Billionaire Sheryl Sandberg calls for new laws to help Americans through the coronavirus, including mandating paid sick leave and finally fixing the gender wage gap

• Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg sat down with Business Insider to talk about mental health during the coronavirus pandemic, as well as what business and government leaders need to do in response to the global outbreak.
• Sandberg talked about the 2015 death of her husband, David Goldberg, and revealed she recently lost a family member because of complications from the novel coronavirus.
• Sandberg and the psychologist Adam Grant recently released an excerpt from their book, "Option B," along with a new foreword about grief during the coronavirus pandemic to help people cope.
• The Facebook COO called for structural changes to social policy, including laws mandating paid sick leave for all workers as well as laws addressing the wage gap between men and women.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Like other business leaders, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is trying to do her part in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Recently, she and a few other high-profile business leaders raised more than $8 million to fund local food banks. She also held a Facebook fundraiser for struggling families that raised nearly $300,000, and matched it.

But there's another way Sandberg thought to help: by releasing an excerpt from her best-seller "Option B," a book on building strength after trauma that she coauthored with psychologist Adam Grant.

Sandberg wrote "Option B" after her husband, SurveyMonkey CEO David Goldberg, died at age 47 in 2015. Since then, she's become an advocate for speaking about loss, as well as for bereavement leave.

In a time of historic death, unemployment, and an overall loss of normalcy for most people on the planet, Sandberg sat down with Business Insider to talk about grief and resilience. The Facebook COO also talked about inequality during the pandemic and called for policy reform around healthcare, bereavement leave, and equal pay.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

The whole world is experiencing grief during the coronavirus pandemic, she said.

Marguerite Ward: Sheryl, thank you so much for taking the time to speak. Grief is an issue that actually impacts me a lot, personally. I lost my brother, Matthew Ward, in May of last year to an accidental opioid overdose. And since then, grief has been a really big part of my life.

Sheryl Sandberg: So sorry. Like, so sorry. [Puts up her hands.] Cause the death, it's an avoidable — that — like so sorry.

Ward: Thank you.

Sandberg: And, and that's why you care about this, right?

Ward: Exactly. [Pause]

So the first thing I wanted to talk about is how grief, it changes people. Right now a lot of people are being changed by grief. As you write about in your new excerpt and foreword of "Option B". People are losing loved ones, people are losing their jobs. How would you characterize this moment in time? What is the world going through?

Sandberg: Well, I think it is such an important question. You know, where "Option B" started was when I wanted Dave to do this activity he was supposed to do with our son and my dear friend, Phil Deutch [founder of NGP Energy Technology Partners], saying to me, "Dave's not available. But we're going to kick the shit out of Option B." Option B is when we live a life we didn't expect or didn't want, you didn't want your brother to die. I didn't want my husband to die.

The entire world is living Option B right now. Everyone, there's literally not a single person. Now some people are suffering much more than others. We lost my fiancé's first cousin, you know, so we've had a direct death in our family. [Tom Bernthal, CEO and founder of an LA consulting firm, Kelton, is Sandberg's fiancé.]

Ward: I'm sorry.

Sandberg: Some people have health things, some people are much more worried about the economic situation. But I honestly think there's not a single person who's not living some form of "Option B" right now.

So the question is, when life throws the unexpected challenge our way ⁠— death for you and me, everything we're going through now, what do we do? And the answer is we try to build resilience. We built it in ourselves so we can get through it and we built it in other people and that's what "Option B" is about. And that's why we're releasing it and talking about it.

Sandberg shares key lessons on building strength from her recently released "Option B" excerpt.

Ward: Why release it now? I mean you're not releasing a new book that people can purchase, you're releasing something that's free — this excerpt.

Sandberg: Yeah, we wanted to release as much of it as we were legally allowed to. So we did. [Laughs] We tried to pick the parts that were most relevant, which I also think helps streamline it for people. People are busy right now. And we wrote a new intro, which is all about the situation we face right now.

Ward: What are some of the things people can learn from all of this?

Sandberg: I do think there's so much we can learn from this moment, and so many tools we have. So the most important tool in all of this is when you have a setback, you have "the three Ps": personalization, permanence, and pervasiveness.

[Sandberg is referring to what psychologist Martin Seligman called "the three Ps" that hold someone back from recovering from a traumatic event.]

