Assessing Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In”

My latest, on Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In for MomsRising.org:

Sheryl Sandberg’s well-researched new book, Lean In, focuses on helping women who aspire to careers identify and overcome negative societal messages they have internalized over the years – old scripts that undermine women’s self-confidence and hold them back from achieving their full potential on the job.

It’s not every day that a high-achieving woman proclaims herself a feminist, so I have been surprised by the amount of venom heaped on Sandberg’s book. Some commentators complain that Sandberg places too little emphasis on the institutional barriers and prejudices that stand in the way of women’s struggle for equality and that she “blames the victim” when she points out things women do — or fail to do — that hold us back from exercising leadership roles. Others charge that Sandberg’s advice for overcoming these socially-ingrained habits is only relevant to women with jobs where individual initiative is rewarded and with partners who will step up to the plate when asked to share family responsibilities.

It’s true that Sandberg’s book is addressed primarily to highly educated business and professional women whose employers have a stake in retaining their skills and whose partners tend to be more egalitarian in outlook than many other men. For that reason, the ideal companion volume to Lean In is The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict: The Poor, the Professionals, and the Missing Middle, by Joan Williams and Heather Boushey, which lays out the range of problems facing less privileged women.

But Sandberg does not discount the external barriers facing women. Nor is she unconcerned with the well-being of less affluent women. Lean In is nothing like The Secret, the Oprah-endorsed 2006 best-seller that claimed failure to achieve wealth and happiness is caused by lack of positive thinking.

Read the rest here.