The recent controversies that have engulfed Facebook and its leadership have also prompted a re-examination of Sheryl Sandberg and her public image (strangely, these controversies have prompted rather less re-examination of Mark Zuckerberg's eager nerd-king image). This prompting led to a vigorous discussion over drinks with friends of mine, a discussion which was limited by the unfortunate fact that none of us had actually read Lean In. Since I would never miss an opportunity to gain the upper hand in an argument, I decided to take the plunge and found a copy; below are my reflections after finishing it, a mere five years after its publication.
I should make clear that I mostly avoided other published takes on the book in order not to manipulate my own impressions; as it stands, I already had fairly strong views on many of the subjects covered by the book. Although I do believe that what Sandberg has done since the book's publication, both as a private citizen and in her role COO of Facebook, is somewhat relevant to how we might evaluate her message, for the most part I will focus on just the text itself (except for one key insight, which I will bring up later).
What is clear from the very beginning, despite whatever aspirations Sandberg might have, is that this book is far more relevant to the 1% than the rest. While Sandberg herself did not appear to grow up in the same lofty socioeconomic strata that she occupies now, she is a Harvard graduate, was mentored by Larry Summers (as she tells it, a rather serendipitous occurrence), and worked at McKinsey, the World Bank, and the Treasury Department (the latter two thanks to Summers) all before the age of 30. To her credit, Sandberg doesn't pretend that all this success happened by magic, but the book does suffer from its memoiristic focus on her personal narrative.
Many times, Sandberg cites statistics demonstrating her understanding of the broadness of the problem of female disempowerment, but her direct advice for women tends to fall into the very narrow band of "you are already an executive at Google, here's how you advance". I found myself distinctly underwhelmed by the stakes of most of what was presented in the book - Sandberg or the other women whom she talks to are at no point facing economic ruin, or not being able to feed her kids, or not being able to buy medicine, or anything like that. For example, Lean In opens with a story of a heavily pregnant Sandberg demanding that Larry Page and Sergey Brin put in parking spaces for pregnant women at Google, after a particularly rough day that opened with her having to cover quite a large distance quickly to make a meeting on time. Of course, she was correct to demand such accommodations, but I'm not sure this is helpful to pregnant women who need similar accommodations but can’t just barge into the office of their company’s CEO. I think a greater effort to understand and reflect the perspective of women for whom "leaning in" in the traditional sense might involve serious risk (or might literally be impossible) would have made it far more relevant and useful.
In that vein, there is precious little offered to tell women what to do if "leaning in" fails - what if speaking up more in meetings means that you get branded as difficult and no one wants to work with you? Women are, of course, socialized from youth to develop traits that may make them less successful in the business world, but women are also able to see, as many other disempowered people can see, that those who clash with the norm often pay a heavy price for doing so. Because Sandberg has been so successful, I think it is difficult for her narrative to integrate some insight into why women might "leave before they leave", for example (no less of an authority than Michelle Obama expressed this view soon after I finished reading the book, coincidentally).
This lack of reflection on the legitimate reasons why women might be acting the way they do in the workplace looks much worse in the light of the #metoo movement. As we are now learning (if we didn't know already), often the monster isn't just real, he is working in the next office. Even allowing that Sandberg might have written a different book with those revelations in mind, I think that it also needed a deeper understanding of the relevant forces involved, more than what she could have possibly supplied on her own. (For one, the inclusion of Larry Summers as a valuable mentor for her is certainly interesting, given his previous statements.) It would have vastly improved the book if there had been more discussions with sociologists and historians and others who might have been able to offer the full picture on the things that women who take things into their own hands often deal with, as well as with those women who have faced a great deal of adversity but still been able to succeed. Further, it seems that most, if not all, the women cited in the book are of similar socioeconomic status to Sandberg; this quite obviously limits its usefulness to people outside that band.
Most importantly, Lean In fails to sufficiently interrogate the premise that the book stands on - that women should be encouraged to pursue power such that they achieve equity with men. This equity, it is implied, will also make the lives of less-fortunate women better, and thus justifies the pursuit of power within these parameters by women in the first place. But what if pursuing power in this way isn’t the best way to do that? The stakes of the book, because of the way it is written, are deeply wound up with Sandberg’s personal success - but should we even care if she, or even lots of women, become senior executives at major corporations? As I alluded to above, it would be deeply unfair to lay all the troubles of Facebook at her feet, but it is true that at the pinnacle of her success, she is a key decision-maker at a company whose products have facilitated genocide (with the accompanying violence against women), negatively affected young women’s mental health, and most glaringly, seem to have helped Donald Trump, an admitted sexual predator, get elected president, a result that has undoubtedly made the lives of many women in the US and around the world worse. Lean In provides a great deal of advice for women who want to reach the top levels of our society, and for men who want to empower women to do so, but it doesn’t get close to asking whether women (and men) should buy into these structures in the first place if they really want to build a more equitable society.