So let's go through them. Personalization [or blaming one's self for a loss].

I had a lot of "Could I have saved Dave's life?" "Why didn't I know he had cardiovascular disease?" Like really beating myself up, until like I learned that personalization wasn't going to help me. Then I had to say "I'm not a doctor, you know, of course if I could have known." Right?

Ward: I blame myself as well. We even had Narcan [the drug that can reverse an opioid overdose], but it was too late by the time we found my brother. I often think, What if I had called him later that evening? Or had been at my parent's house?

Sandberg: That's the personalization. So many people find ways to blame themselves.

Permanence. [The idea that way you feel is going to last forever.] I know you probably still feel terrible about your brother's death. I still miss my husband, but I don't feel the way I felt on week one. Do you?

Ward: No. I don't.

Sandberg: It's — it's better. It never goes away entirely, but it does get better.

Ward: It does.

Sandberg: [The coronavirus pandemic] feels so permanent or indefinite, because no one knows when it's going to end. So now we have to say, "OK, this is going to end." We don't know when. Maybe it is a long time until a vaccine comes out, but we have to know this feeling is not permanent.

Ward: So we've gone through personalization and permanence. There's one more P, right?

Sandberg: And pervasiveness. One of the most important things that happened to me is Adam Grant [psychologist and coauthor of "Option B"] said to me, "You know, this could be worse."

I was like, "My husband just died totally unexpectedly. I walked into a gym and found him on the floor. What could be worse?" He was like, "He could have had that cardiac arrhythmia driving your kids."

I'm like, "Oh my God." I mean, I cry thinking about that. My children are alive. I'm okay.

Ward: Yes.

Sandberg: You know, we lost Tom's cousin, but we have each other, and we're not sick. No matter what people are going through. Even in the worst of situations, people are able to say, "hang on to something." It's not pervasive. There's some area of your life you can feel good about. I think those tools are so relevant right now for everyone.

Sandberg talks about living life more deeply after trauma.

Ward: Melinda Gates recently told Business Insider that one of the things that will never be the same after this pandemic is our psyche, the public psyche. How should people expect to feel from this experience? How do these things shape us?

Sandberg: Well, it's such an important question and it goes to what is post-traumatic growth [a theory in psychology that explains transformation after trauma.] If you ask people about post-traumatic stress, everyone's heard of it. I ask audiences, every hand goes up. And that's a real thing. And it's a very complicated thing. People who have trauma often have fall out afterwards of post-traumatic stress. We have to fix that.

But there's something called post-traumatic growth that no one's really heard of or talks about, but many more people experienced post-traumatic growth than stress. And that doesn't mean you would choose what happened. I would never choose to lose Dave. I would never choose for the world to go through this. But there are ways in which my life is better.

And again, I want to be clear. I wouldn't choose it, but there are lessons I learned that I wished I had learned then. So, you know, birthdays, I never celebrated birthdays. I did the zeros and the fives. I turned 47, I turned 48, I celebrate every birthday because I know they might not have happened and I wish I could take that gratitude back and go give it to Dave, but I can't. But I can bring it forward into my life and my children's life. I ask people now, last time you went to a restaurant, how much did you care? Last time you hugged a friend, did you even notice? Think about the next time you go to a restaurant or hug a friend, you're going to be like, "Oh my God."

Ward: Yeah. I'm grateful for every text that I get. Every Instagram message that I get asking how I am.

Sandberg: That's right. And it's the great irony to go through tragedy or hardship and come out more grateful, but that is the post-traumatic growth and it makes your life better.

And we can't bring your brother back. We can't bring Dave back. We can't change what the world is going through, but boy, can we try to learn the lesson of gratitude and appreciation.

Ward: Right.

Sandberg: You know, I wake up every day now and I don't have a cough and I'm like, "Oh my God, I don't have a cough." I didn't have a cough two months ago either, but I didn't wake up appreciating it.

The Facebook COO says the pandemic shows American families don't have the support they need, and calls for policy reform.

Ward: Transitioning a little bit to the business world. When you talked with Alyson Shontell, [Business Insider's Editor-in-Chief], you talked about how the coronavirus is putting a spotlight on inequality in the US. I think one of those things that we have that is part of this inequality conversation is access to mental health. First of all, do you think that after this we're going to see a change in the way that people talk about mental health and grief in the workforce, in the workforce, in society? Do you think there's a change?

