Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

Good book on women in leadership.

Sheryl Sandberg is fantastic. I like how she is honest about the times when she has dropped the ball or said something she wishes she hadn't said. She says things that make so much sense that I wonder why there are people who don't understand feminism and equal pay for equal work.

It was sad to hear her talk about her husband who you know passes away two years after she wrote this, but at the same time time it's beautiful to read.

A great book for anyone to read, but the 20 somethings making their way through college and into the working world, this should be your bible.

This is way more interesting than I thought it would be.

I thought this book was beneath me: I could give an hour lecture on the problems facing the women's right movement today; this book was for women who didn't even know that they're feminists.

For years, as a woman doctor, I shied away from Women in Medicine groups, because having been a female computer scientist and facing the very overt sexism that occurs in the C.S. world, I thought that there was nothing to complain about in medicine. But the further I got in medicine, especially once I had my daughter, I realize all of the subtle ways that its there: the encouragement to leave before you leave; the lack of high-powered female mentors, and the overall relative dearth of women in leadership and highly academic positions. So I joined a national committee on women in medicine and science and at the same time I read this book.

And it's amazing. Sheryl Sandberg gives easy language for the problems I know we face: “sit at the table” for the confidence issues that professional women have; “lean in” and “don't leave before you leave” for the self-selection that occurs. She talks about the seductive message the feminism's work is done that leads to increasing amounts of this subversive sexism (which is the temporal equivalent of the same illusion I fell under switch from C.S. to medicine.) She addresses the hard issues: the linguist quirks that make women seem less confident and the social norms that prevent women from being assertive, both of which put women into a damned if you do/damned if you don't position.

But this is not just a book on contextualization. Sandberg gives concrete advice to women that is useful for women in all fields. She focuses on helping women become top business officers, but its helpful advice to anyone. And she does this without ignoring the importance of being a parent for women who want to parent – and I think this part gets lost among the rhetoric for a lot of people. One of my close friends hates this book, because she says that Sandberg doesn't believe in the importance of mothering, but that's not a correct assertion. Sandberg spends many pages talking about how she decided to take from 5:30-bedtime off from work (offline, off everything) almost all nights because that's what's right for her family. She talks about a woman who joined the Biden administration but on the condition that she goes home for dinner every single night. This is advice on how to set your priorities and then make them happen – dropping the hysteria that comes from assuming that in order to be successful, you have to make sacrifices on someone else's terms.

Sandberg makes it clear that you can't “have it all,” but you can choose what you get to have, and I think that's the best message possible.

I kind of wanted to hate this book tbh. Like going into it, I was like, “Oh sure, Sheryl Sandberg has tooons of great advice for the average woman, toootallly.” But after I read it, I was like, “Oh sure, Sheryl Sandberg has tons of great advice for the average woman!” NON-SARCASTICALLY.

I also saw this getting slammed for her being out of touch with non-CEO women/minorities/etc, and I was expecting to roll my eyes a ton at this for that reason alone, but I was actually very impressed with how often she did point out that obviously women with less privilege are going to have a lot more obstacles against leaning in, and it should fall to men to “lean back” and to other women with more privilege to help pull up women. (Obviously there's more to say about those issues, and it's definitely not Sandberg's main point, but she's not as clueless as a lot of what I'd read about this wanted to make her seem.)

And I think a lot of what she has to say about gender roles in the workplace were just very refreshing to read, written out so clearly. Like, even though I am pretty well-educated and read feminist blogs and whatnot, I still had about 100 lightbulb moments reading this. It's very TED talk-y (I mean that in a good way). Her points really resonated with me, even though I'm obviously not a CEO of anything, nor do I ever want to be.

ALSO I think it's shitty that people are so dismissive of this like it's some inconsequential thing that there are so few women CEOs and we should be focusing on REAL issues like girls being kidnapped in Nigeria, for example. Like, yes, of course, there are other important issues in the world. But nobody's saying shit like that about like, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, or whatever. Until we overthrow capitalism, I think big companies like Google and Facebook are probably going to stick around for awhile, and it certainly does matter how many women work there and how comfortable they feel in their chosen industry.

I honestly really recommend this to both men and women, no matter what kind of job you have or want.

Sandberg stretches what could be a longish blog post into a book-length narrative. Raises good point but belabors them to the extent of knocking you over with it. It doesn't help that she isn't that good of a writer (if she indeed wrote this book). Also, she has a penchant of dropping names of her rich and famous friends whom we know aren't exactly women-friendly (Hi, Tim Armstrong)