Lean In – Book Review
Before reading Lean-In by Sheryl Sandberg, I would have
said that the feminist movement has reached its goal. Perhaps I’ve been watching too much “Mad
Men”, but it seemed that women were a hair away from equality and that perhaps it
was just our sisters in other countries might need the lion’s share of the help.
My friend, Mo, handed the book to me after finishing it, and
said, “trust me, you have to read it.” A
few months went by and after reading the covers and the blurbs, I thought: am I
really in the mood to read about disgruntled women? Finally after picking it up and firing
through it in a few days, I wanted to burn my bra, get a briefcase and make sure all of my friends had read
it. Such an important read and we have
so far to go.
What does a book like Lean In mean to me, a SAHM, not at a
career-oriented stage of my life? I could dust off an MA and a pretty impressive resume, instead I felt inspired to “lean in” to writing even
if I can’t commit 8, or even 2, hours per day to writing or studying the
craft. It made me question how I let 95%
of the household chores and responsibilities fall on me. What kind of role model am I to my kids? Will they assume that the woman needs to
sacrifice her career aspirations to fold laundry, schedule the gutter cleaning,
and volunteer at the school? There
wouldn’t be space for me to work with all that I carry now. When I left the workforce as a teacher, I
couldn’t even cover the childcare costs for one child. As we planned to have more children, it seemed like a no-brainer to let my husband
make the big bucks while I the childcare/cook/bill payer/ property manager.
Don’t get me wrong, I love being the one to drive my kids to
their activities and be with them after school, make them warm muffins and turn
off the world to hunker down with them when they are sick. I feel lucky.
It’s not what I had after age 6, but what I wished I did.
And I dream of a scenario, where both parents can equally
provide the nurturing; family actually does come first; and no one has to
choose an either/or. If I were
benevolent dictator, I would rewrite the way we run business in this
country. (That’s for another post.) But I will say that another possibility is
if, as the song goes, we are smarter, maybe the women want to opt out of the
corporate rat race, especially while are children are young. Perhaps the reality of stress and anxiety
over leaving our babes is valid and as children of the seventies, we want to
have a family life that doesn’t feel torn.
Sandberg would say that if you "lean in" to your profession,
you won’t want to leave it – or that you’ll have a tougher choice to make than
if you lean out prematurely. Make the
most of your career and don’t apologize.
Last week my book club discussed Sandberg’s book and most of
us saw some common threads in our lives that we weren’t aware of before. Most of us, admitted to surprise when we
realized how much of the household responsibilities we carried. Most of us had a career but are either full
or part-time moms now. Before kids came,
we thought that those tasks would be more 50/50, but after the kids arrived, we
just all fell into roles that now made us uncomfortable. There has been more progress in the American
workplace than in the American home.
Just as we saw with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Sandberg
writes that confident men are seen as direct and powerful while the same
qualities in a woman are seen as bitchy or bossy. Double blind studies show that even college
aged kids liked confident men more than women.
Combine this with the fact that we are more concerned about being liked,
and you’ve got women afraid of appearing too confident and successful.
So read the book, if you haven’t. And let’s stop calling our girls bossy and
start recognizing their leadership skills.
Here is the Ted Talk that Sandberg gave in 2010
And the next one in 2013
http://www.ted.com/talks/sheryl_sandberg_so_we_leaned_in_now_what.html
