Overview

Sheryl Sandberg is a world-class business leader who has thought deeply about how to be successful in the workplace, with a particular focus on what it is like to be a woman in business. She takes an even-handed approach by both describing the structural factors for why it is difficult to be a woman in business and advocating for women to aspire to be leaders. In this book, she succeeds in both providing practical knowledge for women navigating the workplace and educating men who are interested in empowering women in business.

She argues that there are both structural factors and internal factors that inhibit women’s success in the workplace. She crucially notes that advocating for women to ‘lean in’ and work harder doesn’t mean that she is letting institutions off the hook. See the chapter summaries below for more detail about the issues that she addresses.

Reactions

Overall, I found the book to be a good read and I found her perspectives to be well-thought out and practical. Since I have spent a considerable amount of time trying to understand the factors that inhibit women in science, many of the factors that inhibit women in business were familiar to me. Regardless, it was good to hear her perspective on the business side of things. One point that doesn’t come up enough in science is that female researchers need equal support from their partners (women should demand it and men should aspire to provide it).

Another key view of the book that I found to be salient was as follows: Sheryl argues that addressing structural factors impacting women is insufficient to achieve equality (or addressing them is much slower than emphasizing individual choices that women make in the workplace). She has gotten a lot of push back on this point (i.e that she is victim blaming). However, her years of experience in business have shown time and time again that there are examples of women not pushing themselves enough at crucial junctures. Another way of putting this argument is that while it is normal to push men extra hard to push past any obstacle, it is uncommon to push women hard who are navigating similar situations.

Personal Anecdote

When I read these books, I try to apply them to my life. Here is a recent anecdote from my life where the ideas from this book seem relevant. I attended a seminar where the room was about two thirds women and one third men. In both genders, there was a roughly equal mixture of professors and graduate students. During the seminar, there was one female speaker and one male speaker. The audience asked about 20 questions throughout the seminar, all of them asked by men. I would argue that asking questions of a speaker is an important part of being an engaged listener and that it is beneficial for the listener to ask questions. While I acknowledge that women are generally discouraged from speaking up, this is a situation where the individual women in the room would benefit from ‘leaning in’ and asking more questions. The feminist/leader in me doesn’t want to just ignore this situation, however, I feel stuck because it would be socially unacceptable for me to intervene. Any advice or suggestions on this matter would be appreciated (email me!). I will further add that these situations are relatively common and I’d like to develop my ability to handle them better.

Chapter Summaries

As usual, these summaries are brief and you’ll benefit greatly from reading the book yourself. She offers a variety of personal anecdotes and research-based statistics to support her points that I do not include here.

Introduction: Internalizing the Revolution

Here, she introduces the basic facts about how women are still not well represented in the upper eschelons of business.

Chapter 1: The Leadership Ambition Gap: What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

Sandberg reviews the evidence that women are less likely to aspire to attain leadership positions. She makes the point that women internalize social cues that they should not aspire to professional success where as career ambition is expected of men. On the personal side, we need to push women more to seek leadership roles. On the structural side, we need to address the institutional factors that inhibit female success such as lack of childcare services.

Chapter 2: Sit at the Table

In this chapter, Sheryl recounts a number of experiences where she noticed women passing up opportunities due to internal barriers. While she understands these internal barriers from personal experience, she notes that is essential for women to be educated about this gap and to correct for it. One particularly salient example is that she notes is that while giving a speech about gender equality, she said that she only had time for one more question, all the women put down their hands, and she still answered multiple questions from men who left their hands up. She also discusses impostor syndrome and the fake it till you make it

Chapter 3: Success and Likeability

The main point of this chapter is that successful men are often seen as likable but women whoa re successful are often seen as unlikable. Often these attitudes are internalized and people don’t realize that they are expressing these biases.

Chapter 4: It’s a Jungle Gym, Not a Ladder

While people often describe career advancement as climbing a ladder, she describes how her career was more like climbing up a jungle gym - there are many paths to advancement. She discusses her choice to join google during its early stages. The best advice that she got for choosing a job was to evaluate the growth potential of a business. Another point that she makes is that it is important to take risks (and potentially change jobs and enter at a lower level). Women are often less likely to make risky career moves due to societal pressure.

Chapter 5: Are you my mentor?

Sandberg discusses the importance of mentorship in career advancement. Women are generally at a disadvantage for this reason because people are more likely to form mentorship relationships with people who are similar to them. One great piece of advice in this chapter is that one should ask people direct questions instead of asking somebody to be your mentor. This is really crucial advice because just asking somebody to be your mentor isn’t actionable (what will they do if they say yes?). I’ll definitely be applying this approach in the future.

Chapter 6: Seek and Speak your Truth

The main point of this chapter is that it is important to practice communication and to speak truthfully as often as possible. She also notes that it is important for people to enter discussions with the belief that everybody has their own truth and to use ‘I’ statements as much as possible.

Chapter 7: Don’t Leave Before you Leave

In this chapter, Sheryl discusses how it is important for women who are about to have children to not check out of their job too early. It is often the case that women are capable of taking on difficult work a couple months before they have children.

Chapter 8: Make Your Partner a Real Partner

The key point of this chapter is for women to encourage their husbands to take on an equal share of the household work. Likewise, men with wives in the workforce should seek to split the work at home.

Chapter 9: The Myth of Doing it All

Here, Sheryl talks about how the myth of doing it all is harmful and upsetting to women because it is impossible and it makes women feel bad who aren’t doing everything.

Chapter 10, 11: Lets Start Talking About It, Working Together Toward Equality

These chapters are about talking about how to create equality in the workplace.