Maybe You Should Read the Book: The Sheryl Sandberg Backlash

On February 22nd, the New York Times published a fifteen-hundred-word story about Sheryl Sandberg on its front page. It wasn’t the first time Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, had been featured prominently in the paper, but this story, written by Jodi Kantor, concerned a personal project that Sandberg had been pursuing outside of her work at Facebook. Drawing on her own experience in the corporate world, Sandberg has taken up the pressing question of what’s stopping more women from rising to the highest positions of power. (Ken Auletta wrote about Sandberg and Silicon Valley’s male-dominated culture for The New Yorker in 2011.) She wrote a book— “a sort of feminist manifesto,” as she’s described it— called “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” which will be published on March 12th, and created a foundation that will support what she calls “Lean In Circles,” a program for professional women that encourages them to review social-science research, share stories, receive instruction on career development, and “lean in” to (as opposed to opt out of) their careers.

Kantor’s piece, which detailed Sandberg’s plans in a tone of subtle disdain, was notable less for what it did say than what it didn’t. Although there were plenty of skeptics quoted in the piece—the business consultant Avivah Wittenberg-Cox accused Sandberg of “blaming other women for not trying hard enough,” for example—Sandberg herself had not participated in the story. And though Kantor disapprovingly quoted from guidelines for the lean-in circles that she acquired from a project advisor, the circles themselves hadn’t even begun. The piece also focussed on a disagreement (which it portrayed as a kind of catfight) between Sandberg and her “chief critic,” Anne-Marie Slaughter, the Princeton academic and former State Department official, who wrote a wave-making cover story in The Atlantic last August announcing that women could not “have it all,” and thinks that Sandberg holds women to an unfairly high standard. (In reality Sandberg and Slaughter are less ideological opposites than dissenting allies.) But what was most problematic about the piece was Kantor’s use of a truncated quote that was taken out of context, which prompted a series of hastily written critical pieces about the Lean In project that revealed a reflexive closed-mindedness about the idea of a corporate leader who also identifies as a feminist.

On its own, that quote—“I always thought I would run a social movement”—sounded unappealingly arrogant and naïve about history. But the comment was only part of an interview that Sandberg gave for the feminist PBS documentary “Makers: Women Who Make America,” and her full statement actually conveyed something quite different: “I always thought I would run a social movement, which meant basically work at a nonprofit,” she said. “I never thought I’d work in the corporate sector.” (In her book, Sandberg explains how her parents—her father was a physician, and her mother was a teacher and a human-rights activist—instilled in her a sense of social justice.) But the damage had been done.

Kantor’s piece for the Times first ran online on February 21st; the next day, Britain’s Daily Mail ran an absurd, unsourced, and unreported story that called Sandberg’s “feminist project” a “failure” and compared her to Gwyneth Paltrow, who lends her name and efforts to a lifestyle Web site. On February 23rd, Kantor’s Times colleague, the columnist Maureen Dowd, published an op-ed about Sandberg that picked up on the skeptical tone of the original piece. Dowd, deploying her signature alliteration, was withering about Sandberg, calling her an “It Girl,” quoting from a piece about her in Vogue magazine, and snarking over Sandberg’s supposed fondness for Prada ankle boots. (Ironically, the column’s title, “Pompom Girl For Feminism,” was pulled from another comment made by Sandberg that had been removed from its context.) Though Dowd may have been right to point out that social- and economic-justice movements usually grow from the bottom up, her column repeated, with some glee and derision, the out-of-context quote that had appeared in the Kantor piece, and alleged that Sandberg’s efforts were solely in service of padding her bank account. Dowd accused her of coöpting “the vocabulary and romance of a social movement not to sell a cause, but herself.”

By the 26th, the Times had seen fit to run a correction to Kantor and Dowd’s stories, announcing that the pieces “quoted incompletely from an interview [Sandberg] gave for ‘Makers,’ a new documentary on feminist history” but the paper’s suggestion that Sandberg was an opportunistic one-percenter had already metastasized. A blogger for Forbes who hadn’t read the book weighed in. In the Washington Post, on February 25th, the writer and activist Melissa Gira Grant dismissed “Lean In” as a vanity project, and, echoing Dowd, accused Sandberg of cynically exploiting feminist language to burnish her own image. (Gira Grant, who also questioned Sandberg’s legitimacy by noting that the married executive “employs a staff to help keep house, raise her children and throw her women’s leadership dinners,” had not read the book.) That same day, Joanne Bamberger published a piece in USA Today drearily titled “The New Mommy Wars” that focussed not only on Sandberg but on the newly appointed Yahoo C.E.O. Marissa Mayer. Bamberger, whose story gave no indication that she had ever cracked open a copy of “Lean In,” accused Sandberg of inflaming working mothers’ guilt over, among other things, “not acting with more ambition” and clucked that “Sandberg’s argument… just requires women to pull themselves up by the Louboutin straps.” (That line was apparently so Dowdian that the Times stylist herself couldn’t resist quoting it approvingly in her next column, which came out the following day.) When, on February 26th, the New Republic published yet another piece critical of Sandberg’s efforts—this piece, too, included a veiled admission that its writer, Michael Kazin, had not read her book—the situation seemed to have reached a nadir.

Part of what was so galling about the pile-on was the subtext that because Sheryl Sandberg is rich she can’t possibly be sincere in her advocacy for women. Much of the criticism presented Sandberg as a superficial, fashion-obsessed Marie Antoinette muscling her way into a milieu she didn’t belong to and couldn’t possibly understand. (Online commenters, as they so often do, took the implication and made it explicit. Readers of Dowd’s February 23rd column dubbed Sandberg a “huckster,” an “arrogant narcissistic upstart,” and “Paris Hilton in disguise.”) But anyone who had read her book would have known that Sandberg herself is the first to acknowledge the debts she owes to the women who came before her, not to mention her youthful naïveté and eventual engagement with gender politics. “I headed into college believing that the feminists of the sixties and seventies had done the hard work of achieving equality for my generation,” she admits early on in “Lean In.” “And yet, if anyone had called me a feminist, I would have quickly corrected that notion.”

There was also a peculiar irony in so many writers accusing Sandberg of being craven and covetous. It didn’t seem to occur to these critics that accusing Sandberg of cashing in or cynically embracing gender politics for personal gain—especially without having read her book—might come across as hypocritical or similarly self-serving. Nor was there any acknowledgement that feminist activism, coming from the C-suite or elsewhere, has never been a moneymaking endeavor, and, anyway, Sandberg is not exactly strapped for cash. As the feminist writer Jessica Valenti pointed out, with appropriate sarcasm, in the Post, “If there’s anything wealthy women are desperate for, it’s the chance to lead a social movement.”

What felt wrong was not that Sheryl Sandberg was being criticized—Gira Grant and even Dowd, while rhetorically over-the-top, had one or two useful points to make; others, like ForbesBryce Covert, wrote smart pieces that relied more on substance than style—but that normally thoughtful writers issued such damning verdicts on a book they had not even bothered to read. Perhaps more distressingly, after being called out on their mischaracterizations and the questionable ethics of writing about a project with which they had not familiarized themselves, some critics dug in their heels and avoided direct engagement over their journalistic clumsiness; Gira Grant defended her response as “a moral & tactical crit of feminist myopia on race & class.” (One would hope that engaging directly and responsibly might entail reading the text in question.)

Critics like Gira Grant seemed to come to their conclusions not as journalists but as activists. That’s not to say that all activists felt the same way. There was Valenti, who marveled at “how radical Sandberg’s messages are for a mainstream audience.” There was Naomi Wolf in Project Syndicate and Jill Filipovic in the Guardian. Among the ranks of writers with more traditional journalism backgrounds, there were Joan Walsh and Irin Carmon in Salon, Nisha Chittal in the Huffington Post, and Michelle Goldberg in The Daily Beast, who lamented the “strange sour backlash…aimed less at what the book says than at who Sandberg is.” Connie Schultz, whose fair-minded book review for the Washington Post, published on March 1st, was nonetheless accompanied by the inflammatory headline “The Elitist’s Guide for Working Women,” acknowledged that Sandberg is “bubbling with contradictions”: “Stand up for yourself, but don’t tick off the boss. Seek help from more experienced women, but don’t ask for a mentor.” She also charged Sandberg’s critics with being too simplistic in their criticisms.

