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Review: Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’ is full of good intentions but rife with contradictions

By Connie Schultz,March 01, 2013

Connie Schultz is a nationally syndicated columnist in Cleveland and the author of “. . . And His Lovely Wife.”

To have a meaningful discussion about Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, let’s acknowledge its flaws and move on to what she gets right.

Sandberg is the Harvard-educated chief operating officer of Facebook and a self-avowed feminist who wants to transform the role of women in the workplace. She is also incredibly wealthy — reportedly worth hundreds of millions — and is too often tone-deaf to her voice of privilege. This makes it hard to close the distance between lucky her and the women who could most benefit from her advocacy. It’s a problem that plays out time and again in “Lean In.”

[Make Your Case: Is Sheryl Sandberg good for feminism? Readers weigh in. >>]

In high school, Sandberg was voted “most likely to succeed” but asked a yearbook friend to delete it so she’d have a date to the prom. She was the only woman in her class to win a Harvard Business School award but, unlike the male recipients, felt compelled to keep her success a secret. She was “horrified” and “embarrassed” that Forbes magazine listed her as the fifth-most-powerful woman in the world, ahead of Michelle Obama.

By the time she describes the pangs of guilt as a mother working outside the home — some of her most poignant passages — it is impossible to forget that she, like many of the female friends she quotes, is a wealthy, white, married woman with a “vast support system.” Surely she could have included a story or two about successful women who are more likely to have been born to nannies than to hire them. Or at least more who didn’t graduate from the Ivy League.

Sandberg barely mentions the millions of single mothers in the workplace. She does, however, advise women on how to find a supportive spouse — who, in her book, is almost always male. Ambitious lesbians will have to find their tutorial elsewhere. “When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys,” Sandberg writes. “But do not marry them.”

So, how to find the right guy? Sandberg turns to Kristina Salen, an executive with Fidelity who devised a two-tiered test to determine whether a boyfriend would support her career. First, Salen canceled a date because of work. If the guy kept his cool, she proceeded to test No. 2: Was he willing to join her on a work trip — to Sao Paulo, Brazil? That’ll weed out the losers, not to mention most men on the planet.

Sandberg encourages women to act more like men. She quotes her longtime mentor Larry Summers, who once advised his tax lawyer wife, Vicki, to “bill like a boy.” “His view was that the men considered any time they spent thinking about an issue — even time in the shower — as billable hours,” Sandberg writes. “His wife and her female colleagues, however, would decide that they were not at their best on a given day and discount hours they spent at their desks to be fair to the client.”

Sandberg asks: “Which lawyers were more valuable to their firm?”

My question: When did personal integrity become a character flaw?

At 172 pages of text, “Lean In” is a short book, much of it a rehash of Sandberg’s 2010TED Talk titled “Why we have too few women leaders.” The video of that talk went viral, catapulting Sandberg into the fray of feminist debate. Her critics say she heaps too much blame on women, but that is too simplistic. At 43, Sandberg is young enough to remember the youthful confidence of her generation of women and old enough to see how it has withered since graduation. They were equal competitors with men in college. Not so in their careers.

“The world has not evolved nearly as much as I believed it would. All but one of my male classmates work in professional settings. . . . In comparison to their male counterparts, highly trained women are scaling back and dropping out of the workforce in high numbers. In turn, these diverging percentages teach institutions and mentors to invest more in men, who are statistically more likely to stay.”

Except for two surveys — of Harvard and Yale alumni — Sandberg relies mostly on anecdotal evidence to argue that too many women fall behind in their careers because of their own bad choices. Any mother who works outside the home, however, will recognize the tensions she describes.

The problem, in Sandberg’s view: Women make incremental decisions based on future plans for a family, which chips away at their career options.

Her solution: Don’t leave before you leave.

For example: “A law associate might decide not to shoot for partner because someday she hopes to have a family. A teacher might pass on leading curriculum development for her school. A sales representative might take a smaller territory or not apply for a management role. Often without even realizing it, the woman stops reaching for new opportunities.”