One Cheer for Lean In
I reread the book. I still kind of like it. I swear I'm not a bad feminist.
Come for a long-gestating defense of Lean In, stay for some links.
1.
I remember when I first read Lean In. I remember my brain melting and sizzling. I remember marching into the U.S. News and World Report newsroom and telling Meg, the woman in the cubicle across from me, that this fucking book [holding it up, smacking cover loudly, repeatedly] was REVELATORY. I wanted to punch the air. Head-butt the wall. Smear on some war paint. Fight a horse. Eat a tiger.
That was 2013 – more than 10 years ago. Today, Lean In is disliked, widely criticized, even hated. At the very least, it’s seen by many feminists as a regrettable fad – it’s permed hair and wide shoulder pads, the kind of thing that makes you look back and sigh, “well, that was … [pause, cringe]”
The phrase “lean-in feminism” is a pejorative now. “Lean In has been discredited for good,” The Nation declared in 2018. Michelle Obama told an audience that year, “it's not always enough to lean in, because that shit doesn't work all the time." In reporting on Obama’s remarks, Paper taunted, “Michelle Obama hopefully put the nail in ‘Lean In’ feminism's inevitable coffin.”
I wanted to revisit the book this year for a number of reasons. One is that in the last 10 years, feminism has changed – and not only that, but the way the world interacts with feminism has changed. “Intersectionality” is now a mainstream concept. The first woman presidential nominee came and went, losing to a man who bragged on tape about committing sexual assault. (He brushed it off as “locker room talk.”) “Me Too” happened, and we ladies looked around and wondered if – holy shit – maybe we didn’t have to shruggingly accept that we can’t be alone with that handsy male boss. The pandemic happened, and we all looked around and acknowledged that – huh! – when there are no schools or daycares to watch the kids, moms’ careers pay the price.
Anyway, I wanted to know just how poorly this book had aged.
But I also had self-interest in mind in rereading the book: I wanted to know if the book would still be helpful for me. I am now married with a baby, in a more-demanding and higher-profile job than a decade ago. Parts of the book that childless, 30-year-old me skimmed past might be brand-new to me now.
And so I have reread Lean In. I have underlined. I have nodded in agreement. I have rolled my eyes. And I have a sheepish admission:
I still kind of like it.
—
2.
Kind of! I said “kind of”! Lay off! God!
Let’s back up.
For the uninitiated or too-young-to-remember, a primer: it’s hard to overstate how wildly popular Lean In was. It was blurbed by Oprah, Sir Richard Branson, and Chelsea Clinton. It got a warm review in the New York Times and a bracing defense against early haters in The New Yorker.
The book, written by former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and writer Nell Scovell, consists of 11 chapters, most of which are focused around basic career problems women face, and instructions for improvement (“Sit at the Table,” “Make Your Partner an Equal Partner”). The advice is largely self-focused: here are the roadblocks you are making for yourself, and here’s how to get rid of them.
In her introduction, Sandberg tries to describe her book, saying it’s “not a memoir” and “not a book on career management,” and also that it’s “not a self-help book.”
But at its heart, it is a self-help book – perhaps “annotated self-help” is the best way to put it. It’s filled with lessons and advice, with copious data and anecdotes that back up why these lessons are important.
Lean In’s lessons are now basic lady-in-the-workplace 101. A lot of us learned from Lean In what impostor syndrome was. That we should apply for jobs even when we don’t meet 100% of the listed “requirements.” That we face a double-bind when we try to negotiate. That many of us suffer from “tiara syndrome,” thinking that if we work hard enough and are just flat-out good enough, someone will give us the crown – that we will be noticed and rewarded. (I still suffer from this. I think many of us do.) That if we marry, and especially if we have kids, we should pick an “equal partner” – someone who will do their fair share of child- and house-work.
There were two great gifts that Lean In gave me. The first was one message: you’re not crazy. That no, you’re not imagining it that men talk over you. That you’re not imagining it either when the world assumes you will eventually back off your career when you decide to have kids. That people (of all genders) really do badmouth smart, ambitious women behind their backs. That lots of people (of all genders, but especially women) feel like they’re faking it. That the world promotes men based on potential and women based on performance – in other words, that bosses look at a young man and say, “This kid is going places! Give him the job!” whereas an equally qualified woman might get an “Ehhhh…can she handle it?”
And crucially, Lean In assures you that you’re not the only one who constantly kicks herself for having held herself back in that meeting, for not having said the thing you wanted to say – that women do it all the time, and there are ways to improve.