Sandberg: I mean, never waste a crisis, right? So we shouldn't waste this crisis and I think we shouldn't waste this crisis for people to understand loneliness, anxiety or healthcare access. All of these things are hitting us harder than ever before. We need to not waste this crisis for women.

Sixty percent of the people who have lost their jobs are women. Black women are more than twice as likely as white men to have lost their jobs, or their hours or be furloughed. That's according to a survey we did at my foundation.

You know the structural inequities we have for men and women and women of color in the workplace, the structural lack of access that poorer people have to the basic services you need, mental health is just as important as what we normally consider healthcare. It needs to be included. All of those structural imbalances are bigger, more important, and we have more of a responsibility to do something about them. So I think we need to not waste this crisis and fix those.

The wage gap. The wage gap is why this is harder for women. And it's even harder for black women and Latinos right? We needed to fix it before. Now, that's why those women don't have savings and making what they should've been making all along. And so we have to fix this, including access to mental health. I really believe that.

Ward: Obviously I'm not asking you to lay out policy, but what—

Sandberg: Oh, I'm happy to lay out policy. [Laughs] Please, go ahead!

Ward: [Laughs] What do we need to see from government leaders and what do we need to see from business leaders so we don't, as you say, waste this crisis?

Sandberg: Well, this is a full on economic crisis. So we need full and effective support for families. And this is showing us that in America, we don't have the support we need in the first place.

So all of the stimulus programs, all of the money needs to get there quickly and needs to be as big as it can possibly be.

But we also have some structural policy things we need to change. So for example, we're one of the only developed countries in the world that doesn't have maternity and paternity leave. We're one of the only countries in the world that doesn't have paid sick leave for everyone. Boy, is that a bigger problem now, right?

We need family medical leave so you can take care of yourself, a sick child, a sick relative. And think about this through a gender lens — that's how I think about everything — all of these things are worse for women. Guess who does the majority of childcare and housework before this? Guess who takes care of the majority, not just of your own parents, of your husband's parents.

Ward: Women.

Sandberg: You have to solve these structural inequities in your relationship because you will do more for your parents and his parents if you don't. And maybe that's what you want to do, that's fine. But for a lot of women, who have full-time jobs and even those who don't, they would be very happy to have partners who are more full partners in the home. We've got to fix these issues and we've got to fix family medical, maternity leave, and have sick leave for everyone.

Ward: We've seen business leaders really stepping up changing corporate policies in the wake of the pandemic. Some have increased wages, some are providing more sick leave. Do you think that corporate leaders need to make changes to mental health benefits or do you see something coming out of this?

Sandberg: At Facebook, we cover everything. I'm not an expert in what other companies cover. So yes, if there's a gap [in mental healthcare access], which I'm assuming your question implies there is, of course we need to make to make those changes.

One of the things I've worked really hard on after Dave's death and "Option B" is bereavement leave. We moved to our bereavement leave way up for both immediate family and extended family members and other business leaders should as well.

Sandberg talks about how society has been changed and shares her hopes for the future.

Ward: Do you think this crisis will be a changing point in America's psyche, in the world's psyche about grief and mental health?

Sandberg: Yes. It has to be. And it has to be a moment of change around resilience, right? We're going to have to build it, and we build it in each other.

There's this great Facebook story that I love. There's this woman, I think her name is Emily. She's a mother who has a newborn. And she has asthma. Her husband is an ER doctor working with coronavirus patients. So she was scared to see him, as she should be. So she posted on Facebook asking if anyone had an RV. A stranger lent her an RV. Her husband is now living in front of their house in an RV so she can see him, and he can see the baby without affecting her.

Then Emily started a Facebook group for frontline healthcare workers and RV owners so people could lend their RVs to frontline healthcare workers. That's community resilience. Community, it's never been more important.

Ward: That's a great story.

Sandberg: That's collective resilience. I think this is going to change us and I hope and want it to change us for the better so that we do more, we give more to strangers, we give more to the people in our lives. And I think we are seeing that, and that is collective resilience. That's how we all live our very best "Option B."

Ward: Thank you, Sheryl.

Sandberg: Thank you. And my thoughts to your family.