Some Thoughts on the Legacy of "Lean In"
A recent study concluded that messages from Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead , cause people to believe that women are responsible for gender inequality, whereas messages about structural problems cause people to see a need for institutions and society to address discrimination. After tweeting about this study I saw many say that it validated what they had long thought and found bothersome – even oppressive – about the 2013 book: That encouraging women to adapt to and play a “man’s” game that is structurally stacked against them and beyond their control, and tailoring this advice to a small subset of privileged women, is misguided and insensitive (as Sandberg later acknowledged ). But Lean In still made an important contribution to discourse about women and leadership. At the time it came out, Sandberg’s message was a highly unusual one in the corporate world, which liked to parade successful women on panels for "women in business"