Feminism Fails #1: Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In (2013) has aged like chicken broth left out in the sun
Thank you to Andi for suggesting this one.
Welcome to a new series, Feminism Fails; every few months, I’ll examine a high-profile feminism fail in popular culture. From Lana Del Rey’s bizarre “question for the culture” Instagram post to Katy Perry’s more recent shitty “satirical” music video/misunderstanding of what the male gaze is/working with alleged sexual assaulter Dr. Luke on her album about women’s empowerment, I’ll be covering incidents where mainstream feminists have failed to include people other than themselves, have stuck both feet in their mouth and then doubled down, or poured an assload of money into founding an exclusive club for young professional women that — shockingly — had massive problems with racism.
To head it off at the pass: why create this series? I am fascinated by so-called “feminist” projects that fall flat in some way, especially those that are forwarded by women who already have a lot of money, power, and/or cultural influence. I don’t want to be glib and say that all of these failures are products of white feminism, but many of them absolutely are. I understand that some people will think, “Oh my god, Anna, do you HAVE TO BE so negative about this stuff?” Yes, mostly because I have not seen many of these failures specifically covered from a disability feminism perspective. These essays will also have jokes, because if there’s one thing that I love to take the piss out of on a near-constant basis, it’s mainstream feminism. I should have a Master’s degree in taking said piss at this point. I already have a Master’s in Women’s and Gender Studies, which is another story that contains EVEN MORE feminism fails. I’ll write a more in-depth essay about that someday (maybe).
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (co-written with television writer Nell Scovell) was an instant bestseller upon its release in 2013. There was an entire “movement” — not a grassroots one, mind you, but a very corporate one — to establish Lean In Circles, small groups where women could encourage each other to apply the advice in Sandberg’s book. There is also fugly merch! So from its outset, Lean In has been the apex of corporate, mainstream feminism. I read the whole book, and there went three hours of my life that I will never get back. Good thing I’m a fast reader.
There has been a huge amount of well-deserved pushback to Lean In since its publication 11 years ago. It had a lot of celebrity endorsements. Some feminist writers, such as Jessica Valenti, praised it -- for some of you, hearing that will be THE LEAST SURPRISING THING. Many others, including bell hooks, Susan Faludi, Melissa Gira Grant, Jessa Crispin, and former Facebook employee Kate Losse, who worked with Sandberg in the early 2000s -- took Sandberg to task for her book’s focus on individual solutions to systemic problems. As you might guess, I’m with the latter folks. Sandberg one hundred percent deserves criticism for this book, and it’s not because she is “imperfect,” as Valenti’s WaPo editorial put it; it’s because the corporate feminism Sandberg wants to sell to us is unrealistic for a huge fucking swath of the population. Sandberg’s shiny corporate feminism is so simplistic and outdated that it’s better left in 2013. The book did make an appearance as a sight gag on an episode from this season of What We Do in the Shadows, which is what it deserves.
Lean In has not aged well for many reasons, chief among them the onus that Sandberg puts on women to do it all in order to be successful (read: wealthy). She forwards individual solutions such as good time management, getting one’s partner to do his (always his) fair share of domestic chores and childrearing, and higher salary negotiation as solutions for the issues faced by working women, instead of any structural changes that would benefit families and working people of all genders. Sandberg’s corporate feminism has a strong undertone of “I’ve got mine…but here’s how you can get yours, too!” The entire thesis of Lean In is that women need to work harder and rely on themselves more in order to succeed at work. On some level, sure, that’s capitalism. However, telling women that they just need to work harder to win at capitalism is simplistic at best and willfully naïve at worst, particularly at a time in history when so many people are struggling to make ends meet. Why are so many people struggling to make ends meet, one might wonder? It’s not because they don’t work hard enough. It’s because billionaires — Sandberg is one, by the way — hoard more wealth than they will ever need. That wealth is usually built on the backs of their workers, and don’t forget those sweet tax breaks!