All of this makes Lean In seductive, in that way that any good self-help book is. It not only reassures you that, yes, the sexism is real and quantifiable…but that there are ways you can counter it! Yes, you! You can take charge! You can do something!
Rereading it, yes I rolled my eyes sometimes…but also, I at times again wanted to punch the air, head-butt the wall. This fucking book [holding it up, smacking cover loudly] still fired me up, made me want to go climb a ladder, overhaul a power structure, sit tall and proud at a conference table and talk loudly, steamrolling anyone who might interrupt.
And that’s not just about self-help seduction; sitting at the table and speaking up are basic, empowering steps. If you’ve been schooled in politeness (which usually means silence) for a lifetime, suddenly talking can feel revolutionary.
That was the second great gift Lean In gave me: a generous dose of dignity, of self-respect. Reading it at 30, the message of “sit at the table” knocked me over. Sandberg described a meeting at Facebook with then-Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, at which many women decided to sit at the perimeter of the room, rather than at the table. Even when Sandberg invited them, they didn’t move.
That’s me, I thought. That’s me. And that’s just being polite, right?…Except no, that’s being SMALL. It had never occurred to me that I could claim a seat, literally or figuratively. Even now, I think about the phrase “sit at the table” at work sometimes. It means literally grabbing a chair, but also just taking up the damn room you deserve. Lean In made me question my reflexive (but not natural) politeness.
I had this shaking-myself reaction to so much of Lean In’s simple-seeming advice. The idea of speaking up made me — wait for it — speak up. This was terrifying. In my early days at Vox, I shrank from everyone, intimidated by the Ivy Leaguers and well-known journalistic names that surrounded me. Talking made my heart race and my face go numb and cold.
And so, with Sheryl on my shoulder, I made the resolution to speak once per meeting.
Was this the smartest idea? I don’t know. I’m sure I said some unnecessary things in the service of my quota. I wondered if colleagues rolled their eyes when I spoke up. But also, I got very, very used to talking. And now I do it (a lot) more.
—
3.
But hold on. Lean In has its problems. Many of them. A(n almost certainly incomplete) list:
Most glaringly, it doesn’t address race. There is little acknowledgement that some women face not only systemic bias based on their gender, but their race or ethnicity. Especially now, when many feminists are reckoning with the movement’s racist past, this is a glaring omission.
It ignores single moms – Parenthood with two parents is hard, meaning that with one parent, it’s downright grueling.
And it’s not really aimed at every woman. This book is largely for women in white-collar jobs. Sandberg even inadvertently underlined this when, shortly after Lean In’s publication, she snubbed unionizing hotel workers who asked her to come speak to them.
Speaking of which, Sandberg has some, shall we say, baggage. She was COO of Facebook during the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Whistleblower Frances Haugen told of all sorts of problems that were swept under the rug during Sandberg’s tenure, like the mental health effects of Facebook and Instagram on teen girls. And then there’s the simple fact that Facebook has long contributed to America’s increasingly ugly, broken politics, by spreading misinformation and fostering extremism.
Lean In ultimately asks very little of corporate America – it puts the onus on you, dear reader. And even then, there’s no guarantee you’re going to get anything out of it. As bell hooks said in her eyebrow-singeing critique of the book: “[Sandberg] makes it seem that privileged white men will eagerly choose to extend the benefits of corporate capitalism to white women who have the courage to ‘lean in.’”
Put another way, the book is all individual change, no structural change – if one truly wanted to make the world better for women in the workplace, one would be better off changing laws and corporate policies, as opposed to simply promoting women to the top of broken structures. Which brings me to:
The thin promise of trickle-down feminism – Sheryl hoped that putting more women in positions of power would enable other women to rise. But it’s not clear that that works. By the time you become a leader – especially at a large workplace – you’re at best stymied by corporate bureaucracy, at worst changed by it to support the very oppressors you once vowed to fight.
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4.
That’s a lot to dislike. And I get it.
And let me add some more complications to my defense of Lean In — things in the cultural ether that make me hesitant to criticize the book.
In recent years, I have grown increasingly wary of calling out other feminists’ ideas loudly, and particularly on social media. Part of that is that social media lends itself more to posturing than fruitful discussion. But moreover, when feminists call each other out, question each other, try to change each others’ minds, outsiders all too often find readymade ways to not only slam women but appear pious in the process.
Consider the term “girlboss.” To the women who claimed the mantle, it was briefly a term of empowerment – a way to tell the world that you were thriving professionally in a man’s world. But the term quickly morphed into a pejorative (not unlike “Lean-In feminism”) – a criticism of women dressing up their personal gains as feminist victories.
