sexual without judgment or coercion, and where girls and boys alike can embrace their authentic selves because no one will be told that strength, tenderness, confidence, empathy, or aggression is "inappropriate" for their gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or physical ability. — Jennifer L. Pozner

The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness. — Rick Santorum

It is a silly question to ask a prostitute why she does it ... These are the highest-paid 'professional' women in America. — Gail Sheehy

As an entrepreneur and mother, I support the need to put women at the center, recognizing their crucial impact on social development and their important role of balancing family and professional responsibilities. — Yelena Baturina

Men feel like they can be a professional and a father. For women it's "or." That's offensive to me. The concept that it's not possible is crazy. — Sheryl Sandberg

I think there is a natural maternal instinct that comes out, which creates a much more nurturing environment. I've been accused of misogyny in the past, for relationship stuff that's been twisted in the press and for bullshit that gets said, and that gets to me because I've always had a huge amount of respect for women, and I think that all the women who I've surrounded myself with in both a professional and personal capacity would agree with that. — Zayn Malik

I have about 20 to 25 platonic relationships with women all across the board from professional to artistic and they always give little clues on what they like. — Jamie Foxx

Countries where women have access to professional life are also those where the birth rate is higher. — Claude Martin