Weds
4/3 |
Sheryl Sandberg is the chief operating officer of Facebook and the author of "Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead."
Forbes bio
twitter
wikipedia
Bloomberg bio & spec. gossip
Lots of stuff about the book out there. B&N has several full reviews (snippets from some majors). Some sexism (let's post silly pictures of the latest silly woman thinking she should get attention! And what should she be dressing like?), lots of agreement (fawning and/or sincere) and a whole lot of disagreement, especially (but not exclusively) from our intellectual compatriots on the left.
Good snippet at goodreads:
Someone asked me for a cliffs notes version and the best I can say is to search online for Sheryl Sandberg's TEDWomen talk in 2010. It is a 15 minute long speech that basically sums up her most pertinent points in this book.
cognoscenti.wbur.org
Her central point is that more women need to aspire to leadership roles and “lean in” — try harder — to get there, and it carries special weight coming from a woman whom Fortune Magazine named the fifth most powerful in the world — above Michelle Obama.
But Sandberg has a central blind spot, a striking omission.
Her push for women to work full-time in high-powered jobs, even through motherhood, seems to willfully ignore this fact: A great many of us don’t want to, not when our children are young. We want — often desperately — to cut back. If we can possibly afford it.
And, in my experience at least, our greatest obstacle is not any girly self-doubt. It is a rigid workplace culture that won’t let us ratchet down. It is employers who do not offer flexible alternatives that drive parents out, by offering only a binary choice between full-time-plus or the highway.
UK Guardian review
But that is exactly the point: this book isn't offering a new spark for a feminist revolution. Rather, it says, your revolution has stalled – why don't you try getting what you want my way? Perhaps predictably, this involves a lot of flexibility, and even more smiling. "A woman needs to combine niceness with insistence," she concludes, having surveyed all the evidence that people respond badly to women who lobby in their own interests. "I understand the paradox of advising women to change the world by adhering to its biased rules and expectations. I know it is not a perfect answer but a means to a desirable end." We're back at the prom. Zip it, smart-arse, or you won't get laid. Except you probably wouldn't want to get laid, because it would erode your value proposition.
This goal-driven, ideology-free approach has some fascinating insights into the world of business itself...But when she pans back to apply her approach to all women, her conclusions are often comically infantilising.She gives Arianna Huffington as an ego ideal. "Her advice is that we should let ourselves react emotionally and feel whatever anger or sadness being criticised evokes for us. And then we should quickly move on. She points to children as her role model. A child can cry one moment and run off to play the next." Sure. And a cat can go to sleep when it's bored. Emulating the cat may not be the best way to deal with a boring situation...This is not a book about how women can become more equal: this is a book about how women can become more like Sheryl Sandberg. You will be able to decide relatively fast how plausible a goal this is.
Tina Brown-->
“We talk too much about the fight for the corner office,” she told Bloomberg Television's Stephanie Ruhle in advance of her Women in the World Summit taking place later this week. “We don’t focus on the real needs and wants out there that women don’t own as much as men.
‘‘It’s about ‘leaning on’ more than ‘leaning in’ the powers that be to make sure that real changes get made.”
Lean In and 1% Feminism (new to me, read this one if nothing else)
Of course Sandberg is masterful at self-inoculation and her book is chock full of preemptive moves to immunize against critique. Yes, she graciously grants, not everyone can or wants to have it all. And yes, there are structural barriers that continue to block women's advancement. But, while offering to jump-start and lead a feminist revolution, she has essentially produced a manifesto for corporatist feminism, career advice for the distaff side of the 1%. That advice is, in fact, about how to have it all, while offering precisely zero guidance on how to dismantle the structural barriers to gender equity that still impede most women...Lean In is not about feminism in general, but about a very particular brand of feminism that, delusions aside, has nothing whatsoever to do with inspiring a social movement. We need to understand the core features of the brand, and then decide whether to buy in or take a pass.
- Corporatist feminism is fundamentally conservative...
- 1% feminism is all about the glass ceiling, never about the floor...
- Trickle-down feminism depends on the benevolence and gender politics of those who make it to the top...
- Dream-crushing feminism is about stripping feminism of any remnants of a transformative vision...
the fact that Sandberg has occupied so much space and is taken so seriously as the new voice of feminism is a sign of how intractably conservative the current political environment is. That's all the more reason to reassert the social justice roots of feminism, and to make sure that it does not become synonymous with leaning in.
Notable:
It is well-known that Facebook clones small apps and rolls them out to Facebook’s broad user base when an outside app becomes threatening to Facebook’s business model. Given that strategy, it’s not hard to see how Facebook may want to incubate its own feminist movement in order to prevent a more activist and transformative feminism from affecting Facebook’s business. Just as with any of Facebook’s competitive moves, the need to create an in-house version of a product arises due to an external threat. And put very simply, feminism is a threat to Facebook, just as Instagram or Snapchat were threats to Facebook’s photo-sharing business...Now, with Sandberg’s Lean In, we have a book that tells the story that she and Facebook want to tell about sexism: women can solve it themselves by working harder. This story works in the first instance to supplant a more structural feminist critique of the workplace, but beyond that it promotes Facebook as a cutting-edge work environment where men and women are encouraged to work “harder better faster stronger” in support of the company’s domination and success.
The loser in the Lean In vision of work isn’t one version of feminism or another—other feminist organizations and publications will continue to flourish alongside Lean In, though they may receive less media attention—but uncapitalized, unmonetized life itself...
And so, in the end, Lean In may be a book not about a social movement, but about Sandberg’s own movement from Harvard to Google to Facebook, and now into her self-appointed role as leader of Lean In. The book advocates “lean in” circles for women in corporate environments. The circles are now being advocated by the book’s corporate partners like American Express, Amazon, and Bain, with her book as their guide. As memoir, it is instructive regarding Sandberg’s successful career trajectory, and provides some helpful advice for young women in how to follow her. But as a manual for navigating the workplace, it teaches women more about how to serve their companies than it teaches companies about how to be fairer places for women to work.
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