Eat, Pray, Lean
Facebook exec is selling women snake oil
WOMEN, you lazy bums, you can have it all — if you just work at it. So said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s seminal book from 2013, “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” anyway, though the “lazy bums” part was implied.
With chapters like “Sit at the table” and “Don’t leave before you leave,” Sandberg managed the feat of writing a celebrated feminist work that essentially spent 200 pages insulting women to their faces.
In the years since, “lean in” has become a running joke to many, something with which women ironically tag their Instagram selfies. Here I am on a conference call after my toddler puked on me, #leaningin. Or: Here I am wearing uncomfortable shoes to a job interview, #leaning in.
Four years later, Sandberg admits little has changed since her book appeared — at least according to her metric: “We are stuck at less than 6 percent of the Fortune 500 CEO jobs and their equivalent in almost every country in the world,” she told USA Today’s Jessica Guynn. “There were 19 countries run by women when ‘Lean In’ was published. Today there are 11. Congressional numbers have inched up a tiny bit. And so, overall, we are not seeing a major increase in female leadership in any industry or in any government in the world.”
Sandberg is encouraged, however, by “Lean In Circles,” groups of women who get together to espouse Sandberg’s philosophy. If I wrote a hit book and rubes were getting together to promote my brand, I might be similarly encouraged.
Though perhaps I’d feel a twinge of guilt over plumbing eager women’s expendable in- come to boost my book sales.
Most susceptible to this hustle are previously overachieving women who feel guilty about their muted role at work because they actually prefer to “lean in” at home with their kids.
Sandberg’s marks continue to believe that women are suffering, penalized by men and un- able to advance due to the unfortunate accident of their gender.
By all objective measures, women are in a great place in 2017, and it’s getting better all the time. Far more women than men go to college. Women are the primary breadwinners in 40 percent of households with children. In 2007, 90 women served in Congress, described at the time as a “record number” by the CRS Report for Congress. Today there are 104. There have been 50 women senators in the entire history of our country and 21 of them serve currently.
The problem is that it remains in the financial interest of many feminist leaders to keep us worried and feeling like we aren’t achieving enough. If you do think you’re doing OK as a woman in America today, you’re told to check your privilege and try to relate to a woman who is struggling. We end up grasping at straws trying to empathize.
In a USA Today piece this month about what women want, University of Houston political historian Nancy Young said, “My right to vote as an upper-class white woman with multiple college degrees is not in jeopardy but what about a working-class African-American woman or Hispanic woman?” Also not in jeopardy.
But saying that things are going well for women, better than ever before, just doesn’t sell enough books or get women riled up enough to march in the streets. Pretending our rights can be snatched from us at any moment or that women as a group are failing professionally are much more useful in keeping women agitated.
In her book, Sandberg admits that women in America are in a good place but laments that men continue to “run the world.” Her goal is numerical parity — that is, having 50 percent of CEOs and members of Congress and world leaders be women. But that’s a shallow form of equality, and a silly way to judge.
A truly pro-woman, proequality stance wouldn’t require a certain number of women be drafted onto various industry boards so snake-oil saleswomen like Sandberg can claim credit. The goal, instead, should be to ensure women have those options and letting them decide for themselves.
There’s just not a lot of evidence that a majority of women want to be senators or CEOs. Some do, of course, but we’re not matching Sandberg’s numbers because lots of women have other priorities — they value things Sandberg doesn’t think they should.
How feminist of them, and how backward of her.