And yes, that’s a fair criticism, but as Moira Donegan pointed out in 2022, the “girlboss” insult gained more traction than it deserved: “it seems clear that the girlboss was a distraction or a scapegoat, a genre of woman that attracted contempt far out of proportion to its actual numbers or influence. … The girlboss and her transgressions became fodder to condemn whole swaths of feminist history and thought, if not the whole of the feminist project itself.”
And this has led to men delightedly flinging the term around. When I hear (ostensibly forward-thinking) men criticize ambitious women by joking, “girlboss gaslight gatekeep,” I internally scream.
In a similar vein, a Bill Burr SNL monologue from a few years ago lives rent-free in my head. I’m linking to it, but you are under zero obligation to watch it. The basic gist: it’s 2020, Black Lives Matter protests have swept the nation, cancel culture is freaking Burr out, and he is pissed at white women for “hijacking the woke movement.”
Again, this could go on to be a thoughtful look at white women’s complicity in oppression. But Burr has no specifics, nothing in particular he’s calling out in contemporary ladies; it quickly becomes clear that he sees this as an opportunity to call white women “my bitches” and order them to “sit down and take your talking to.” (Witness the glee he takes in doing this.)
It’s not that Lean In is beyond criticism. But I think criticizing Lean In for its faults too broadly, too unthoughtfully, is not only unfair but also risks handing anti-feminists the exact ammo they are always looking for. (See also: Hillary Clinton.)
And one more thing, while I’m laying out cultural complications: especially right now, I am here for anything that encourages women’s ambition, at a time when ambition once again feels like a dirty word.
The writer Jill Filipovic wrote one of my favorite recent essays on this. Observing a general cultural “vibe shift” away from applauding women’s ambition, she notes:
I’m not criticizing any of these “end of ambition” pieces, which are getting to something quite real that is happening among a lot of women I know. But I am criticizing the broader idea that these aren’t just predictable life ebbs and flows (with an ebb reliably coming along with childbearing and then the transition to middle age) or fixable problems (is it at all bad or sad that ambitious women have that snuffed out by a system that crushes them?), but rather part of a binary value system that only gets applied to women: Ambition was ok for a moment, but now it’s not, so not only are there no downsides to this withdrawal from ambition (there are), but we were right to be suspicious of female ambition all along. In other words, The problem is not the observation that female ambition is ebbing among some women of a certain age. The problem is the positioning of ebbing ambition as self-realizing enlightenment (rather than, perhaps, crushing disappointment), alongside a broader cultural pathologizing of female ambition.
That idea — that it’s healthy and natural for a smart, sane, well-balanced woman to take her foot off the gas as she approaches middle age, especially while raising a small person — makes me feel crazy. I do not want to scale back. Yes, I cry on reporting trips because I miss my baby. And also, I would be enraged at myself if I didn’t travel, didn’t keep grueling hours for a few days at a time chasing a candidate around Iowa or New Hampshire.
I still want to Lean In. I’m not always sure if that’s a good thing. But I still do.
—
5.
My feelings for Lean In go beyond defensiveness, though. Rereading this book, I realized that if a younger woman came to me for career advice, a lot of the advice I gave her would echo Lean In…and in particular, it would echo the internal changes Sandberg advocates.
Among Sheryl’s lessons that hold up: Stop getting in your own way. Speak up. Speak honestly. Get that equal partner. Be as assertive as you can get away with. Apply for the job you’re not sure you can get. Don’t discount your accomplishments. The world socialized you badly, and that’s not your fault, but you can at least try to deprogram some of it. So go do it.
But also, I want a book-long addendum to Lean In, and I want it to be a reality check about what Sheryl’s advice will and won’t get you.
My addendum would say this: Lean In is a fine day-to-day playbook. It’s a start at getting by in a system that wasn’t made for you.
BUT. But but but: to make things more equal, you will have to do more than lean in. Change doesn’t happen because a bunch of individual women get promotions…or at least, it hasn’t so far.
Put a different way: Following Lean In is not itself feminist. This book is not so much a guide to fighting the power as a guide to how to survive – maybe (MAYBE) even succeed – in power structures that weren’t built for you.
To some degree, Lean In was a victim of its own success (which means it was also a victim of Sandberg’s prominence – her famous TED Talk, her position in Silicon Valley, her massive press tour). With another, less-prominent author, it might have been just another ladies-in-the-workplace self-help book – a research-heavy version of “Nice Girls Don’t Get The Corner Office.”