Can I tell you how weird it is that this book only talks about the career and family struggles of economically successful heterosexual women? The only family structure that seems to exist in Sandberg’s universe is the straight, nuclear one with a certain degree of wealth: ambitious wife, precocious kids, and husband who usually needs to be corralled into doing his fair share of taking care of domestic labor and his own kids. LGBTQ+ families are nowhere to be found in the achievement-centered world of Lean In. There are no disabled people profiled in this book, as far as I can tell (surprise)! That is actually the exact opposite of a surprise, because if there’s one thing mainstream feminism sucks at, it’s including disabled people or paying a scrap of attention to stuff that impacts us.
The writing in this book is also a fucking snoozefest! It was written with writer Nell Scovell — who has worked on some of my favorite TV shows — but unfortunately, any influence that Scovell presumably had in making this book interesting does not seem to show up in the final product. Lean In is, at its core, a business book; it is just general enough to seem helpful to its target audience, but it’s not engagingly written at all. This is a nothing-sandwich of a book. Like many self-help books, it presents its author’s life lessons as profound without containing much actual advice or profundity. At one point, after going on and on for the previous 79 pages about how women are most “hindered by barriers that exist within ourselves” instead of systemic issues, Sandberg drops this pearl of wisdom on page 80: “The ability to listen is as important as the ability to speak.” WOW! Groundbreaking stuff here, Sheryl.
Lest we forget, Facebook is also the company behind the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and its algorithms boosted misinformation that contributed SUBSTANTIALLY to the genocide that targeted Myanmar’s Rohingya population. For the last few years, founder Mark Zuckerberg has also insisted that his company pump billions into rebranding itself as the Metaverse, a thing that is useless, but which also gave us one of the 2020s’ first great (if unintentional) memes: Legs are coming soon! Are you excited? No! Should the definition of feminism be expanded to include a select number of women amassing wealth and power at the expense of social media users and a marginalized population that was the target of a genocide? Also no!
Hilariously, Sandberg also commits to the fallacy that more women in power is always good and will change the world for other women in positive ways, which is laughable because it is not true in the slightest. How do you explain Margaret Thatcher with this logical pole-vault? Or, to point to a more recent example, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, and the other transphobic, conspiracy-addled dipshits of the lady MAGA auxiliary? Whose lives are they improving positively, other than their own? Not the lives of trans people, certainly, and especially not those of trans women. I wonder if Sheryl Sandberg would tell trans targets of MAGA bigotry to just ask for a raise or whatever. Maybe she’d say that they are “holding themselves back” by focusing too much on the bathroom issue — which is a basic human need, and one that Mace and company do not need to be inserting themselves into.
So, to sum up what is probably pretty obvious: I think this book is useless. Worse than useless, actually; it’s a guide to a game (capitalism) where the rules are stacked against most people from the get-go, no matter how much grit those people have. You already need to be a successful, wealthy, nondisabled, straight woman with a family (and reliable childcare) in order to get much out of Lean In. If you are a person who has faced significant systemic and interpersonal barriers in your career, this book is probably not going to help you crack the code of success at work. One can advocate for oneself in the workplace, negotiate raises and flexible hours (for nuclear family reasons, and usually NOT disability-related reasons), make all the right moves, not “hold themselves back” due to stereotypes, and still get the shit end of the stick. That is a huge part of how late-stage capitalism operates; we can’t all be billionaires.
Sandberg sprinkles in a few mentions of the importance of systemic changes in improving work a couple of times throughout Lean In. She proceeds to just breeze on by all that stuff to devote most of the book to anecdotes about some women she personally knows who leaned in, and it worked for them! They changed their lives for the better! You know what else would work to change things for people that doesn’t rely on individual grit? Systemic changes, including switching to single-payer healthcare, lowering the cost of prescription drugs, supporting universal childcare, providing housing for all, increasing disability payments so that disabled people on benefits aren’t stuck in poverty, funding free college, defunding the police, increasing the accessibility of low-cost healthy food, expanding the social safety net and unemployment insurance, making universal basic income a thing, and creating jobs where all workers — not just executives and shareholders --can benefit from companies making money. But why advocate to change all of that when you can perform Sandberg’s version of girl(boss) power and improve your life? Lean In’s message is this: if you want to be successful in your career and family life, you need to overcome your internal barriers to be successful. It’s all your responsibility. Do it all, and then do more. Not just for yourself and your family, but also for all women.
What a great and empowering feminist message!
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