00:02:46.780But there was also pretty widespread criticism, especially from feminist theorists and thinkers.0.99
00:02:52.540And even like the favorable reviews tended to hedge their praise a bit.
00:02:56.440And then you get a few things happening.
00:02:58.920You get the Me Too era where there's been a lot of writing and reflection both on the book and the shortcomings of this type of feminism generally.
00:03:07.580And then you also get like the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
00:03:10.960You get the Myanmar genocide that Facebook might have helped facilitate.
00:03:15.700All of that sort of washes whatever residual sheen there was off of Sheryl Sandberg and Lean In.
00:03:22.540She lost her title as airport royalty, parentheses derogatory.
00:03:25.960To give you a sense of its initial reception, when it comes out, The Guardian called it infantilizing.
00:03:32.060The Baffler and Dissent published like withering reviews.
00:03:36.740But you also had some generally favorable reviews from The New York Times, The New Yorker.1.00
00:03:42.480And maybe more importantly, from like a PR perspective, she's partnering with a ton of big companies and female leaders to build this lean in brand, which generates a ton of press and attention.
00:03:56.340So even though there's this sort of backdrop of negative reviews from very serious thinkers, the public perception is just like big hit book.
00:04:05.300Right. I remember the backlash to this book happening roughly eight minutes after it came out.
00:09:51.800I feel like we've sort of, we moved on from this quickly enough that it's maybe no longer0.99
00:09:57.200part of the cultural memory of young people.0.99
00:09:59.860But shit like that, as bad as it sounds, sounds very familiar to me.0.98
00:10:04.400Before Lean In came out and changed everything, these eras were very regressive.0.99
00:10:08.760So she builds on this by talking about stereotyping, by talking about the lack of parental leave in the United States, all of these different factors coming together.
00:10:17.120And overall, it's like a very comprehensive, fairly compelling case that the difference in ambition between men and women is in some large part socially constructed.
00:10:26.820Right. But then she gets to the end of the chapter where she translates this into advice for women.
00:11:14.880My favorite reads, what would you do if you weren't afraid?
00:11:18.800We also have kitten posters in the office that say, hang in there.
00:11:23.440So she's in the like prescriptive phase of this chapter.
00:11:26.620And all of a sudden it sounds like a script for like a Super Bowl commercial for Facebook at Facebook.
00:11:32.500We work hard to create a culture like, OK, so she lays out this sprawling problem with all of these complex cultural and political causes.
00:11:42.880And you're like nodding along. And then her solution portion is like, don't be afraid.
00:11:48.940Right. It feels so deeply inadequate after you read the first 90 percent of the chapter.
00:11:53.640Yeah. Even just as like a matter of individualized advice. Right. There is no like research about strategies for overcoming all of these social and cultural biases or anything. There isn't really research about being less scared. There's right. There's nothing practical. It's just like, get out there.
00:12:12.180What if I'm afraid of starting a union, Cheryl? What should I do then? How bold should I be?
00:12:17.100It's so weird when companies do this. Like fortune favors the bold. But like I'm at a job where I can
00:12:22.140get fired for any reason. It's America. We have at will employment. So like you can be bold under
00:12:27.240very prescribed conditions in American workplaces. You can imagine advice that's just like a little
00:12:34.160more grounded in reality, a little more practical, right? Here are ways that you can be unafraid,
00:12:41.100right right but in a vacuum it's just not really meaningful right like act without fear okay uh
00:12:49.060what am i gonna yell at my boss more like that's what that means to me there's a weird sort of0.97
00:12:53.560chicken and egg thing too where like one of the reasons why women are less likely to kind of be1.00
00:12:58.220bold in the workplace is mostly because when women are bold they get called shrill yeah so it's not1.00
00:13:03.560just like well women need to be bold it's more like people need to interpret women's boldness
00:13:07.360as the same way they interpret men's boldness
00:13:33.620In 1978, a pair of researchers at Oberlin
00:13:36.840Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes published a paper about high-achieving women experiencing the imposter phenomenon, a perpetual feeling of inadequacy that seems to persist despite consistent success and this parallel feeling that your fraudulence will soon be exposed, right?
00:13:55.960The paper is very popular, spawns a ton of literature.