And my lengthy addendum would add, in all-caps red font (blinking, if possible): if Leaning In doesn’t make all your dreams come true, it’s really not your fault. If people still talk over you, well, that’ll happen. If you become a mom and find your role is diminished, that’s not your doing. If you don’t rise to the top and change your entire workplace to be more equal, more equitable, more humane, more fair, that’s…not surprising. Change is difficult and slow and maddening.
And if you want systemic change, it might require, for example, convincing men that patriarchy is also bad for them. It might require you and many right-thinking people of all genders slowly rising through the ranks at your particular company and making the right decisions. It might require you to speak up for people who don’t look like you or even think like you. It might require decades of political advocacy, and even then, success is nowhere near assured.
In short, systemic change sometimes feels impossible.
Present-day mainstream feminism has evolved toward questioning systems, and particularly capitalism — whether it works at all, whether it can work, whether it has to be replaced entirely or simply fixed to be more equitable.
As a reporter, I take no position on this. But I do think that rereading Lean In is likely to pose a difficult question for many feminists who are deeply ambitious in their careers: is it okay to want the spoils of a broken system, even while you want to change it? Is it possible to do both? And if not, okay, what do you do next?
Maybe the reason I still somewhat defend Lean In is simple: because I desperately want to believe I have some control, that any of us do, when it’s not clear if or how the world will ever become equal.
There’s a joke that my girlfriends and I do when one of us is being particularly jaded or cynical. We mime smoking a cigarette, affect a gravelly voice, and bark: “Lemme tell ya a little something about disappointment. Lemme tell ya a little something about broken dreams.”
And maybe I am that old crone. Because sometimes I look at the shitty realities around all of us (workdays that don’t match up to school days, lack of affordable childcare, women as default parents, visions of success and power built around traditional “masculinity,” women who gain power and then become cogs in broken machines, even office air conditioning set to men’s comfort levels), and I think:
Well, what the fuck else am I supposed to do?
I can’t blame other – particularly younger – women if they look at Lean In (or this essay) and do a full-body eyeroll. And so if/when I make it to the top (whatever that might look like), I hope they hold me accountable. I hope they hold all of us old feminists accountable. I hope when they see my feminism not trickling down, they tell me to woman up and stop being an asshole and try to change something.
And then I hope they punch the air, headbutt a wall. It’s a feeling I want us all to have.
Housekeeping
Substack booted the Nazis! Hell yeah.
Updates for 2024. This newsletter will continue to be, shall we say, haphazard. But two things I can foresee: 1) two newsletters a month. At least. 2) I’ll be traveling a bunch for a certain presidential election. So I’m betting I’ll be doing a lot more diaries from the road, having deep thoughts on the election, perhaps even some book reports on what I’m reading to understand the election.
IN SHORT: Please leave in the comments your thoughts on what else you’d like to read here!
AND ALSO: Your ask-a-journalist questions! Leave them in the comments!
Links
MY STUFF
I talked Lean In on Slate’s The Waves: Wait. Did I plug this already? I think I did. Whatever. Here it is again.
Ron DeSantis is haunted by Trump: Give a listen to my latest story. Come for Rep. Thomas Massie doing a Trump impression AND Trump waxing poetic about shirtless Ron DeSantis (really!). Stay for why some voters who love Trump think DeSantis is an even better option.
The big pre-caucus Iowa rundown: Iowa reporter extraordinaire Clay Masters and I talked to Tamara Keith this week on the NPR Politics Podcast about all things Iowa — what voters are telling us and what the candidates’ closing arguments are.
It’s Been a Minute: My colleague Domenico Montanaro and I went on the wonderful It’s Been a Minute podcast to talk to Brittany Luse about what matter and what doesn’t matters (hint: most issues!) ahead of the next election.
GOP candidates go heavy on schools (light on education): So much talk of trans girls playing sports and critical race theory on the trail this year…but so little talk of academic achievement/improvements. Read/listen here. And then also we did a podcast on it.
OTHER RECOMMENDATIONS:
One Foot in the Fade (audiobook version): The third part in a trio of murder mysteries taking place in a fantasy world full of fairies, angels, werewolves, vampires, you get the idea. These are a perfect mix of dark existential noir and fun potboiler. PLUS I highly recommend the audiobooks — this one accompanied me on a recent swing through Iowa. They are all read by the actor Luke Arnold, who does a *perfect* hard-boiled growly detective voice (not to mention an array of accents and voices for the characters). But also: don’t start with this book; start with Book 1, The Last Smile in Sunder City.
The Fleishman Is in Trouble TV score: Caroline Shaw fangirl reporting for duty [salutes]
Delightful past internet thing you forgot existed: The Nutrigrain “I feel great” ad.
Just wanted to say thank you for taking up this space in my inbox. Always a delight reading your words!