Do you want to know the weirdest thing about Sheryl Sandberg's book,
Lean In, Readers? I relate to it.
That is weird. Why would I relate to a book about climbing the corporate ladder? Excuse
me, climbing the corporate jungle gym, as Sandberg prefers to describe it. I’ve
done everything I could to arrange my life so that I would have blocks of free
time in the afternoon. This plan has led me as far away from corporate life as
anything could have. I worked in an office right after college, and I
discovered that it depressed the hell out of me. After ruining a perfectly
swell linen skirt with grass stains on my lunch hour, I had to face it: I am
not your corporate type. Whatever that is.
On the other hand, why wouldn’t I relate to a book about how
a seemingly competent woman struggles with self-doubt and has to double think
and analyze every step she makes? If I’d known I could do that on a
stupendously large salary, I might have stayed on the professional path.
I’ve been kind of appalled by the responses to Lean In. It’s too
one-percenty. It’s about “clawing your way to the top.” It doesn’t consider the
real problems of most working women, or of most women, or of other particular
groups of women. She was “lucky “
to have Important Male Mentors.
So what? Does every woman have to speak for every other
woman to speak truth? To make a difference? Isn’t Sheryl Sandberg’s experience
as valid as mine? Or yours? Or your cleaning lady’s? And frankly, it’s the one
percent who can make some immediate policy changes just by being who they are
at the top. Is this bad?
I have to admit that I was one of the people who read Sandberg’s
Barnard commencement address a couple of years ago, and her profile
in the New Yorker last year, with skepticism. I wanted to hate her.
I wanted to find the flaw. If she’s a great business woman, then she must be a
sucky mom, right? Or be divorced.
Or hate other women. When I really paid attention to her, however, I had
to admire her words and recognize my own thwarted ambition.
A lot of people complain that she’s blaming the victim,
telling women they have to fix themselves internally before structural change
will occur. To them I say, have you actually read the book? She’s talking about
the need for internal and external changes. Leaning in means not prematurely
cutting yourself off from seeking promotions or taking on extra leadership
roles just because you might want flexibility to have a personal life and
children. She says it’s better to lean in to your goals and keep going towards
them, and work out the details later; don’t cut off possibilities for yourself
because you’re afraid you’ll have too much work or responsibility. When women
do that – and they definitely do – then they often find themselves in lesser
work that’s unfulfilling, and ultimately they may drop out of the workforce.
Sound familiar, anyone?
Her section on mentors is a little harsh. In short,
she says there’s been too much emphasis on women finding mentors, as if a
mentor is the secret key to success. She says, “We need to stop telling them [women],
‘Get a mentor and you will excel. Instead, we need to tell them, ‘Excel and you
will get a mentor.’”
Speaking as one of many women who has lamented her lack
of mentors and looked at finding one as the deus ex machina necessary to
success, let me say, “Ouch!” However, after rubbing that bruise, let me also
say that her words echo the phrase, attributed to Buddha and familiar to habitués of yoga studios and
meditation retreats everywhere,
“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” Honestly, she’s just
saying you’ve got to work hard. No one is going to get you there until you’ve
proven yourself.
So, here’s what I like about this book:
1.
She’s honest about her self-doubts. Lean in also
means learning to work with the negative, doubting voice in the brain and
acting confident, even if you don’t feel it; it means, to quote a friend’s
favorite phrase, “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
2.
She’s honest about her intellect, her luck, and all
the help she’s received from men, from women, from bosses, and from assistants.
3.
She’s honest about her mistakes, like the time
she failed to see the raised hand of one of the few women in the room and
called on man after man. At a talk on gender equality.
4.
She says she’s a feminist. If you think this is
minor, just check with any female under forty and find out if she wants to
identify herself as feminist, and then look at the other prominent women in
business and notice how they distance themselves from the term, and from the
“issues” that are “women’s.” Why do you think we haven’t had that final burst
of change that would institute meaningful family leave policies, equal pay,
paid sick leave, and flexible scheduling across all industries, businesses,
jobs? Because women have had to distance themselves from these issues to get
ahead. And once they do, like Melissa Mayer, Chief Yahoo at Yahoo, they pretend
being a woman makes no difference in the world.
The feminism I grew up with taught that
once women made it to the top, they were going to change things for everyone.
Well, the movement stalled, didn’t it? As Sandberg says, women who made it
found themselves adhering to a stereotype about what men are like, and men
often have to do that, too. The point was supposed to be that when women gained equality, then
men would have more options, too. Only it didn’t work out that way, because
women at the top forgot that last step: speaking out to make change. Sheryl
Sandberg didn’t. She says, “I believe that this will create a better world, one
where half our institutions are run by women and half our homes are run by
men.”
5.
She gives practical advice. She talks about how
to negotiate salary. She talks about how to navigate the mentor-mentee
relationship. She talks about how to handle negative criticism. In every
instance she talks about challenges she overcame.
Yes, Sheryl Sandberg is different from most of us. She’s a
corporate superstar, very bright, extremely ambitious, and powerful. She’s not
a professional automaton, however; she’s a very human professional. By showing
her humanness, she’s also in the vanguard of a changing working paradigm. This
is what we were aiming for, back in the 1980s. She made it up there and now she
wants to encourage more women and men to join her, and to be human about it.
Maybe you don’t want to be part of her working world. Maybe your ambitions are
totally different from hers. But I honestly believe that it’s people like
Sheryl Sandberg who will help shape work life policy in a more equitable,
family-friendly direction, and that will in turn make life better for all of
us. She’s speaking her truth, and encouraging others to speak theirs. I say,
applaud her for bringing the focus back to what a lot of us would like to think
is old news: We’d like to think those feminist battles have been won, because
they were exhausting. The battles were not won, however, and the movement,
until very recently, had been beaten back into the tributaries of academia and
radicalism. With Sheryl Sandberg, the women's movement, feminism, whatever you
want to call the effort to achieve equality between women and men has moved
back into the mainstream. Let’s lean in on that!
