Lean In: Chapter 2, Sit at the Table

Chapter 2: Sit at the Table

Sandberg starts out with the famous anecdote she used in her TED talk, about how the men at an important meeting sat at the conference table while the women sat in chairs around the edges of the room.

She discusses "impostor syndrome" and how it disproportionately affects women, reflecting a larger problem of women consistently lacking confidence and underestimating themselves. In an example that hit home, she states that a "study of close to one thousand Harvard law students found that in almost every category of skills relevant to practicing law, women gave themselves lower scores than men." This called to mind an interview I had my senior year of college with Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects division of Lucasfilm. I was taken by surprise when the interviewer asked me to rank myself on a scale from 1 to 10 on various programming skills. Despite being a good programmer, I ranked myself between a 3 and a 6 on most of them, and no higher than an 8 even on the skills that I had been teaching my classmates as a TA for the past three years. I figured that I wasn't an expert on any of these things, even if I was pretty good at some of them. I didn't get a call back.


It's well established that men tend to attribute their successes to their innate qualities and skills, and their failures to a lack of interest or effort on their part, while women attribute their successes to external factors like luck, and their failures to inherent lack of ability. Sandberg takes this a step farther by arguing that society at large makes these same assumptions. For instance, in an article about Facebook, the New York Times attributed the success of Sandberg herself to being "lucky" and having "powerful mentors along the way."

All of this results in a workplace where men jump at new opportunities and challenges, while women hold back. Sandberg says this cuts both ways: institutions and individuals must be aware of this tendency and make an effort to encourage and champion women, and women must take more risks and either gain confidence or act more confident than they feel. She doesn't say this, but I think the key here is for women to stop internalizing failure. Frankly, there are times when I catch myself thinking I shouldn't or can't do something and I think, "What would a man in my position do?" The answer is usually, "Say yes and fake it."