• Tue, Mar 12 - 10:15 am ET

13 Fun Facts I Learned About Sheryl Sandberg From Reading ‘Lean In’

lean inLean In is a lot of things, but one thing it is definitely not is boring. Sheryl Sandberg‘s book on that pesky terminology of “work life balance,” she admits, is not really a memoir. She explicitly specifies that it’s not really “a self-help book,” or “a book on career management.” Although she is comfortable with the descriptive “sort of feminist manifesto.” Frankly, Lean In is a hybrid of all the aforementioned labels, and the personal anecdotes of Sheryl’s own rise to the top of Silicon Valley perform as the perfect punctuation between some rousing lady career advice.

Sandberg admits early on in Lean In that she didn’t exactly set out the write The Book on gender bias in the professional sphere:

“I never thought I would write a book. I am no a scholar, a journalist, or a sociologist. But I decided to speak out after talking to hundreds of women, listening to their struggles, sharing my own, and realizing that the gains we have made are not enough and may even be slipping.”

But between encouraging professional women to “lean into” their work and “sit at the table” of company goings on (as well encouraging more men to “lean in” to their families), much about the Facebook COO herself can also be gleaned from Lean In.

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  • BR

    I saw her on 60 minutes and was thoroughly unimpressed with what she had to say.

    • Blueathena623

      What was the gist of what she had to say? I’m reading her profile in Time magazine right now and its iffy. I swear, the longer I live, the more I think that lots of what we consider to be gender and race issues are actually socioeconomic issues. Which isn’t to say that gender and race don’t play a part in that — they do, a whole hell of a lot — but once you’re rich (at least in America) gender and race don’t matter as much.

  • Blueathena623

    I have not read this book, although I read a semi- discussion of it in The Week magazine about it called workplace equality: should woman lean in? To paraphrase sections, it says sandbergs argument is that women have to lean in to their work and be more assertive, both at home (demanding more help with chores and childcare) and at work (demanding raises and freedom). The critiques of it include the fact that very few women really ave the resources to make any sorts of demand at work (the pregnant parking was mentioned), although apparently Sandberg never intended for her book to speak for women everywhere, just the small number of women who do have the clout to make such demands so they can make the system fairer for women in general. However, another author claims that this amounts to blaming women in general for not trying hard enough, and now “every resistant man on the planet can tell women employees that they’d get paid more and promoted to better jobs if only they leaned in and became more ambitious, more assertive, more . . . Male.”
    So this brings back the whole female CEO catch 22 — are they required to be stereotypically female and “pave the way” for others and try to maintain a balance between work and home, or do they have to act like a man to even get into the position in the first place? I really wish this fight — for better home/work balance didn’t always have to come from the female sector. Where are the male CEOs arguing for more family-friendly practices?

    • BR

      What I like about this comment is the general call for more family-friendly practices, which is gender neutral. IMHO, we need to take the stigma away from taking time off to raise a family and other things that we need to do to take care of our families. Where is the CEO who took a couple of years off, then was able to go back to work without being treated like a loser without focus? Men and women should be able to benefit from family-friendly practices.

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