00:14:00.220In general, women appear to be more likely to attribute their failures to their own shortcomings,
00:14:04.640while men will more often attribute their failure to external factors.
00:14:09.540And of course, there's all sorts of theory about what is causing this.0.91
00:14:12.380And there appear to be like numerous inputs, including the fact that women are often socially
00:14:18.320and professionally punished for expressing confidence, right?
00:14:22.000So Sandberg's solution has two components, one of which I think is reasonably good, and it's just that there should be more public awareness of this phenomenon such that bosses, hiring managers, et cetera, might have some context for these differences in behavior.
00:14:38.780The other the specific advice for women is just fake it till you make it to just manufacture confidence and eventually it will generate real confidence, which I think is OK.0.93
00:14:50.380But again, it does feel after like after going through an entire chapter of like, here's what this imposter syndrome is.0.93
00:17:08.080You don't solve an issue like this by just like being more bold in meetings.0.73
00:17:12.320This is almost like if someone was looking at hiring patterns and realizing that men are being hired way more than women and they're looking at all the data and they're like, well, I think women should be wearing more suits.0.65
00:21:23.800They surveyed business school graduates and they found that more women said that they negotiated their salary than men.
00:21:30.000And yet the gender pay gap in that population was still 22 percent in favor of men.
00:21:35.740This also builds on some research from 2016 that found that while there are situations where it's productive for women to negotiate more, negotiating more across the board actually decreases average salary for women.
00:21:48.220So the research from last year also included studies that showed that the more someone attributes gender pay disparities to the negotiation gap, the more likely they are to oppose pay equity legislation.
00:22:02.180And moreover, people who are exposed to the idea of the negotiation gap are actually more likely to believe certain gender stereotypes.
00:22:10.280Right. Because that's basically a proxy for conservative beliefs about gender.
00:22:13.500Absolutely. Absolutely. So there's like a real concern that the proliferation of this negotiation gap idea has been to some degree counterproductive. Right. I just think that the way that this was digested by the public is very clearly women negotiate less and should negotiate more.
00:22:30.800Yeah. They're lacking the killer instinct. Right. When in reality, the problem is that there are downsides for women who try to negotiate aggressively and women respond rationally to that by negotiating less than men do in many situations. Right. Whereas I have always taken the tactic of just not negotiating and being underpaid. We exist. We matter. I always just say, what's the most you're willing to pay me? That's the question.1.00
00:22:55.960they ask me what my weakness is i say i work too hard no one's ever thought of that before
00:23:01.640this is the this is the trick that we don't tell women about so you know the sort of like tapestry
00:23:07.440of the negotiation gap issue is actually really complex and interesting it's also another area
00:23:13.260where sandberg's practical advice really falls flat given the scope of the problem that she has
00:23:19.020outlined some tips she gives she says to use we instead of i when negotiating oh no it's word tips
00:23:25.860She says to provide justifications for the negotiation when you do it because that tends to work for women, even though it doesn't actually help men.0.96
00:23:34.100This is like that shit from 4-Hour Workweek where he's like, don't say I have to get up early.0.98
00:36:37.520We need more male CEOs in this country.
00:36:39.100You can also see this implied a bit by the McKinsey women in the workplace data, because since 2015, there has been a 65 percent increase in the number of women in the C-suite at the surveyed companies, but seven to eight percent increases in the number of women in entry level and managerial positions.
00:37:02.040This is something we've talked about for various other topics, too, that like representation is obviously a necessary condition, but it's not a sufficient condition.
00:37:08.460I think it's also important that, like, maybe what's happening is that companies know that it looks good to have a higher percentage of women in the C-suite, so they pluck some out of senior leadership, and then they're like, all right, job's done.
00:37:23.460There's a good amount of evidence that a lot of these patterns change based on circumstance.0.95
00:37:29.800Women aren't just, like, innately opposed to hiring other women, right?
00:37:33.440One study found that women in prestigious positions are much less likely to hire other women, but women in less prestigious positions are actually more likely to hire women than men.
00:37:45.420That same study found that on teams that are majority female, the bias functionally drops away and they just hire other women at about a 50 percent rate, which indicates that what's happening is possibly that women in leadership positions often avoid hiring other women.
00:38:01.160because they perceive an implied quota for women in leadership, right?
