On Tuesday, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, published “Lean In for Graduates.” The book’s cover shows her smiling in diamonds and a white blouse. Put out by Knopf, this is an expanded version of Sandberg’s “Lean In,” which has sold close to two million copies since its publication, last spring. Beneath Sandberg’s placid portrait on the new edition are the words “Because the world needs you to change it.” “Lean In for Graduates” begins with a zestful letter from Sandberg telling those in mortarboard caps that they “can help create a more equal world where everyone sits at the table and all voices are heard.” She signs it, simply, “Sheryl.”
Oh, hello again, Sheryl. Ken Auletta wrote a Profile of Sandberg in the magazine in 2011, three years after she left her position as a vice-president of Google to take Facebook’s second-most-prominent executive seat. In his interviews with her, the thoughts that inform “Lean In” were beginning to take shape. Before she was a billionaire, Sandberg earned undergraduate and business degrees at Harvard, where she became a protegée of Lawrence Summers; when he was named Secretary of the Treasury, she worked as his chief of staff. In each of these boys’ clubs, she thrived. Auletta writes that Sandberg doesn’t quite see the point of rehashing horror stories about sexist acts—that only “diverts women from self-improvement”—and that she “opposes all forms of affirmative action for women.” He describes a meeting in which Sandberg told twelve female Facebook executives, “What I believe, and that doesn’t mean everyone believes it, is that there are still institutional problems and we need more flexibility in all of this stuff, but much too much of the conversation is on blaming others, and not enough is on taking responsibility ourselves.” It is in this spirit that Sandberg imagined her book as the basis for a social movement.
The infusion of “Lean In” into the zeitgeist is clear: Hillary Clinton spoke of “leaning in” last week, in conversation with Christine Lagarde and Thomas Friedman at Tina Brown’s “Women of the World” conference; and it seems to have influenced Arianna Huffington’s newly released “Thrive.” And yet the book has had its detractors. Critics have faulted Sandberg for a lack of specificity (she includes plenty of motivational talk but few practical tips), and for exclusivity (she name checks people like Sue Decker, a former C.F.O. of Yahoo, and John Donahoe, the C.E.O. of eBay, who helped Sandberg cope with her work-life balance by flying her kids on his private plane). A third criticism surfaced, too: If Sandberg grants that society still reeks of sexism, why is her focus on women pulling themselves up and not on institutions becoming more fair?
“Lean In for Graduates” suggests that Sandberg has absorbed some of the criticisms levelled at “Lean In.” It includes six additional chapters in which experts offer specific professional advice, and it tells the stories of several people—not all of them corporate executives—whose lives were touched by “Lean In” or who exemplify its lessons: a twenty-nine-year-old who was elected mayor of her city in Iowa; a mental-health counsellor in Arizona who testified against her rapist; a twenty-seven-year-old Chinese woman who refuses to be marginalized for being unmarried. We even hear from a man or two. The introduction to the original “Lean In,” titled “Internalizing the Revolution,” discusses what women should change about themselves. For the new edition, Sandberg has tacked on an introduction to the introduction, “A Letter to Graduates,” in which she gives further attention to systemic unfairness:
She adds, “Until we—and others—are aware of these biases, we cannot change them.” Sandberg’s awareness of discrimination seems to have increased in the three years since Auletta accompanied her around Facebook’s Silicon Valley headquarters, or at least her willingness to articulate her thoughts on the matter has.
Still, “Lean In for Graduates” remains more focussed on how women can improve their own circumstances than on the external pressures they face. On Wednesday morning, in a conversation about the book on the “Today” show, Savannah Guthrie said to Sandberg, “In a way, the subtext is, You need to lean in, you need to do something. If you don’t get ahead, it’s your fault. As opposed to, frankly, institutional barriers that exist.”
Sandberg replied, “I think these are false tradeoffs. We need all kinds of change. We need public-policy reform and institutional change, but a lot of those changes can come about if there were more women in leadership roles. We know that when companies have more women, and even middle management, those companies have better work-life policies for women. So I believe we need reform, and I believe women can help us get there.”
To read either version of “Lean In” is to watch Sandberg settle on her particular credo. She writes movingly about her grandmother, Rosalind Einhorn, who grew up in the crowded quarters of poor, Jewish New York a century ago. Rosalind—called Girlie—was pulled out of high school to sew flowers onto underwear; a girl’s education was not considered important. Einhorn imparted to her daughter, Sandberg’s mother, the importance of civil rights. Sandberg writes that she “grew up watching my mother work tirelessly on behalf of persecuted Jews in the Soviet Union.… Dinner discussions often centered on social injustice and those fighting to make the world a better place. As a child, I never thought about what I wanted to be, but I thought a lot about what I wanted to do. As sappy as it sounds, I hoped to change the world. My sister and brother both became doctors, and I always believed I would work at a nonprofit or in government.” Later, she writes of trying to “stay socially conscious” while at Harvard Business School.