To be fair, Sandberg and her handlers bear some responsibility for the tumult. In the weeks leading up to the book’s publication, reps for her publisher, Knopf, were either unwilling or unable to distribute enough galleys to fulfill the avalanche of requests that were pouring in. But the initial, heedless reactions to Ms. Sandberg’s book spoke to a larger problem, namely the pressures that the twenty-four/seven hamster-wheel pace of the contemporary media puts on writers: to speed up rather than to slow down, to shoot first and ask questions later, to create drama, and, sometimes, to operate from a place of bad faith and fixed biases. “Unfortunately, in the stumble that has become women talking about powerful women, you only get to the reasonable part of the conversation after you go through every possible iteration of figuring out how terrible all the powerful women are,” wrote the Atlantic Wire’s Rebecca Greenfield, on March 1st.

Tellingly, many of the most full-throated defenses of Sandberg came from women who had actually met her. Last autumn, Sandberg’s P.R. team invited a group of about twenty writers—including this one—to a dinner at Estancia 460, a restaurant in lower Manhattan. The evening started with cocktails, then proceeded to a dinner at the back of the restaurant, where guests sat at tables arranged in a square. I ended up seated directly next to Sandberg, where, in the course of three intense hours, I was able to observe her interactions with the rest of the group. I found her extremely impressive: smart, curious, sincere, funny, and warm. It was clear that she’d done her homework on every single woman in attendance, and she was frighteningly well-informed about the structural issues and challenges that working women are up against. (The evening’s conversations were off the record, so I can’t comment on specifics.) To say that I left that dinner feeling simultaneously inspired and sheepish would be an understatement.

Even so, my initial hesitations didn’t abate until I actually read her book, in early February. (Over Christmas, my discerning, second-wave mother absconded with my galley copy and returned it to me with the pronouncement, “This was very interesting!”) Part of my skepticism came from the very same biases and impulses that I suspect fuelled many of the more uninformed commentators who weighed on the book: that the C.O.O. was more Fortune 500 than feminist; that power is always antithetical to progress. And no matter how much I’d like to believe otherwise, it’s possible that my suspicions about the book reflect the widely held ideas about women with ambition and authority. (Sandberg addresses this issue within the first twenty pages of “Lean In,” explaining that ambitious women “often pay a social penalty.”)

As for “Lean In” itself, I believe that many, many women, young and old, elite and otherwise, will find it prescriptive, refreshing, and perhaps even revolutionary. As for those who complain that it’s heteronormative and anemic on the subject of class differences, they’re right—but to a point. In much of the commentary, I’ve encountered the erroneous assumption that the book is written for corporate power players, which it isn’t, and an odd expectation it should speak for all women, which it shouldn’t. As Erin Matson, writing in January on another high-profile and controversial feminist agitation, Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” put it: “In my experience, people can speak profoundly well for themselves, and do both themselves and others a disservice when they try to speak for everyone else at the same time.” Judged on its merits, “Lean In” is an inauguration more than a last word, and an occasion for celebration. Its imperfections should be regarded not as errors or exclusions but opportunities for advancing the conversation.

Correction: This piece originally referred to Maureen Dowd repeating “mischaracterizations of ‘Lean In,’ ” in Jodi Kantor’s piece. We have changed that to “the out-of-context quote.” We also have removed a sentence that said that Kantor had not done “much original reporting.” Kantor did read an early copy of the book, and she did obtain and publish previously unseen documents from Sandberg’s Lean In Foundation.

Anna Holmes is a writer in New York and the editor of the upcoming “Book of Jezebel,” to be published this October by Grand Central Publishing.

Photograph by Michele Asselin.