Introduction: Internalizing the Revolution
Readers of this blog know that, as a corporate lawyer at a large firm with two young children, I am not feeling inclined at the moment to "lean in." Instead, I've been searching for ways to be human and feel like I can breathe while keeping up with the demands of my job.
So I was prepared to dislike this book. But I found myself nodding in agreement as I read most of the introduction. Sandberg starts out with an anecdote about asking for reserved spots for pregnant women at Google after her own experience trying to race to an important meeting on swollen feet across a crowded parking lot while fighting back nausea. Her point is that she never realized that was a need until she experienced it herself, and the women below her never brought it up because they didn't have the power. She continues with more stories and statistics, each underscoring the point that we need more women in power.
Sandberg brings up the statistics we've all heard about how women are equal to or ahead of men in academic achievement, and are hired more or less equally in entry-level jobs, but reach the top at much lower rates than men. She says:
I saw that the senior leaders were almost entirely male, but I thought that was due to historical discrimination against women. The proverbial glass ceiling had been cracked in almost every industry, and I believed that it was just a matter of time until my generation took our fair share of the leadership roles. But with each passing year, fewer and fewer of my colleagues were women.I see this every day at my firm, which as law firms go is a fairly enlightened place. Half or more of the junior associates are women. But in my department, I can count the number of female partners on one hand.
Sandberg concludes this part of her argument by saying, "It is time for us to face the fact that our revolution has stalled. . . . A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our homes." At this point I'm saying, amen, sister.
Then she turns to the next question: what can we do about it? She says the barriers to improvement are both external (societal attitudes toward women and men) and internal (buying into messages about gender roles and how women should be less assertive and powerful, lack of self-confidence, lowered expectations of ourselves, doing more than our share at home, and generally "pulling back when we should be leaning in"). Then she says: "My argument is that getting rid of these internal barriers is critical to gaining power." She acknowledges that both problems need work, but she's going to focus on the internal barriers because they are within our control.
She addresses criticisms of her message by saying that while she wants more women in power, not everybody has the same goals and it's okay if your goal is not to acquire power. But I think part of her message is to get women to examine why their goals might be more personally or domestically oriented and less work-oriented than men's goals. So on one hand, I think it's useful to say, "Let's think about what we want and what we do about it and how we live our lives -- are we overly influenced by what society says we should do, rather than what's really best for us?" And on the other, I think her "internal barriers" are really "external barriers" in disguise. Yes, women can act to increase their self-confidence and assertiveness, and can try to make sure they have equal partners at home. That part of the message isn't new or controversial. I think the controversial part is that if you follow her argument through, she's saying that women aren't in power because we don't want it enough, and we SHOULD want it, and if it weren't for these internalized messages about gender we WOULD want it, so we should work really hard to get it and then things will be better for everyone. But there are still eleven chapters I haven't read yet, so we'll see if that's accurate.
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