“What do you think?” he asks, nodding at the book across my lap. I look up, startled. We have been sitting side-by-side in row 27, seats A and B for two hours now and this is our first time making eye contact. As the pilot announces our final descent into Boston Logan airport, my seatmate wants to know my opinions about Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In.
I begin to respond, but he cuts me off. “I think it’s definitely a problem,” he says, referring to the dearth in women in higher leadership roles in business, politics, technology, and many other fields—the central issue Sheryl Sandberg illuminates and seeks to revolutionize in her book. My seatmate says he works at J.P. Morgan in Chicago and that while the women he knows in higher leadership roles there are fabulous, he believes they had to work twice as hard as their male peers to reach the company’s upper echelons. He describes the higher leadership at J.P. Morgan as a “boys club” that is difficult for any sorts of outsiders, women and homosexuals among them, to penetrate. “It’s not fair,” he remarks.
Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, Sheryl Sandberg’s first book released on March 11, makes America’s propensity for male-dominated leadership its central issue and sets out to define the problem, suggest concrete strategies for improvement, and inspire working women to help change the professional climate. Sandberg suggests that the most effective way that women can instigate cultural change is to “lean in,” find careers they love, work at them with gusto, and have the ambition to ride these careers all the way to the top of leadership structures.
Sandberg claims that her work is part memoir, part self-help book, and part career management manual, but really a “sort of a feminist manifesto” at its core. She hopes it will inspire both men and women to prioritize gender equality in the office and at home. “A truly equal world would be one where women ran half of our countries and companies and men ran half our homes. I believe this would be a better world,” Sandberg proclaims.
As Facebook’s current chief operating officer, a past vice president at Google, past chief of staff for the U.S. Treasury Department, and the mother of two children, Sheryl Sandberg is no stranger to the noticeable gender disparity in the leadership of many fine American companies and institutions. She utilizes tidbits of her personal experiences as her main evidence to support her book’s central claims: women’s success is hindered by societal and personal barriers, women’s empowerment at work must be matched by men’s empowerment at home, and workplace gender equality will improve as more women push to get higher leadership roles and use their new power to reform male-dominated professional culture.
Sandberg relies heavily on her own experiences and psychology research to frame the problem of women’s stunted success in the workplace. She asserts that history and society expect women to be the primary caregivers and homemakers, noting that her own parents emphasized marriage over academic achievement, and argues that these expectations hinder women’s ambition when it comes to their own careers. Furthermore, Sandberg cites psychology studies suggesting that men get increasingly likeable when they have success but that the opposite is true for women. As such, men get awarded for their assertiveness and confidence while women suffer a social penalty for these same attributes.
The bossy little kid who enlisted her younger siblings to work as employees in her invented kiddie clubs, Sandberg herself never struggled to cultivate leadership abilities, but she does admit that she has often tried to cloak her successes to maintain a degree of likeability among her peers. She kept mum upon being ranked one of the top students of her Harvard Business School class, for example, even when her male colleagues shared and were celebrated for their academic achievement. More surprisingly, Sandberg admits that she felt “horrified, embarrassed, and exposed” when Forbes named her fifth most powerful woman in the world. She tried to smother the article until a female colleague asked her to stop wallowing in insecurities and own the new title as most men given a comparable honor would.
Though demonstrative of her points, Sandberg’s anecdotes feel pretty distant from the experiences of her readers—most of them will never be ranked in magazines or valedictorian lineups at top business schools. To convincingly make the argument that women without her level of income and household help should be gritting their teeth and working harder, Sandberg needs more voices, experiences, opinions, and inputs of other, more “typical” women who have had to climb their way to leadership in their careers. Her book, especially early on, lacks these more “normal” perspectives from impressive businesswomen whose success has been a smidge less superhuman.
Examples from Sandberg’s own life become very relevant and powerful, however, when she uses her experience as a jumping off point for providing her readers with practical career advice. Sandberg explains that her own professional success hinged on her willingness to advocate for herself and take risks like working for brand-new startups Google and Facebook in their young, vulnerable days. She urges her readers to do the same despite the internal resistance many women feel to risk-taking and self-promotion, and she gives concrete advice for workplace behaviors that will help women stay likeable in spite of their ambition.
Between advice about salary negotiation (combine niceness with insistence), soliciting feedback (do it frequently and get comfortable withstanding criticism), and finding mentors and sponsors (don’t force it, don’t waste their time with your emotions), reading Lean In’s middle chapters feels like tapping into Sandberg’s wealth of workplace secrets and tricks of the trade—an opportunity many women would kill to have.
