Sheryl Sandberg and the Lean-In movement

By now, I'm sure most here have heard of the Facebook CFO's new feminist manifesto. At my shop, we got a company-wide email inviting the women to a Lean-In seminar.

The basics boil down to this:

• For all of their educational gains, women still lag behind in the world's halls of power, both corporate and government.

• Women share some of the blame for this, and need to start more aggressively challenging the status quo.

I like her take. I like her movement. One reason women are underpaid in this country, studies show, is that they do not aggressively pursue raises and promotion.

Two frequent criticisms of Sandberg:

• She's privileged, powerful, and, thus, out of touch with the regular American workplace. This is reminiscent of a lot of the ad hominem criticism heaped here on the NYT op-ed contributor who urged readers to be less materialistic.

• She's blaming women for their difficulties advancing, something a lot of feminists still don't react particularly well to.

Thoughts?

 

If the corporate and government halls of power are rife with corruption -- which they are, men and women alike -- why are we clamoring for more women to subject themselves to it? So they can roll around in the ethical mud as much as men do?

 

Sarah Palin and Margaret Thatcher withstanding, a world where testosterone makes fewer decisions in the halls of power sounds pretty good.

 

FWIW at the company I work at the CEO signed on to the Catalyst Accord which states:

The Catalyst Accord is a call to action for Canadian corporations to increase the overall number of board seats held by women to 25 per cent by 2017. Catalyst is the leading non-profit organization expanding opportunities for women in business.

I don't have a problem with it and thought it was pretty cool. The internal reaction was pretty negative with cries of :reverse sexism".

In a world where white males have had a historcal advantage in business I see it as a positive to try to increase more women as business leaders (just as long as they let me work from home :0)

 

If women want positions of power, they should be aware of all that comes with it. Perhaps they'll be more capable of casting out the corruption than men have been.

I saw Sandberg on TV the other day leading a seminar on this subject. Sounded like she was telling them to take more responsibility for their own lives, be more assertive. Not bad messages.

 

Sandberg is the foil (and was the motivation) for that much-discussed piece in The Atlantic by Anne-Marie Slaughter last year, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All." Sure enough, Slaughter is preparing her own book that discusses what society and the business world can do to accommodate working mothers more. The two are set up nicely as a Crossfire pair on cable news. But I think there's going to be a "whose side are you on" mentality that ultimately will be detrimental to the cause or at least not helpful to it.

If I had to choose, I'd lean slightly toward Sandberg's vision. An organization has to evaluate what employees do, not what they might do in some theoretical confluence of events 10 years down the road when their kids are grown.

 

I work with a lot of young, driven women. The idea of having children, I swear, is completely off of their radar. Although I'm a man, I can sometimes tell that they find it positively quaint that my wife and I have children.

 

I knew many women like that many years ago. My wife was a woman like that. We now have four kids.

Things change.

 

Agrees 100%

 

Oh, I'm sure they will for them. My wife and I were 32 before we had children, though we always planned on it.

 

Which wave of feminism are we on now? Fifth? Sixth? Where are we on the cycle of backlash to the backlash to the backlash? Roiphe? Wolf? Flanagan? Which set of false self-help equivalencies are we going to stumble over? Biological? Racial? Financial?

It's heartbreaking to me that we've been having the same arguments about women and work for more than forty years. Only the bylines change.

 

I don't think about it that way.

I think about it as not getting complacent just because gains have been made.