Every few years a book is released in the business world that is insightful enough to transcend the boundaries between the worlds of business and society (business/government, business/academia, business/the arts, etc.) or (in my case) between such divisions as copywriter/client or editor/writer. As I earlier discussed in my blog, Seth Godin’s Linchpin: Are You Indispensable (2010) was one such book. In the next couple of blog postings, I’ll discuss why Sheryl Sandberg’s bestseller, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, is another (New York: Knopf, 2013). It warrants a close reading from me and from the people with whom I work. Freelancers may be negotiating an alternative pathway from the mainstream business world (on that cf. Michelle Goodman’s excellent book, My So-Called Freelance Life [Seal, 2008]). But that pathway isn’t any less subject to what women and men often experience as ongoing gender inequalities. These issues are what Sandberg exposes and discusses.
Of course, as she readily says in her “acknowledgments,” such a discussion cannot reasonably be produced, in a reasonably short amount of time, by one person–particularly one as busy as the COO of Facebook. And, she openly states that she is “not a scholar, journalist or sociologist.” But a team of minds, including co-author, journalist Nell Scovell; and the sociologist and researcher, Marianne Cooper; (and with the input of numerous other women and men) have produced a manifesto for rethinking gender issues for the 21st century. Sandberg addresses women primarily (but not solely) in the West; and people (men as much as women) in every field, be they single, partnered, married, divorced, childless, parents or grandparents. (The research is US-based, but Sandberg’s insights are wide-reaching enough to transcend many cultural differences, without denying that those differences exist.)
30 years after the work of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, whereby women became 50 percent of the college graduates in the United States, Sandberg takes as launching point the reality that the revolution has stalled and true equality has not been reached. Men still hold, she says, the majority of leadership positions in government, industry and academia, so that women’s voices are “still not heard in the decisions that most affect our lives.” She says that she, like most children of the 1960’s and 70’s expected the glass ceiling to shatter after she started working in the early 1990’s, only to find “with each passing year, fewer and fewer of my colleagues were women. More and more, I was the only woman in the [board]room” (6).
The inequalities are even worse, globally, as she well knows, referring to the experience of Leymah Gbowee, who received the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for helping to lead women’s protests that ended Liberia’s dictatorship. Sandberg says that when asked what women in America can help to overcome the atrocities against women in Liberia and the East, Gbowee said: have “More women in power.” (My one criticism of the book is the lack of space it gives to explore more globally women’s disempowerment. But that could be another book or books, or several Ph.D. dissertations.) Daily American and Canadian news shows a limited tolerance in the West for exposing such atrocities as female genital mutilation and forced childhood marriages, in the East.
But to return to Sandberg’s argument, there are a lot of “external” gender inequalities still present, in contemporary Western culture. To mention only a few, there are not enough companies with “flex-time” hours for working parents who raise young children; child care and parental leave are inadequate or outright absent. Mentors and sponsors who could assist women to advance their careers at crucial times are often hard to find. (Famously Betty Friedan refused to work with or even shake hands with Gloria Steinem. And many women like me have found ourselves similarly “shut out” of power or authority by other, sometimes older, women.) Also, women continue to do most of the housework and to provide most of the child care, in addition to the “job” or “career” that they may have.
Sandberg describes the “chicken and egg” dilemma that most professional women face today. On one hand (the chicken): women need leadership roles to tear down external barriers and Sandberg urges us to do that work. But on the other (the egg): women need to eliminate those same external barriers in order for women to get into those leadership roles in the first place. And she fully supports women who focus on the “egg,” as she has done. These are the “external” gender inequalities she refers to.
But Sandberg also speaks of the “internal” barriers that women experience as ones that too easily perpetuate our inequality: women internalize the same kind of negative messages that we heard as children, throughout our lives. So we feel it’s wrong to speak up in class, be aggressive in pursuing what we want and to be more powerful than the men near us. She writes: “We tend to discount ourselves in pursuit of career goals,” because we try to accommodate a partner and children that we “may not even yet have.” We suffer disproportionately from the imposter complex, frequently underestimating ourselves. And women cite “hard work” and “help from others,” when we do well. By contrast, men are quick to take credit for their accomplishments, without such qualification.
To “lean in,” in Sandberg’s title phrase, is to be ambitious in any pursuit. Sandberg advocates (by this term) for women’s self-confidence, in common sense ways, such as “sitting at the [boardroom] table” (and not in the symbolically peripheral chairs around the room); in finding partners to do more of the work at home, “to make your partner a real partner;” and in shedding unattainable standards, such as “the Myth of Doing it All.” Continue reading “On Women, Men and Work: Reading Sheryl Sandberg’s _Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead_ (2013)”