Her advice is holistic, too: her workplace perspective transitions to relationship coaching as she stresses the importance of marrying someone who will be supportive of a woman’s ambition, both at home and at work, and an equal partner in actualizing that vision. Making women and men equal partners in family life and breadwinning, she argues, will help counter the “work-life balance” debate that incorrectly frames the two realms as diametrically opposed. “Who would ever choose work over life?” Sandberg asks, a question both male and female professionals should consider. Both genders seek elements of personal and professional meaning in their lives, so men and women should each get the richness and satisfaction of these two sides.
Sandberg’s final argument states that the best way to improve workplace gender equality is to get more women into higher leadership roles so that they can work to reform male-dominated professional culture however they see most fit. Right now, the lack of women in leadership means that those few female leaders face the near-impossible task of representing and advocating for all working women, which is unrealistic for the leaders and unhelpful for women at lower-than executive levels who face very different workplace concerns. Sandberg suggests that women must overcome competition and jealousy and commit to supporting each other in their climbs to higher leadership and the decision-making table.
Lean In is not just isolated theory but also a text that Sandberg intends to ignite a social movement, and the invitation comes on the book’s final page that encourages readers to join the Lean In Community online. The corresponding website LeanIn.org seeks to provide online community, education through free leadership lectures and resources, and the opportunity to join Lean In Circles, local small groups of women that meet for monthly discussions with the aim of supporting each other in their endeavors and careers.
Another key feature of the website is “Lean In Stories,” personal essays similar in tone to NPR’s “This I Believe” series, but focused instead on ambitious people who have leaned into their work. Hundreds of women including Melinda Gates, Oprah, the Bush sisters, Reese Witherspoon, Diane von Furstenberg, Kelly an assistant principal, Virginia an event planner, Ana a break-dance pioneer, and even President Drew Faust have submitted personal essays with their own Lean In stories as part of this initiative—all voices that Sandberg could have included to strengthen her book’s argument. The Lean In Foundation website demonstrates just how many women are already behind the movement, committed to leaning in and either working to reach higher leadership or using their positions of power to uplift and encourage the women coming behind them.
If a formula existed for sparking a social movement (one clearly defined problem + one spokesperson for the cause + money + corporate endorsements + grassroots community buy-in = social change), then Sandberg is following the formula perfectly—and it’s working. Weeks before Lean In launched, hundreds of articles were already bombarding international media in anticipation of the book’s arrival. The articles were so numerous, in fact, that the Wall Street Journal published a roundup that linked to 21 major stories anticipating the book in the New Yorker, Time, the Washington Post, Forbes, and many other prominent publications.
Some of the flurry of articles anticipating Lean In criticized what journalists saw as Sandberg’s hubris and presumptuousness in starting her movement, while others encouraged readers to try and consider the book and it’s arguments separate from the character of the author behind it. Some journalists debated the utility of Sandberg’s claims for the average working Josephine, while others celebrated Sandberg’s helpful anecdotes for salary negotiation and seeking mentors, among other tough workplace interactions. The buzz around Lean In hasn’t stopped since the launch; articles about Sandberg and the book’s release continue to surface in international press nearly every day, though the book launched over a month ago.
The movement is working. I see peers reading Lean In in Quincy dining hall, a wonder considering how little reading Harvard students typically do outside of class. Online articles published every couple of hours continue to hem and haw and debate Lean In, and Sandberg has appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, 60 Minutes, and the Sanders Theater stage all within the past few weeks. The guy beside me on the airplane who spent the flight listening to music in Arabic through his headphones saw Lean In lying across my lap and paused his iPod to chat about the movement.
“Should we really be putting Sandberg’s lifestyle of overachievement on a pedestal?” he asks, explaining that he finds her success both superhuman and financially motivated, and that maybe women shouldn’t be comparing themselves to her standard. I wonder if he would make the same argument of a book by Bill Gates, Ben Bernanke, or Mark Zuckerberg even.
His reaction to Lean In further proves the urgency of Sandberg’s strategy: We need more women in higher leadership so that people starting their careers have many professional role models of their gender rather than just a few, limited narratives of women’s success. And as women continue to work towards leadership, Sandberg’s Lean In is igniting the debate and the sparking conversation, even between strangers. She’s taking the first step towards a successful social movement.