Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

I kind of wanted to hate this book tbh. Like going into it, I was like, “Oh sure, Sheryl Sandberg has tooons of great advice for the average woman, toootallly.” But after I read it, I was like, “Oh sure, Sheryl Sandberg has tons of great advice for the average woman!” NON-SARCASTICALLY.

I also saw this getting slammed for her being out of touch with non-CEO women/minorities/etc, and I was expecting to roll my eyes a ton at this for that reason alone, but I was actually very impressed with how often she did point out that obviously women with less privilege are going to have a lot more obstacles against leaning in, and it should fall to men to “lean back” and to other women with more privilege to help pull up women. (Obviously there's more to say about those issues, and it's definitely not Sandberg's main point, but she's not as clueless as a lot of what I'd read about this wanted to make her seem.)

And I think a lot of what she has to say about gender roles in the workplace were just very refreshing to read, written out so clearly. Like, even though I am pretty well-educated and read feminist blogs and whatnot, I still had about 100 lightbulb moments reading this. It's very TED talk-y (I mean that in a good way). Her points really resonated with me, even though I'm obviously not a CEO of anything, nor do I ever want to be.

ALSO I think it's shitty that people are so dismissive of this like it's some inconsequential thing that there are so few women CEOs and we should be focusing on REAL issues like girls being kidnapped in Nigeria, for example. Like, yes, of course, there are other important issues in the world. But nobody's saying shit like that about like, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, or whatever. Until we overthrow capitalism, I think big companies like Google and Facebook are probably going to stick around for awhile, and it certainly does matter how many women work there and how comfortable they feel in their chosen industry.

I honestly really recommend this to both men and women, no matter what kind of job you have or want.