After her four years at the Treasury Department, Sandberg writes, her “bank account was diminishing quickly, so it was time to get back to paid employment.” A number of companies were recruiting her. One was Google. She writes that her “heart wanted to join Google in its mission to provide the world with access to information,” but the role was “lower in level” than her other options. When she explained this to Eric Schmidt, who was about to become Google’s C.E.O., he told her “not to be an idiot (also a great piece of advice).” And then, she writes, “he explained that only one criterion mattered when picking a job—fast growth.” Describing her transition to Facebook, several years later, Sandberg writes, “At first, people questioned why I would take a ‘lower level’ job working for a twenty-three-year-old. No one asks me that anymore. As I did when I joined Google, I prioritized potential for fast growth and the mission of the company above title.” Fast growth is a valid criterion in making career decisions, but it’s far from the only one, and it doesn’t always go hand in hand with being socially conscious. (Meanwhile, if Schmidt calling her an “idiot” did anything to illuminate the ethos of Silicon Valley, she never lets on.)
For a high-level executive like Sandberg taking to the page, it may be more expedient to give women advice about advancing their careers than to challenge the power structures that help companies stay ahead. (As Kate Losse, who used to sit next to Sandberg at Facebook, put it in a review of the original “Lean In,” for Dissent, “Sandberg has penned not so much a new Feminine Mystique as an updated Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.”) Google and Facebook—and the executives who have led them, including Sandberg—are interested in making money, and they tend to espouse political positions that fit neatly within the corporate comfort zone. This isn’t to say that their intentions aren’t admirable—Sandberg’s convictions are frequently praiseworthy—but those in the corner office rarely adopt political stances without a note of caution.
In 2008, Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, took to the official Google blog to voice the company’s support for marriage equality during California’s legal battle over the Proposition 8 ballot measure. But it wasn’t until February of this year, on the day of the opening ceremony in Sochi, that Google made a broader show of support for gay rights, by displaying a rainbow-backed homepage logo depicting six athletes engaged in Winter Olympic events. Google’s doodle, visible worldwide, marked a clear objection to Russia’s homophobic law banning “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations to minors.” That move dovetailed with the opening up of gay-rights attitudes in many countries. (A Pew Research Center survey last year found “broad acceptance of homosexuality in North America, the European Union, and much of Latin America, but equally widespread rejection in predominantly Muslim nations and in Africa, as well as in parts of Asia and in Russia.”)
As Andrew Solomon recently wrote about a Honey Maid television commercial that calls a two-dad household “wholesome,” “Marketers’ objective is to sell things, and they will seldom be brave enough to jeopardize their own interests, but their own interests appear to be changing.” These days, he wrote, “It turns out that tolerating gay people is good for business.”
Facebook recently changed its gender-identity options, allowing users with less normative genders dozens of choices, like “androgynous” and “pangender”; the move has been called a “gender-labeling revolution.” But this, too, looks strategic: Facebook’s annual report to investors spoke of “maximizing the relevance of each impression to selected users” and offering marketers targeted benefits based on the personal information they share—that is, age, tastes, location, and gender. A company spokesman, Slater Tow, told me that Facebook sought “to be a place where people can be their absolute authentic selves, and this is one more step in that direction.” It just so happens that the more the company knows about you—the more gender options it provides you in its menus, for instance—the better it is for advertisers.
Sandberg’s mission, while empowering, seems similarly business-friendly. Weeks before releasing the expanded “Lean In,” Sandberg created a campaign called Ban Bossy, under the umbrella of the Lean In organization and in conjunction with Girl Scouts USA. The project aims to end the use of the adjective “bossy,” which it says brands women unfairly. This seems in tune with the Lean In playbook, which exalts the particular virtues of leadership and assertiveness: important skills, but ones that reinforce the values of companies, which seek growth and profit above all. Women, like men, can be successful in countless ways that fit less neatly into a corporate framework—participating in the arts or volunteering on a campaign to change public policy, for instance. Sandberg herself writes, “There is far more to life than climbing a career ladder.” But, despite such enlightened lines, she focusses her attention on what women should do in order to ascend within corporations.
In her book, Sandberg asserts that she “proudly” calls herself a feminist; it follows that she knows that many women face injustices far worse than being tarred as “bossy.” In both versions of “Lean In,” she writes, “Our country lags considerably behind others in efforts to help parents take care of their children and stay in the workforce.” At events and in interviews, she promotes the Family Act, which would mandate paid family leave for new parents. It makes a person wonder: Why doesn’t she use the Lean In platform to start a high-profile campaign, on the scale of Ban Bossy, to directly address that sort of institutional barrier? In this country today, two-thirds of minimum-wage workers are women. If Sheryl Sandberg wants to use her corporate connections to help more working women—if she knows better and better the societal barriers holding them back—why not create a hashtag in the service of an increased minimum wage? #BanPoverty, maybe?
Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty
