00:00:55.540We did not know she was awful when we womaned her. I'm mostly joking, but today I do want to1.00
00:01:02.420have a conversation that kind of complicates the cultural script around the girl boss archetype
00:01:07.480and what that really was, as well as how I think we should have understood figures like Sandberg
00:01:15.020if we had known then what we know now. Because today, lean in as a concept is basically a joke,
00:01:21.480and the word girlboss is effectively a slur. And I think the cultural mechanisms by which that
00:01:28.060happened and the consequences of it are not good. Boldly declaring something not good on
00:01:34.640diabolical lies. So I'll say up front that a lot of the criticisms that we're going to read today
00:01:39.620are things that I think you and I would actually broadly really agree with. Like some of it was
00:01:43.800actually even written by leftist writers that we are friends with. And yet, the process of
00:01:50.660researching this episode made me realize that the story that we have been telling about the
00:01:56.120so-called lean-in girlboss era and the way that we've metabolized it and narrativized it as a
00:02:01.940society and what that time period ultimately was, I think has a bit of a Mandela effect happening.
00:02:08.480So I went into this as the type of person who would write and has written more than one snarky
00:02:15.800lean and take down. And I came out of it with significantly more complex feelings about this
00:02:21.320whole thing. So we're going to start today with where the sentiment stands now. So in 2022,
00:02:29.500Time Magazine declared that ambition is out. The Guardian asked, is this the end of ambition?
00:02:37.180The New York Times named it the age of anti-ambition. And we are going to read from
00:02:42.720one piece that captures this anti-ambition moment in the New York Times. It is a recent story called
00:02:48.720Girl Boss to No Boss, subtitle, They Reached the Heights of Corporate Success. Now some women are1.00
00:02:56.340trying to redefine what ambition looks like. So I'll have you start here with the introductory1.00
00:03:03.920section. An emerging slice of women who are shifting away from full-throttle careers defy1.00
00:03:09.920such easy characterization. These are the women of the girl boss era who have MBAs and legal1.00
00:03:15.580degrees to match. They've read Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg. They've stood on the shoulders of the1.00
00:03:20.980second wave feminists who fought for their right to work. Sixty years on from that fight, they're1.00
00:03:26.260also beginning to wonder whether all that career pressure they've been under was another way of
00:03:30.200forcing them into a box. If they now want something other than more work in exchange for all that work,
00:03:35.940Why exactly is that a capitulation?0.99
00:03:38.760Okay, and now I'm going to have you read a section of the article about one or two women in particular.1.00
00:03:45.520Ashley McCreary, for one, used to believe the pinnacle of success would be becoming the vice president of a healthcare company.1.00
00:03:51.760Then she became one, helping lead a startup through an acquisition, which enabled her to cash in on her equity.0.80
00:03:57.780To Ms. McCreary, whose parents divorced when she was 16, women's financial freedom had always been paramount, and she'd never considered being a stay-at-home mother.
00:04:05.540Growing up, I was like, why would you ever do that? She said. But after having her first daughter during the pandemic and another two years later, she understood. It wasn't that she couldn't balance work and family, flag that. She worked remotely from her home in Louisville, Kentucky, and set work-life boundaries that her colleagues respected. Whatever, quote, having it all is, end quote, Miss McCreary felt she had it, but she didn't want it. Among other things, the periodic travel her job required now seemed totally unappealing.
00:04:34.420So many of us are told what being successful is,
00:04:36.600we never really thought about whether we want that or not, she said.
00:04:39.760She left her full-time job in December of 2023
00:04:42.480and has since been the primary caregiver for her children,
00:04:45.400while building her own coaching service for women going through similar transitions, flag that.
00:04:50.080But just because the move was hers to make does not mean it was easy.0.56
00:04:53.600Ms. McCreary knew that opting to scale back was a privilege.0.78
00:04:56.760Who was she to make that decision when so many women couldn't?
00:05:00.220I'm partially really proud that I set myself up to make a choice, she said.
00:05:03.940At the same time, I think to myself, are people judging me for not working?
00:05:08.420Are people judging me for not having to work?
00:05:10.880In a LinkedIn post last year, flag bat,
00:05:13.100Ms. McCurry wrote a defense of pulling back to explain her decision.
00:05:17.200In retrospect, she admits she was really trying to justify it to herself and her would-be critics.
00:05:22.320But the response she got was broadly supportive.
00:05:25.120Overall, the feedback has had the tone of, I wish I could do that, she said.0.98
00:05:29.360Of course, women are not making these choices in a vacuum.1.00
00:05:32.580They're making them at a time when women still take on a disproportionate amount of child care,1.00
00:05:37.080earn 85% of what men do on average, and hold just 29% of C-suite roles.
00:05:42.220For Claudia Timmermans, that imbalance was decisive.
00:05:45.700She and her husband met at law school and both became lawyers, but his career advanced faster.
00:05:50.580When Ms. Timmermans was laid off from her job at Ernst & Young in 2023,
00:05:55.120that disparity factored into her decision to shift careers to make more room for family.
00:05:59.940She is now an executive coach, flag that, and contractor, which gives her more time with her
00:06:05.020two children. It was her decision, but she said, quote, it came with a lot of grief because I had
00:06:10.640worked really hard on that career. Okay, Caro. Thoughts? We've got a couple flags here. What are
00:06:17.640you thinking? I have a lot of thoughts, but I know that you have a lot to say today, so I'm going to
00:06:20.980be concise. Okay, so I think first and foremost— No, this is your podcast too. Lean in. Lean in.
00:06:27.660Okay, so the first thing is this piece starts, or the section that I read starts basically with a woman achieving her goals and then realizing that it's not all that they're cracked up to be.
00:06:37.300I just want to note that that is not necessarily an indication of, like, failed politics as much as we can talk about how the image of being a working woman probably did not meet people's opinions.
00:06:57.660I certainly am not making the decision to walk away from being a novelist, but it's always more complicated when you experience it than when you're imagining it.
00:07:04.860And I also want to note, like, it's one thing to achieve your dreams and then decide you want to do something else than to say that this dream isn't actually what I want.
00:07:14.120So that feels like very interesting framing.
00:07:15.680I find it very interesting that these women are, quote, pivoting away from the corporate world, but basically using the benefits of what they gained during that time in the corporate world to then make money off of other women with similar anxieties.
00:07:30.380And then, of course, there's like the financial element where all of these women are walking away because they can.0.86
00:07:36.120And that is not at all like the dynamic of being a stay-at-home mother who doesn't have financial options or working because you don't have financial security.0.91
00:07:43.600It's just a totally different ball field.
00:07:45.000Totally. So my first thought reading this is like, huh, this is interesting. Maybe we're having some sort of generous read, anti-capitalist awakening, right? Maybe women are like, you know, I don't need to do wage labor for the man. I'll become an executive coach and go coach executives who are doing wage labor for the man.
00:08:06.360So naturally, my next question is, where are the men? Where are the stories about the men who reached the heights of corporate success and then decided to redefine ambition? So I Google men leaving careers to find fulfillment elsewhere. And most of the evergreen content that comes back was mostly entrepreneurial content. It was about men leaving their full-time jobs to start companies.
00:08:29.640But I also got a bunch of recent hits from this May about young and old men leaving the workforce at record rates.
00:10:04.460In March, Newsom convened national leaders in Sacramento to tackle rising—
00:10:09.240Oh, I know what I have to say about this.
00:10:12.080To tackle rising loneliness, disconnection, and lack of opportunity among boys and young men.
00:10:17.780Quote, it's much more than a dollars and cents issue.
00:10:20.280Work is a service to others that helps to complete you, end quote, said Nicholas Eberstadt, the conservative author of Men Without Work.
00:10:28.700Quote, when you're disconnected from work, when you're disconnected from a family, when you're disconnected from faith, when you're disconnected from your community, people tend to suffer.
00:10:39.060The broader shift towards a service-based economy has also hurt men, economists say.
00:10:43.720Between January 2025 and March 2026, the U.S. economy created 369,000 jobs, of which 94% went to women and 6% went to men, an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data by the University of Michigan's Stevenson shows.
00:11:00.280That's partly because new jobs added to the U.S. economy during that period were in healthcare or private education.
00:11:06.120Men often shy away from jobs in those industries because of their lower pay and status, economists say.
00:11:36.640This is the labor market version of women are always failing society,1.00
00:11:41.080but society is always failing men.1.00
00:11:42.460So, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm. Interesting. Quite a different framing, I would say. Quite a bit more concern and anxiety about this trend in this half of the population leaving the workforce.
00:11:54.780And there's also like implied in the article about the ambition is like, there's an implication that women have been given a raw deal and that these women are making smart decisions to go somewhere better. There's no effort or anxiety about like, how can we retain women in the workforce? It's like, good, they're leaving because it's not that great anyways. And with this, it's like, oh, fuck.
00:12:16.460Totally. So the thing that's important about this is what sort of solution this framing sets us up to look for. And to your point, well, there are no issues on the women leaving front. Women are finding fulfillment elsewhere. They are redefining ambition outside of career, and they are choosing differently.0.99
00:12:34.200So we don't actually have to do anything about that. Men, though, they are being alienated from their purpose. Their exit is a, quote, red flag for economists. It is a, quote, source of anxiety for policymakers. And so this is just a contrast in the present rhetoric that I would like everyone to keep in the back of their minds as we walk down memory lane today.
00:12:54.880I also found this 2026 Glassdoor report.
00:12:58.020This came from Stephanie O'Connell, whose research we're going to revisit throughout
00:13:20.700Over the course of a woman's career, the gender pay gap doubles.1.00
00:13:24.840The gap for workers with zero years of experience is 12 percent.
00:13:28.600In the first 10 years, a quote within role difference grows where women start earning less than men with the same experience performing similar roles.
00:13:36.660The wage gap for workers with 30 years of experience is 25 percent.0.98
00:13:41.360Right. So if you stay in the workforce, you are going to see that gap widen.
00:13:46.220The report also finds that women's wages stop growing when they're 35 years old, whereas men's tend to level off around 45. So I think anyone listening to this podcast is probably familiar enough with these statistics that this doesn't really surprise you, but it's still disappointing.
00:14:02.140And I think what's really fascinating about this is that, as Stephanie points out, what's interesting, again, is this report's framing, that these statistics represent a, quote, redefining of career success for women.
00:14:15.200So I'm going to have you read what Stephanie wrote about this report.
00:14:18.780After acknowledging that, quote, the wage gap that widens for women in their 30s is largely structural, end quote, the Glassdoor report goes on to rebrand the systematic failure as a personal recalibration.
00:14:29.260Yep. Quote, the women thriving after 35 have decoupled their worth from job titles.
00:14:34.880These aren't stories of women settling for less. They're stories of women choosing differently,0.99
00:14:39.700the report says. Convenient. Really fucking convenient. Okay. So now that we've got a good1.00
00:14:45.580representative gloss on the present discourse around the state of women and men at work,
00:14:50.440we're going to hop in those time machines. We're going to go back to 2013,
00:27:41.200I think the reality is that when you look at the data
00:27:43.300and you look at some of the most unfortunate situations
00:27:47.820that women, especially in midlife and later life,
00:27:50.840find themselves in because of the financial gaps between women and men and women being more likely
00:27:58.560to be in poverty after a divorce and all of these things. All of that is true, and the advice is1.00
00:28:03.460very valid and very necessary, but it does not work for people who simply just don't have enough
00:28:09.180income coming in. And short of being like, and here's a chapter on how you can try to negotiate,
00:28:15.720and here's a chapter on how you can earn more and how you can think about accessing more income,
00:28:20.320Like, there aren't individual solutions to these things. And so I think, for me, this has been a central tension in my life for a long time, which is how to balance the systemic with the individual. How do we continue to make things better for people in the here and now and give them tools that might help them immediately while also focusing on this bigger picture?
00:28:42.540And I think what's interesting about reading Lean In is this book probably would have been
00:28:47.02040% shorter had she taken out all the caveats. This type of language is in every chapter.
00:28:54.680She is constantly disclaiming. But there was another part of Lean In that I'd completely
00:28:59.480forgotten about. She has a chapter about how men in heterosexual relationships need to step up and
00:29:06.760be equal partners. And we're going to spend more time dissecting that one later too. But for now,
00:29:11.480I just want to give you a sense for what's in it.
00:29:13.840So if you'll please read this from a chapter called
00:30:18.300And then she, like, tells this anecdote about some friends of hers where one day the mom was at home to pack the kids' lunches and the dad had to do it.
00:30:26.780And he, like, didn't know how to pack a lunch.
00:30:28.680And so he just, like, put a bunch of junk food in the lunchbox.
00:30:31.200and how, like, the couple would regale this story to people
00:30:34.900and everyone would, like, think it was really funny and charming
00:30:37.460that, like, the dad just, like, put a bunch of Oreos and Cheez-Its in the lunchbox
00:48:02.480well, is this woman a liar or a bitch1.00
00:48:04.720or a shitty person or not make your decision based off of this argument that is supposedly1.00
00:48:08.960progressive. And that's what it feels like this is doing. These arguments aren't asking us to0.99
00:48:13.120think clearly about class and structure and whatever. They're asking us to think,
00:48:16.700is Sheryl Sandberg a piece of shit or not? Yeah, it's the Scooby-Doo villain where you1.00
00:48:20.880rip off the mask and it's like, surprise, it's misogyny. Surprise, it's a woman.1.00
00:48:26.420Okay, so I've kind of alluded a couple times now to this theory of change that like,
00:48:30.300the opening anecdote of the book, I can see really clearly kind of that this is what she's
00:48:33.640trying to get at. Then she states the thesis. Covert is kind of critiquing this theory of
00:48:38.520change and saying, well, more progressive feminists in leadership actually doesn't1.00
00:48:41.840get us where we need to go. The research on this theory of change is actually sort of interesting.
00:48:47.340So this comes from O'Connell's book. The overwhelming majority of leadership in
00:48:52.600workplaces are still men. They tend to work with and promote other men. So just for some
00:48:57.860representative statistics, 29% of the U.S. population is white men. 29%. 56% of C-suite
00:49:06.680executives are white men. Around 19% of the population are men of color, and around 12%
00:49:13.740of C-suite executives are men of color. So a 2023 paper from Harvard Business School called
00:49:20.280The Old Boys Club, Schmoozing and the Gender Gap, studied this kind of male networking effect
00:49:26.340in a large financial institution in Southeast Asia, and it found that the social effects
00:49:32.580of men in leadership seeming to favor other men for leadership roles accounted for one-third
00:49:39.040of the wage gap in that firm. And so O'Connell takes you through a few different examples in
00:49:44.100her book across different countries and different places where they've studied this and basically
00:49:48.420concludes that actually reaching a critical mass of women in leadership in a given organization0.90
00:49:54.260and not just a token few, like, okay, we have the one lady on the board and she's the woman and
00:49:59.960check the box, actually does correlate to smaller gender wage gaps, in some cases eliminating it1.00
00:50:06.260entirely. So I think there are a few reasons for this. The first is maybe obvious, and it's that
00:50:10.940since wage gaps are usually downstream of women's careers flatlining earlier, if you study the wage
00:50:18.020gap in an organization with that typical spread of nearly 70% men at the top, the majority of the
00:50:24.580highest earners will be men. So by the very fact of having more women in those leadership roles,
00:50:28.760earning those higher incomes, yeah, you're going to see a smaller intra-firm gap. But the second0.99
00:50:33.680is the more cultural explanation, which is the one that I think Sandberg is trying to argue for.
00:50:38.680And I found a good articulation of this idea in Rebecca Traister's 2010 book, Big Girls Don't
00:50:43.580cry. She basically says that because there are so few examples of, quote, powerful women,1.00
00:50:49.740we tend to, quote, hold those few women who are powerful up to terrifically high and often0.50
00:50:55.940gender essentialist standards, and that we, quote, still expect our women leaders to be
00:51:00.600more thoughtful, kinder, more collaborative, more eager to listen, more nurturing than their male
00:51:07.800peers. We expect women to act like mothers even when they're in the workplace.0.94
00:51:11.600to domesticate the Facebook frat house, as Maureen Dowd said. So you can see how parody1.00
00:51:17.020would lessen that tendency to spotlight the one or two people who function like a stand-in for
00:51:22.780the entire marginalized group. I think this works for, this is true of like any group that is not
00:51:27.800the default dominant. I think this would be true across like race and other gender and sexual
00:51:31.760identities as well. But like, if you're the only person who represents that group in a leadership
00:51:36.320role, you are being scrutinized more. So anyway, I think that that theory of change is interesting
00:51:42.840because in some ways, I think Covert's critique is true. And in other ways, I think the data within
00:51:49.160organizations is actually a little more complicated than that. It's a little more complicated than
00:51:53.680just saying, no, having a bunch of this group in leadership doesn't change anything. So honestly,
00:51:59.660though, just I'm going to give major points to Bryce Covert for writing a review that engages
00:52:04.060with the material on its merits argues against the thesis specifically.
00:52:08.620Yeah, it's interesting because one of the theories I had going into this is
00:52:12.600usually the book tour of a big book campaign like this or the marketing copy will dumb down the
00:52:18.960book or simplify it and then often mislead all of the nuance that's within the book. And so my
00:52:24.140theory was going to be that it got good reviews, but after the book came out and like maybe Sheryl0.84
00:52:29.200Sandberg was doing interviews with Oprah, maybe then she had to simplify her argument. And it's
00:52:33.360fair too, because then it gets clipped and that's what people think about when they associate with
00:52:36.340Lean In. It's like the tragic outcome of like simplifying a book like this, but it sounds like
00:52:40.480people were misunderstanding it from the jump. That was the impression that I got from reading
00:52:45.160all the coverage of it. I did find positive stuff too. We're going to talk about some of the positive
00:52:49.200as well that came out, but I really wanted to read reviews that were critiquing it on those
00:52:54.380grounds because I thought it was an interesting lens to look at given where we got now. Okay,
00:53:00.680so that same day, February 25th, we get Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In Campaign Holds Little for Most
00:53:06.620Women by Melissa Gera Grant, who is actually a Jacobin editor, but writing in the Washington
00:53:11.740Post. This one is interesting because from my read, she admits that she has not read the book,
00:53:18.780which I'm just like, that actually happened a surprising amount where a lot of people who were
00:53:23.360weighing in never read it. I was like, am I misunderstanding or misreading this? And I went
00:53:29.380back and found another piece from that time period in the New Yorker, which I know has like a famously
00:53:34.620rigorous fact-checking organization where they called out all the people that reviewed it
00:53:40.060without reading it. Oh, that's so gross. And so I was like, okay, I'm pretty sure this is0.65
00:53:44.320real and odd. Like, this is anomalous. Okay, so this is from the Washington Post.
00:53:50.320It seems that the consciousness raised and solutions offered in Lean in Circles.
00:53:54.460Okay, so there's a lot of fixation on these Lean in Circles.
00:53:56.700Yeah, it was basically like, I don't want to call it a book club, but from my understanding of it, it was like they were trying to institute programs within workplaces called lean-in circles where the women in the workplace would get together and like talk about work and like their careers together.0.51
00:54:14.340Okay, flag that, because that feels like early baby wing.
00:54:17.640It seems that the consciousness raised and solutions offered in lean-in circles will be isolated to actions individual women can take to support their own ambitions and desires,0.64
00:54:26.500rather than wondering about the ambitions and desires of, say, the women who keep house for the women spending their time leaning in.0.59
00:54:34.660Okay, there's simply no way for women to lean in without leaning on the backs of other women.0.70
00:54:39.820Okay, after all, who are the women in Sandberg's world?
00:54:43.820An anecdote from Sandberg's 2010 TED Talk revealed her surprise when the men who invited her to make a pitch in their boardroom didn't know where to find the woman's bathroom.0.60
00:54:53.040If she asked one of the people who vacuumed the boardroom, there's a fair chance they would know.
00:54:57.520According to a recent report, 33% of janitorial jobs in Silicon Valley are held by women.0.99
00:55:25.280Which is a much more interesting way of saying disgusting brothers. I guess the thing that just0.99
00:55:29.500strikes me is, like, even in our episode, which I think derided, you know, Scott Galloway's memoir,
00:55:35.320We did it on the basis of his arguments.
00:55:37.900And it's just really interesting to me that, like, when men write about culture, they're not even scrutinized.
00:55:43.100Like, Scott Galloway's including citations from sources that don't exist.
00:55:47.140And no one is writing about that besides Jessica Winter, her one review for The New Yorker, which debates him on the merits of his arguments.
00:55:54.300And it just strikes me as, like, really interesting that you have someone who didn't read the book and who is going out of her way to argue Sandberg's book on the merits of an argument that Sandberg herself is not making.
00:56:08.900Like, the idea of being like, well, these women are leaning on other women.
01:05:07.500Sandberg argues that the reason women hold themselves back in their careers is because of those messages they've received their entire lives.1.00
01:05:13.720That it's not very feminine to be aggressive or ambitious.1.00
01:05:16.760That as a woman, it's nearly impossible to have both a career and a family.
01:05:20.900Her point isn't that women aren't ambitious, but rather that women are afraid to fully embrace their ambitions because they've been convinced of those two messages their entire lives.
01:05:30.360Yeah, it's just, it's really striking me. I feel like my understanding of lean-in criticism was founded in the idea that, like, the people who criticize it are people who are progressive and leftist.
01:05:41.300To your point, bell hooks can and should criticize Lean In, but someone who hasn't read the book and
01:05:47.680is arguing a totally different argument than what Sandberg is saying, it really just reeks of
01:05:52.240misogyny. And I think that, like, even in this Ms. review, I would add to this defender who's
01:05:59.660saying, like, oh, the point is that women are afraid to fully embrace their ambitions because
01:06:03.700they've been convinced of these two messages. I'm like, well, yeah, and, like, they can't.0.81
01:06:07.420Like, they actually just can't fully embrace their ambitions today. I think the point,
01:06:10.980though that Cheryl is making that I actually think is a very necessary cultural shift is the
01:06:16.700idea that women can and should be allowed to be prioritized in that way and should expect this
01:06:22.840from their partners and like shouldn't feel as though their career definitionally has to take0.94
01:06:28.860the backseat in a relationship. And I think that that's something that we are very uncomfortable
01:06:34.160as a society with talking about in the context of systemic conversations about like what needs
01:06:40.600to change. Like, Stephanie O'Connell and I were talking about this, and I told her, I was like,
01:06:44.800look, I am a huge advocate for universal child care. I think that's the bare minimum that we
01:06:49.820should have in society. And if culturally we don't shift our ideas about parenting and women,
01:06:56.360it's still going to be the woman leaving work every day to go pick up the kid from universal1.00
01:07:00.720child care. So it's like, it actually isn't enough just to have better policy. We do actually have0.93
01:07:06.920to change people's minds, and policy can help do that. But like, I think we're kidding ourselves
01:07:11.600if we think that none of this is cultural. I also wanted to touch on something interesting
01:07:15.460that came out in dissent around this time, which is that this is best understood not primarily
01:07:21.360within a feminist context, but within the broader context of entrenching ideas of technocracy.1.00
01:07:27.620So it draws parallels between Sandberg's rhetoric and Zuckerberg's rhetoric running Facebook.1.00
01:07:35.220This is called Feminism's Tipping Point, Who Wins from Leaning In?
01:07:40.020And this piece was written by a former Facebook employee who became Zuck's speechwriter from 2005 to 2010.
01:07:56.300Oh, she, she, that's the most embarrassing thing I've ever heard.
01:07:59.900Never kill yourself, you might become Mark Zuckerberg's speechwriter.
01:08:03.060This is probably the most prescient criticism that we'll read today, especially in light of how AI has changed this conversation and the way that, like, Lean In is now doing, like, AI apologia and, like, here's how we're going to bridge the gender gap in AI adoption.
01:08:18.340Okay, Lean In begins with an introduction called Internalizing the Revolution, and like Zuckerberg's 2007 F8 speech, it aims to redefine what revolution means.
01:08:29.580Sandberg's revolution is not asking corporations to renovate their operations to eliminate sexism.
01:08:35.120Rather, revolution in Lean In is a battle to restructure the self.
01:08:39.520Quote, throughout my life, I was told over and over about inequalities in the workplace and how hard it would be to have a career in a family.
01:08:45.280I rarely heard anything about the ways I might hold myself back, end quote.
01:08:49.960Sandberg details the ways in which she was insecure or afraid during her career rise,0.97
01:08:54.140arguing that other women should learn from her mistakes and assert themselves.
01:08:57.900Though if the proof of the pudding is that Sandberg became a COO in a man's world,
01:09:01.980we may question how much her self-deprecation helped to minimize any threat that her success
01:09:06.160posed to men. Lenin's goal is to push women forward into their work so as to overcome what
01:09:11.360Sandberg represents as women's universal internal resistance to career velocity.
01:09:17.760Sandberg's language in this chapter, while directed at women, recalls and even replicates
01:09:22.080the language deployed at Facebook to push its employees to work harder. That's interesting.
01:09:26.720At Facebook, the offices are festooned with posters that read things like,
01:09:30.420Be bold. Move fast and break things. Done is better than perfect. And what would you do if
01:09:35.920you weren't afraid probably quit my job facebook's corporate imperative no not me if i worked at
01:09:42.340not this job facebook's corporate imperative to move quickly and gain influence over more people
01:09:48.040figured in a formula one vocabulary of speed and victory is repeated in sandberg's writing
01:09:53.500quote when more people get in the race more records will be broken end quote and don't put
01:09:58.520on the brakes accelerate keep your foot on the gas pedal the loser in the lean-in vision of work1.00
01:10:03.880isn't one version of feminism or another.1.00
01:10:06.380Other feminist organizations and publications1.00
01:10:08.360will continue to flourish alongside lean-in,0.99
01:10:11.060though they may receive less media attention.
01:10:13.460But uncapitalized, unmonetized life itself.
01:15:58.300Like, sure, some of that preference is still going to be there
01:16:00.780in a more egalitarian society across everybody.
01:16:03.480Paid work outside the home is not something
01:16:05.040that all people find enjoyment and meaning in.
01:16:07.220And some people do prefer and find the most meaning
01:16:10.680in caring for other people full-time.1.00
01:16:13.280But women also receive messages about how they are shitty mothers1.00
01:16:16.700if they don't prioritize their kids.0.97
01:16:18.660I am open to biological arguments about like, you know, who gives birth and who does not and what chemicals are involved and blah, blah, blah. But the assumption that like, because women give birth, they are naturally inclined to being alone in a house with a child is like, that's not our biology.
01:16:36.760Yeah, it's like a pretty big jump to make. And I will say like anecdotally, this is obviously just one data point, but like obviously I have been traveling for seven and a half weeks now. I've been away from home. My spring has been very big. And like on a personal note, the last few years of my life have been like my personal life kind of revolves around me. Like my husband's in full-time grad school and we have spent a lot of time thinking about me, talking about me, planning for me. He has been taking care of our house and our pets while I have been gone. And we are fine with it.
01:17:04.940Like, this has been, like, he has been completely supportive.
01:17:07.560There has never been a moment where it's, like, you know, what's going on?
01:17:10.460The amount of questions and support that he receives from people who are worried about him because I have had this moment of success is so notable.
01:17:21.720Like, it is really, really interesting the extent to which people are worried about how he is taking a moment in my professional career.
01:17:30.120And he and I just, like, laugh about it.
01:17:31.560We're like, wow, someone checked in on you again.
01:17:33.420And it really gets into this idea of the cultural reinforcements that we do talk about privately all the time. But like the extent to which I think it's hard for us to even notice it because it is so ingrained. But the pressure that women face to and the support they receive to focus on children and vice versa, the criticism men receive and the lack of support if they choose, even for a period of time, like Riley didn't, it's not like Riley dropped out of grad school, but like for him to be taking care of our house, taking care of our pets, all this stuff.
01:18:02.480it's like wow what a big thing you're doing what a sacrifice you're doing for caroline as opposed
01:18:08.500to like if the roles were flipped everyone would be looking at me and being like well when are you
01:18:12.180going to quit your job yeah you know riley succeeded like it's it's such an inverse or
01:18:16.400they'd be like wow you're so lucky that your husband is so successful yeah yeah 100 and
01:18:20.640what i get all the time is you're so lucky that your husband is so supportive that's what i get
01:18:25.100Yeah. So, on that note, one of the constant points of criticism of Lean In is this idea that Cheryl is suggesting erroneously that women can have it all if they just work harder to do it all.
01:18:38.840Kiro, what do you see on your screen right now?0.99
01:23:54.240even as partners argued that both spouses' interests were served,
01:23:58.140concluded Jacqueline Wong and Alison Deyminger.
01:24:01.200This pattern was so common that they called it the myth of mutuality.
01:24:05.080When couples talk about making work-life decisions that are best for, quote, us,
01:24:08.920or, quote, our family, while overwhelmingly privileging or upholding men's interests,0.64
01:24:13.960oh my god, research has found that when we're able to recast this chronic inequality as fair,
01:24:18.760legitimate, and justified, it both maintains and perpetuates the patriarchal gender hierarchy,
01:24:23.600while undermining support for policies that would enable all of us to integrate our personal and
01:24:28.360professional ambitions more sustainably. Okay, so when I was researching the essay that I wrote
01:24:35.060that kind of preceded this episode and made me want to do it, I came across this piece from a
01:24:39.360career coach who said the biggest obstacle that she sees her clients face is not workplace policy
01:24:46.060or like a lack of access to whatever. It is that their male partners are simply unwilling to make
01:24:51.940any, quote, material or practical adjustments to accommodate their ambitions. And Sandberg,
01:24:59.180I think, correctly diagnoses this issue in Lean In, but then her advice for dealing with it is
01:25:04.340sort of adult male toddler coded, where it's like, ladies, even if he puts the diaper on the baby's
01:25:10.120head, you should still smile and congratulate him because at least he's doing it. It's just0.53
01:25:14.760not really helpful. And so I asked O'Connell what she made of all this, and she wrote back this.
01:25:20.760she said, anti-ambition has been lauded as everything from personally empowering to radically
01:25:26.420anti-capitalist, bold claims that are undercut by one glaring oversight. The supposed ambition
01:25:32.660reckoning has landed almost exclusively on women's ambition. If hustle culture, endless striving,1.00
01:25:38.280and dogged careerism is so bad, and I agree it can be, why aren't men also getting the message
01:25:43.380to trade in their power suits for prairie core and trade in their paychecks for personal care?
01:25:48.000Where is the genre of personal essay telling men how much easier and more fulfilling their days would be if they just stopped worrying so much about their livelihoods and started leaning into their softness?0.85
01:25:58.000If public and professional ambition is why modern life has become too exhausting, exploitative, and expensive, then why is it only recognized as something we should opt out of when women pursue it?0.68
01:26:09.120While access to meaningful leisure and rest remains a social media fantasy for most women, it's something men in the U.S. already enjoy, and they haven't had to give up their professional or economic power to unlock it.0.78
01:26:23.860400 additional leisure hours per year i know so it seems to me we're just gonna we're gonna
01:26:32.620pivot to girl boss now but it seems to me that nowhere is scrutiny of the corporate world and
01:26:39.020capitalist power structures more apparent in mainstream media than in the context of a girl
01:26:44.700boss story like when a woman talks about wanting to be the best at something or how she got to the0.87
01:26:49.820top of her field, often things that are related to the masculine goods of career or money,
01:26:54.640that scans first and foremost as a girl bossy impulse, which has these connotations of like1.00
01:27:00.080selfishness and individualist and not being for the collective good rather than just being-
01:27:05.500Everyone suddenly becomes a communist when they want to make one of Sheryl Sandberg,
01:27:09.180and then they take that right back off when the review is over.
01:27:13.940And so there's a conflation that I started to notice where valid criticisms of corporations
01:27:19.060and corporate power structures just kind of melted in our public consciousness into just
01:27:23.480critiques of ambitious women, period, and kind of like clowning on that impulse altogether.
01:27:29.320And what distressed me most about it is just how often these critiques slide into total nihilism
01:27:33.900that anything could be done to improve professional and personal lives of women
01:27:37.260short of a total teardown of the system.
01:27:41.220Well, that's kind of what I'm thinking now that you're presenting all of this is like,
01:27:45.220yeah, theoretically, I think you and I are exactly the kind of people who would be critical
01:27:48.860of the idea of talking about individual solutions over or in lieu of also talking about society.
01:27:54.840I think that we've made that clear on this podcast.
01:27:56.820But it is funny that, like, there is kind of an argument of, like, well, if capitalism0.86
01:28:01.060is what we have right now, God forbid a few women make some money.0.86
01:28:11.020I don't listen to Call Her Daddy very often, but I did listen to a great episode with her1.00
01:28:14.340and Ellen Pompeo. And they talked about how Ellen Pompeo, who plays Meredith Grey on Grey's Anatomy,
01:28:19.580had a huge financial success and basically renegotiated and demanded a very high payday
01:28:25.32010 or 11 seasons in. And Alex Cooper talked to her about how when she negotiated her podcast
01:28:31.120deal, she thought that when they announced it, everyone would celebrate. Because she's like,
01:28:35.740I've been watching sports stars announce these major deals. I've watched male podcasters announce
01:28:41.580major deals and it was like yeah hell yeah I just negotiated a big fucking deal and it was just like0.98
01:28:47.740crickets and Ellen Pompeo said the same thing she said that when she negotiated her deal she thought0.97
01:28:52.400that friends were going to celebrate her and be like good for you for getting your worth for a
01:28:56.960show that she basically sacrificed the rest of her career for like she gave up any other acting
01:29:00.800ambitions to be you know Meredith Grey and Grey's Anatomy and she said she called her manager and
01:29:04.900her manager said oh no honey you need to expect the opposite which is everyone's going to hate you
01:29:09.800Well, and I think the bigger problem here, too, is that, like, this critique became so much bigger than the original ideas that were presented, but it was not—none of this was replaced by a coherent, affirmative vision of socialist feminism.
01:29:26.740What we are left with instead is this idea that having aspirations as a woman is, like, problematic in some vague way, which is why I think the present anti-ambition moment is, A, so clearly gender-specific, and, B, just so easily assimilated into the discourse.
01:29:43.080Like, it just, it's like, it seems so natural and unquestioning, and there is, like, a sort of anti-capitalist leaning to it if you don't really engage with it critically.
01:29:52.560So that was 2013. Now we are going to shift to 2014 when we get Girl Boss. So Girl Boss by
01:30:02.420Sophia Amoruso is a memoir that comes out in 2014. The first Girl Boss review that I can find is from
01:30:07.860Helen Lewis. So what's interesting is that Helen Lewis is still on the Girl Boss beat. Like this
01:30:14.160review is from 2014. She published something in March for In the Atlantic called The Death of
01:30:20.040millennial feminism and the article image as a tombstone with the word girlboss written on it.
01:30:24.480And I was like, dude, so much mileage out of the girlboss thing. So this is a critical review of
01:30:28.920girlboss that makes critiques I think you and I would broadly agree with, which is that memoirs
01:30:33.440focus on your unbelievable tale of ascension from being a high school dropout shoplifting anarchist
01:30:39.880to a person running a hundred million dollar company sort of reinforces this fantasy that
01:30:45.060like that is possible when in reality that happens to like one person. But there it is right at the
01:30:52.800end, if you will please read. Girlboss must be hoping to get a little bit of the reflected glory
01:30:58.740of Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In, which has quickly become the go-to source for thinky thoughts on1.00
01:31:03.800female leadership. Despite many activists' understandable reservations about quote
01:31:08.400trickle-down feminism, that book was at least full of useful analysis of why it is still so
01:31:13.400rare to have a boss with breasts. In Britain, for example, women make up just 20.7% of FTSE 1001.00
01:31:20.640boards, and there is still one blue chip company, Glencore, with no women on the board at all.0.82
01:31:26.140Sandberg's key finding was that we just don't like women who reach the top.
01:31:30.480Quote, success and likability are positively correlated for men and negatively for women,
01:31:34.840she writes. When a man is successful, he is liked by both men and women. When a woman is successful,
01:31:39.900people of both genders like her less. Perhaps that's why I found Girlboss so vexing. Or maybe1.00
01:31:45.520it's the wretched hashtag in the title. Okay, so like fair, but still kind of funny for her to
01:31:52.300kind of break the fourth wall and be like, well, she's a successful woman, so maybe that's why I
01:31:56.400don't like her. We are going to actually fast forward to 2015 now briefly to see how the
01:32:00.820coverage changes now that both of these books are in the world. And then we're going to spend
01:32:05.220the most of our Girlboss-related time in 2017.
01:32:08.380This is when there's, like, a really big wave of it
01:32:10.600because the TV adaptation of the memoir comes out on Netflix.
01:32:14.340There was one season of the show called Girlboss.
01:32:16.840One thing I think is probably worth noting
01:32:19.240is just that, like, the critical reception of Lena notwithstanding,
01:32:34.880like I think about like Olivia Nessie's American Canto and how it was like oh yeah like whether
01:32:38.520it's organic yeah if it is yeah like and it's I actually think it does speak to the fact that like
01:32:43.060women did read this book and when you have millions of copies being sold that only happens
01:32:48.160really with word of mouth once women like people start to recommend it to one another and so
01:32:52.340it is worth noting that like people did read it whether or not the institutions thought they
01:32:57.980Yes. We will read one article about like what women thought about it, but obviously one article
01:33:06.520isn't representative of millions of women. So in 2015, we get a piece from Liz Brunig in The New
01:33:11.900Republic that actually quotes the founder of a socialist feminist magazine called Lux, which is
01:33:18.560a great magazine, highly recommend. But I think it's really useful as a timestamp of where we
01:33:23.800were in 2015 compared to now. So this is called Sheryl Sandberg's Lean-In Philosophy Doesn't
01:33:30.760Just Ignore Disadvantaged Women, It Hurts Their Cause. If you will please read.
01:33:38.480The idea that ambition shouldn't be hampered by gender is so commonplace as to need little
01:33:43.060defense. Regardless, it is worthwhile to say it's an idea I agree with and one that Sandberg's
01:33:48.100feminist critics do not object to. The same goes for the call for dads to be involved at home.
01:33:52.740Okay, so that line, the idea that ambition shouldn't be hampered by gender is so commonplace as to need little defense. I was like, I don't know if things were different in 2015, but it certainly isn't fucking true now.0.83
01:34:05.900Yeah, I don't know where you're living.
01:34:08.360But to argue the case that Sandberg's focus on how women can navigate workplaces and men can be more involved at home actually hurts low-wage women, Liz uses the example of parental leave being zero-sum.1.00
01:34:23.680For low-wage women, the ideal solution would be universal paid maternity leave funded by the state.0.96
01:34:29.600This is where their interests clash with the interests of women in Sandberg's position,0.95
01:34:33.920whose companies might, in light of a universal paid maternity leave program,1.00
01:34:37.840reduce their cushy, individually negotiated programs and instead direct employees to the
01:34:42.640federally funded alternative. In fact, this very argument against a universal paid maternity leave
01:34:48.160mandate was proposed by the conservative YG network in their 2014 policy manual, Room to Grow.
01:34:54.880Quote, this new federal entitlement, Kerry Lucas warns, would encourage businesses currently providing paid leave programs, including more generous leave packages, to cease doing so.
01:35:04.800For the neutral onlooker, basic universal maternity leave for all would surely trump generous maternity packages for a select few.
01:35:13.080But this is only the case when imagining benefits in collective terms.
01:35:17.140Sandberg's vision is far more individualistic.
01:35:18.620individualistic. Thus, when women in high-income jobs find themselves following Sheryl Sandberg's
01:35:23.960advice and negotiating plush maternity arrangements, they might also find themselves
01:35:28.780politically neglecting a universal maternity leave program. These wealthier women and their1.00
01:35:33.680families are the ones with the money and influence to push ad campaigns and dabble in politics.1.00
01:35:38.580That is, they're the ones with the power to effect change for all women. But they're not0.95
01:35:42.760likely to wield their power in that way. Sandberg's corporate feminism preaches individual1.00
01:35:47.640female empowerment in the workplace and now at home too rather than collective social action1.00
01:35:52.600and women who subscribe to that approach are more likely to funnel resources into advanced education
01:35:57.920and leadership training rather than into the machinery of politics and protest okay i'm
01:36:04.780realizing i'm tired of myself this episode is making me realize that like i am tired of like
01:36:10.580that i would probably make all these arguments if we hadn't been going through all of this and
01:36:15.060I'm starting to feel like there are a lot, like, it's a lot of whataboutism to me.
01:36:21.400Yeah, I think this is thoughtful. Like, I think this is a thoughtful criticism, and I think it's
01:36:26.180a question worth asking. Does individual solutions for some people actually make it worse
01:36:31.380for the collective? Though, from where we sit in 2026, 10 years on, I don't feel convinced that
01:36:39.860the reason we don't have mandated paid parental leave is because too many women are successfully
01:36:45.460lobbying their workplaces for leave and then therefore now are in opposition to state mandated0.78
01:36:50.060leave. I don't think most women without workplace parental leave are, quote, funneling their efforts
01:36:56.120into the machinery of politics and protest either. And I think that kind of speaks to the bigger0.97
01:37:01.340problem here, which is like whether your company gives you leave or not, we just kind of lack a
01:37:06.860culture of organizing in America, period, which is a fact that we'll come back to later.
01:37:12.780Well, there's a real like snake eating its own tail series of arguments here that I'm thinking
01:37:17.140about where, as you have pointed out on more than one occasion and kind of illuminating me,
01:37:22.580we don't expect men to have these conversations at all. They're not even asked about the child
01:37:26.820care conversation. They certainly don't write about the child care conversation of their own
01:37:31.860Right. So we're excluding 50% of the population. And also they're in the positions of power, both in Congress and in Fortune 500 companies. And so someone like Sheryl Sandberg might say, yeah, we need more women in these positions. We need to figure out a way for more women to go into positions of power. But then we're also saying like, well, there's no point in that because that's not getting us to structural freedom.
01:37:55.820But I'm like, so then how are we going to get there? Because like, you don't want the individual solutions. You don't think it's going to get better if women become CEOs. And like, I theoretically understand that. But like, the only real conclusion to me would be we have to start holding men to account for the child care conversation. But men are left out of this conversation altogether.
01:38:14.100But we are also largely as women reinforcing it as a problem that we assume that only women should care about by specifically criticizing Sheryl Sandberg. Like, how many women are writing reviews for other male airport books about how they talk about how people can get ahead?
01:38:32.720Yeah, it just really is an interesting thing because, again, I agree with the points being made in this article. I agree that we need to get to a collective social action, but we are essentially cutting ourselves off at the kneecaps by refusing to view any sort of individual solution in either direction.
