Oprah Winfrey speaks one-on-one with two of the country’s most powerful women, Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, on an all new episode of Oprah’s Next Chapter, airing Sunday, March 24 at 9 p.m. ET on OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network (Canada).
Winfrey travels to Silicon Valley for an in-depth interview with Sandberg, who has ignited a firestorm with the recent release of her new book “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.” Sandberg takes Winfrey to her favorite restaurant, the place where she and Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg first sat down to discuss her future at his company. She opens up about her famous boss, life inside Facebook, and how she manages one billion users worldwide and still makes it home by 6:00 p.m. to have dinner with her husband and two kids.
In the second half of the episode, Winfrey travels to the Bronx, NY to sit down with Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina and only the third woman to ever serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. The two meet at the Justice’s alma mater Cardinal Spellman High School where she candidly chats with Winfrey about her revealing memoir, her humble beginnings, the promises she made to President Obama, and the perils of dating when you sit on the highest court in the land.
Below are excerpts and clip links (with embed code) from the episode.
EXCERPT: Sheryl Sandberg says there is no such thing as work/life balance
WINFREY: You’ve said there’s no such thing as work/life balance.
SANDBERG: There is no such thing.
WINFREY: Why, why is there not work/life balance?
SANDBERG: I think all these phrases people throw at woman are so harmful. “Having it all” is the worst.
WINFREY: Oh, please.
SANDBERG: Right? People must ask you all the time, “How do you have it all?”
WINFREY: Yeah, “How do you have it all?”
SANDBERG: Having it all is the worst. No matter how much we all have and how grateful we are for what we have, no one has it all. Because we all make tradeoffs every single day, every single minute. Work/life balance… no one ever asks a man.
WINFREY: Let’s stay on “Having it all” for a second, ‘cause I love that. I don’t think that you can – you can have it all, I feel like I do, but you can’t have it all at the same time.
SANDBERG: That’s right. And what’s happened, if you compare my generation to my mother’s generation – my mother says this all the time – in her generation work was 9-5, Monday to Friday, forty hours, no one expected anything else. And parenting was actually much more constrained. What’s happened now, we are all connected, my industry is part of the problem, right, we are connected all the time, we expect our colleagues at work to always be available. And the amount of time mothers spend one-on-one in that direct child thing with their kids has totally changed. My mother didn’t organize play-dates, we rode our bikes next door, there were no play-dates, she wasn’t with me. My mother didn’t sit there with me as I did all my homework. She helped me when I asked. Checked in every so often, and work has changed and made it more intense, and parenting has changed and made it more intense. I’m not judging those things, they might be bad, they might be good. They make it harder and harder for working women, and almost all women in this country are working women. And almost all kids are being raised by two or one parent who’s in the workforce…
WINFREY: Absolutely.
Watch Oprah’s interview with Sheryl Sandberg and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Sunday, March 24, at 9/8c.
EXCERPT: How Justice Sotomayor was affected by an alcoholic father
WINFREY: How do you think you were affected growing up with an alcoholic father?
SOTOMAYOR: You become a watchful child, and I listened very very carefully to the world around me. I think that children who live with parents who are drug addicts who are alcoholics, or have psychological challenges, you also learn to watch people. You’re looking for those subtle physical signs that tell you trouble is coming. That ended up being great for me, because when I was a lawyer I knew how to watch people so that when a witness hesitated, my mind would just race to the conclusion of – they’re trying to hide something, what is it? And I would dissect the story in my brain and nine out of ten times I would figure out the hole that they were trying to avoid.
Watch Oprah’s interview with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Sunday, March 24, at 9/8c.