01:38:48.420I'm doing this episode, and I think you agree with this, like from the position of someone who often makes these arguments.
01:38:53.780And so I feel like it's forcing me to refine more what I actually believe about these things and what I mean by collective social action.
01:39:02.200Because it's interesting to be like, well, she's talking about empowerment at work and at home, and I'm talking about social change.
01:39:08.640And it's like, well, what is social change if not at work and at home?
01:39:14.200But like these are the building blocks of those things.
01:39:16.680Like, if you can make it more equal for people in their homes and in their workplaces, like, that is going to shift the way that we think about these problems.
01:39:27.300I feel like one of the questions I am thinking about as we go through this is, like, what do and what did we want from Sheryl Sandberg?
01:39:36.600And what does it mean that that is what we wanted?
01:39:39.520I think it's like, yeah, the guillotine.
01:39:40.760I think it's like, because there's a multifaceted thing where it's like, number one, this, and this happens all the time, I could get into this, where it's like, one book will never speak for everyone.
01:39:49.860It will never give you every argument.
01:39:52.160So it's like, first of all, are we critiquing something on the merits of what it aimed to do or just off of the fact?
01:43:34.960Ah, not if Maureen Dowd could help it. That was the other thing that kind of, like,
01:43:38.580rubbed me the wrong way. And I know this is super ad hominem, but, like,
01:43:42.460it was really frustrating to me to read women like Maureen Dowd, who have been opinion columnists0.98
01:43:47.280at the paper of record for 30 fucking years, being like, this is elitist. I'm like, Maureen.0.98
01:43:53.560You're an opinion columnist at the fucking New York Times. Like, what do you mean? What do you mean this is elitist? Your entire career is like built on the same philosophy, whether you own it or not. Like, you leaned in. You did what she's describing, you know?0.99
01:44:09.020You know what? Actually, I feel like I could draw a connection if I had more caffeine and more research time between like how we use claims of elitism for any person, again, who isn't represented in the dominant power group whenever they get to a position of relatively threatening power.
01:44:25.020Like I remember Barack Obama was accused of elitism.
01:44:36.200Right. And again, no one accuses George Bush Jr. of being elitist, even though he went to Yale. You know what I mean? It's like, he's a man of the people. And so it's funny how people who are in minority groups are accused of being elitist. And that is what happens to keep them from ascending any farther. And then white men who are inherently in the elite group often have to present as of the working men.
01:45:00.420There was a cartoon in The New Yorker the other week that was, like, it was a picture of, like, Moses with the Ten Commandments next to the golden calf.
01:45:08.900And these two people in the crowd were like, you know, Moses has some really good ideas, but, like, I feel like I could get a beer with a golden calf.
01:50:07.040I know that listening to this, you can't really see what's going on in the trailer. I would
01:50:12.380actually recommend pausing this and just going and watching it for a second so you just took
01:50:16.820in the same sights that Kara and I just did. Do you remember anything about the main character
01:50:21.040played by DiCaprio in this movie? Nothing specific. I don't think I've
01:50:25.900watched it in a decade. Do you remember anything about how the
01:50:28.600men in your life reacted to this movie? Oh, yeah. He was aspirational.
01:50:33.060Yes. The Wolf of Wall Street is a movie that tells the story of a real person named Jordan Belfort, who scammed and stole from a lot of regular people with a penny stock scheme. And in coverage following the film, Scorsese and DiCaprio and even Jordan Belfort himself, like calling, phoning in from federal prison, all characterized the film as like an indictment of Jordan Belfort's behavior.
02:05:02.800Oh, my God. After this conversation today, I'm going to go through all of our episodes and probably count all of the ways in which I have done this and then fucking lash myself in a corner until I've seen the light. Okay.0.87
02:05:15.520That's what women who do bad things should do. So, good idea. You should hold yourself to impossible standards to never be wrong about anything.1.00
02:05:22.600Okay. The ascent of the lady boss stems from the popularization of what has been referred to as lean-in feminism. Inspired by Facebook's COO, Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In, Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. When it was first published in 2013, Lean In was widely lauded for advocating that women lean in in the workplace to achieve professional empowerment and success.1.00
02:05:49.100It has since been roundly criticized for promoting a sanitized, corporate-backed view of female empowerment in which women must abide by the rules of the game as set by wealthy white men to achieve career advancement.
02:06:01.280The book has also been slammed for ignoring many of the structural barriers in place, preventing low-income women or women of color from being hired in leadership roles.
02:06:10.420Subsequent reports of Sandberg's unethical leadership at Facebook have further contributed to our retrospective understanding that she may be far from the feminist working women heroine that we'd hoped for.
02:06:20.200Flag that. I want to come back to that.0.69
02:06:21.520More than arguably anything else, lean-in feminism also gave rise to Elizabeth Holmes.1.00
02:06:29.380This is a different version of Freya India's argument that behind every man is a bad mom.
02:06:33.700It's like behind every Elizabeth Holmes is Sheryl Sandberg.
02:06:39.680As one of the few female leaders in Silicon Valley, only 11% of all Silicon Valley executives are women, according to a 2014 report. Holmes' gender worked to her advantage in terms of garnering media attention. As Alex Gibney, the director of The Inventor, told Time, she's looking at us and saying, support me because I am a woman in male-dominated Silicon Valley and I'm doing something great for the world. And we want to say, yeah, we're behind you, 100%.0.51
02:07:05.280Basically, she's saying that the ethos that lean-in feminism created, whereby we should support ambitious women who want to, like, rise in the corporate world, created an environment that's conducive to the type of fraud that Elizabeth Holmes then went on to commit.1.00
02:07:26.500So for those unaware, Elizabeth Holmes started a company called Theranos and claimed that its blood testing technology could do something that it could not do. So the devices that they made produced these like wildly inaccurate test results. And so they secretly were using just commercially available blood testing technology to run all the tests.0.99
02:07:45.980She raised a billion dollars in funding from investors based on fraudulent data and falsified
02:07:51.640reports, and then was ultimately sentenced to 11 years in prison when it was discovered that she
02:07:57.500had defrauded investors. Yeah. And then she like popped out two kids right before she went to
02:08:03.040prison. Oh, did she? Which I just think is pretty hysterical. The prevailing theory is that like1.00
02:08:08.600she did it to get a more lenient cycle. But hey, let women be awful. If you want to pop out a kid,1.00
02:08:13.740If you want to pop at a kid and force your husband to be the primary caretaker because you're going to be in jail, who am I?0.97
02:08:19.300Maybe we need to force some men in that way.1.00
02:09:01.400And we still have an ability not only to separate their personal lives from their politics, but to forgive men when we find out that they behave.
02:09:08.040And also, like, we view their behaviors as good even when for women it would be bad.
02:09:12.460But there is something there because I think I have done this with Sheryl Sandberg in the past as well.0.97
02:09:16.600And I'm just realizing I have never read Lean In in its entirety.
02:09:19.620And I have been very quick to use it kind of as a symbol for, you know, like a certain type, which I'm fine with.
02:09:25.900But, like, I think that the confidence—
02:09:27.360Well, but understandably so, which is kind of—
02:09:30.060What I'm getting at is, like, there is a very specific story told about this book in the media.
02:09:36.320But I think to add to that, I think that I bolstered my own sense of credibility on the
02:09:42.060topic by believing that Sheryl Sandberg is not a good person. And I'm only realizing now that it's
02:09:48.480like, well, what does that have to do with anything? More often than not, I think she is
02:09:53.220criticized for being annoying and mean and rude and like kind of more, I don't know, there's just
02:09:58.680something there where it's like, I understand to a certain extent this person is writing about the
02:10:02.980workplace and you want to see about the workplace they are running, but also the idea that women
02:10:07.540have to be perfect role models and also that they have to carry out their feminist politics0.93
02:10:12.980throughout all elements of their lives in order to claim to care about feminism is, I think,1.00
02:10:18.900a huge, and we talk about this with the injectables conversation, like, you cannot be politically0.58
02:10:23.640upright in every sense of the word, but we have an expectation that anyone who dares speak aloud
02:10:29.480their interest in political liberation, it's like such an easy way to gotcha because you're
02:10:33.580always going to gotcha someone. I do think it's relevant that she use like Mark Zuckerberg's
02:10:38.340right hand. I don't want to invalidate that. And I think it is very relevant. I'm just kind of like
02:10:43.520walking through my own implication here, but please continue. So this article argues that a
02:10:49.300culture of quote, lady boss worship is what enabled Elizabeth Holmes to defraud investors.1.00
02:10:56.540but i'm kind of curious why like what makes this the result of lean-in feminism and not just the1.00
02:11:04.540incentives of capitalism capitalism yeah yeah yeah well wait wait a second well why why would0.72
02:11:10.000why would quote-unquote lean-in feminism lead to fraud like this right people commit fraud all the1.00
02:11:15.260fucking time and it has nothing to do with with lean-in and theoretically you could also make the1.00
02:11:20.540flip argument which is like yeah a woman finally became like a tech celebrity billionaire because0.99
02:11:25.560we opened, I think you could argue like, yeah, we did have a cultural moment where we were more0.93
02:11:30.380interested in the idea of women being in leadership roles. And so like, yeah, that maybe would have
02:11:35.560benefited Elizabeth Holmes a little bit, but I actually don't necessarily think that's a bad
02:11:39.400thing. You know what I mean? Like the fact that she ended up being fraudulent really means that
02:11:43.440like for a moment, we allowed a woman to act like a man. And is that really so terrible?0.55
02:11:47.060Yeah, that's equality. That's show business, baby.0.97
02:11:49.300Okay, so I found some really interesting research. It's called The Rise and Fall of the Girlboss, Gender, Social Expectations, and Entrepreneurial Hype.
02:14:47.820I thought it was really interesting the, like,
02:14:50.480Even the type of language used between, like, how they are both protesting their innocence, he is defiant and she is defensive.
02:15:00.640Even that type of language, which, like, one implies kind of being, like, saucy and standing up for yourself, and the other implying, like, oh, you're getting really defensive right now.
02:15:12.000So 2020 really marked, to me, the definitive shift where the coverage transitioned from this, like, kind of clowning on the idea and this, like, back and forth between people arguing that it's a good thing and people saying it's bad, this game of sentiment tennis, to essentially declaring that the girl boss is good and dead.
02:15:30.900Okay, so from this point forward, pretty much uniformly negative. Here are the five most prominent articles returned for the search girl boss feminism in 2020.
02:15:42.000It's perfectly timed to us having the biggest labor dropout of women in modern history last year.0.99
02:20:38.400So, like I told you at the beginning, I have been reflecting on this idea that, like, well, we tried that and it didn't work since I started this research.
02:20:46.260It feels like something we've both said.
02:20:50.180You know, the culture had its boss babe moment and like nothing changed. But did we really? Did we ever culturally embrace this idea that women could and should have access to what Stephanie O'Connell calls the financial, professional, and public power in addition to a fulfilling personal and private life?
02:21:12.240There was never a period, at least not one that I could find in the internet archives,
02:21:16.800where any of this was widely supported and encouraged in mass market media without significant
02:21:22.560immediate outsized pushback that more often than not expressed a resistance to women's gains
02:21:28.620within the framing of the flaws of the corporate world more broadly.
02:21:32.780So after doing this research, I really felt something shift for me because I really couldn't0.60
02:21:37.680unsee the way that the girl boss was just more often than not wielded cynically as a sock puppet0.99
02:21:44.120to denigrate women's interests in things outside of marriage and childbearing writ large and to0.99
02:21:50.200basically write that off as inherently naive, inherently selfish, inherently capitalist.
02:21:56.080And it is certainly true that policy change affects culture. Like in Denmark, for example,
02:22:01.140they've instituted a parental leave that cannot be allotted to all one parent. Like you have to
02:22:06.380split it. And if you don't, you just lose the other half. Elegant policy design does impact
02:22:11.580cultural outcomes for sure. But do you know what else shifts culture? Media, the stories that we
02:22:18.700are told, the stories that we read and watch and hear about on the news, narrative shifts culture.
02:22:24.760And until we culturally perceive not just women's basic economic needs, but also their desires,
02:22:30.620the things they want for their lives, as worthy of taking seriously here and now,0.56
02:22:37.020and not just as a means of, like, righting some greater wrong,
02:22:40.520not only are we not going to make any progress with changing the structure of society
02:22:45.520to be more equitable and conducive to enabling everyone to live full lives,
02:22:50.000but women who ask to be seen and heard and recognized for their accomplishments and interests and talents1.00
02:22:55.400are just going to be reduced to girl bosses.1.00
02:22:59.480Wow. Katie, I don't want to freak you out, but I think you may be the voice of your generation.
02:23:06.020Or at least a voice. I'm a voice of a generation.
02:23:10.980No, seriously, I have known that you have been working on this, and we have joked where I've
02:23:15.900been like, wow, Katie finally bit off more than she could chew. Like, she's going to take on
02:23:19.320Sheryl Sandberg. You have so thoroughly changed my mind and also made me think about so many of
02:23:25.320my preconceived beliefs today that I didn't even realize I was holding I really appreciate that and
02:23:31.220I also think I appreciate that as one white woman podcaster talking to another this was like0.90
02:23:39.500a fundamentally illuminating for me so thank you I'm fucking shaken I've got to go delete every0.88
02:23:44.600if I hadn't already scrubbed my Twitter account you better believe I would be
02:23:48.180that's all I gotta say no same I mean I felt that way too I think and none of it none of it
02:23:54.800really struck me as interesting until this anti-ambition wave of stuff started coming out
02:24:00.760and then I was like I feel really weirdly now about how we talk about women who want things
02:24:08.120out of life and I think that there is just always this expectation that like there was even one
02:24:12.980article that we read a quote from that was like Cheryl suggests that women should like care about
02:24:17.300their own interests and desires instead of the interests and desires of others and I'm like0.70
02:24:21.440so hold on can they not can they not care about their own interests and desires is it a bad thing
02:24:26.960to care about your own life i'm like it's really interesting how everyone suddenly recognizes that
02:24:32.780corporate power structures are bad when women become in control i want to get a baseball hat0.64
02:24:38.300that says i'm a communist so that i don't have to be a feminist1.00
02:24:40.980i'm gonna get one that says let women do fraud1.00