00:38:05.560And they don't want to hire their own direct competition.
00:38:07.700But once there are more women on the team, they get more comfortable, that perception
00:38:11.980goes away, and their bias falls off completely, and they just start hiring women at a normal
00:38:30.940There's also companies where the few women who are in management positions, there's so much friction and so much bullshit that you have to deal with as, like, one of the few women in the C-suite that those women get driven out.1.00
00:38:44.200One of my best friends in Seattle is, like, a middle manager at a large tech company, and she is always the only woman in the room.0.96
00:38:52.120And having to be the one who raises her hand and says, like, I don't think this is addressing, like, female users every fucking meeting.0.99
00:39:07.320So like, yeah, reaching that saturation point can take an extremely long time and kind of goes and fits and starts and can be really hard on the women who have to actually do it.
00:39:16.740There's also an argument that this is just too far downstream of the real problem, which is that women are getting pushed out in the middle because they're being forced to choose between their families and a job.
00:39:29.100Right. Because we are not facilitating a world where women can have a child and maintain their position at work. Right. That pushes women in their like 20s and 30s, especially down the ladder a bit. And then 20 years later, there aren't going to be as many women in senior management.1.00
00:39:47.240You know, the men are sort of just at this advantage that is the result of all these cultural and political norms.
00:40:07.100And Sandberg does, I mean, she talks about family leave and the importance of it.
00:40:11.240The policies at Facebook were sort of industry leading for a bit.
00:40:14.480So I don't want to say that she deserves no credit there, but I do think that the actual solution from a policy perspective is much more comprehensive than someone like Sandberg is willing to accept.
00:40:26.940There's a related criticism of the book related to like the to Sandberg's elitism that was made really forcefully by Susan Faludi, famous feminist author, wrote Backlash.
00:40:40.300She wrote this review for The Baffler right after the book came out.
00:40:43.520And the idea is that this book is, in effect, an act of corporate PR and one that mirrors a long history of efforts to co-opt the aesthetics and rhetoric of feminism and liberation in service of consumerism and capitalism.
00:41:00.160Yeah. Here at Facebook, here's our posters. Absolutely.
00:41:02.840That one line, like, shook me out of a stupor when I was reading it.
00:41:07.960All right. I'm going to send you a quote.
00:41:09.680She is talking here about how in the 1920s, when there were these nascent women's movements, they were undermined by consumerism.
00:41:18.940The rising new forces of consumer manipulation, mass media, mass entertainment, national advertising, the fashion and beauty industries, popular psychology, all seized on women's yearning for independence and equality and redirected them to the marketplace.
00:41:31.640Over and over, mass merchandisers promised women an ersatz version of emancipation, the fulfillment of individual and aspirational desire.0.54
00:41:39.680Why mount a collective protest against the exploitations of the workplace when it was so much more gratifying, not to mention easier, to advance yourself and only yourself by shopping for liberating products that express your individuality and signaled your seemingly elevated class status?
00:41:54.180So she's making the case that lean-in fits into this mold, right?
00:41:58.800Substituting solidarity with this individualized pursuit of corporate success.
00:42:04.480I went into this being aware that there was like this wave of criticism for a lean-in.
00:42:09.000I wanted to sort of go into it with an open mind and I read it and I was sort of giving it a ton
00:42:14.660of credit in my brain until this review like shook me out of it. It was so good. This is like,
00:42:22.260I mean, it's a review that everyone who wants to understand this book should read. She reaches out
00:42:26.280to Facebook to ask for data on their demographics, which Facebook declines to provide. And what she
00:42:34.020focuses on is that lean in is not just a book it is also a non-profit lean in.org that operates as
00:42:41.000an initiative of sandberg's foundation and it has like community groups that you can join
00:42:45.840as well as literally hundreds of corporate and celebrity sponsors from chevron to amazon to
00:42:53.120oprah obviously facebook right to be a partner requires no material commitment of any kind
00:42:59.840Nice. All of these power players very quickly signed on to the brand, which really makes it seem like the whole apparatus is essentially serving a PR function. Right. Right. Because you're not trying to hold companies accountable if you're just letting them latch on to your little feminist brand and declare themselves allies. Right.
00:43:19.040We see this too with like John Roberts is a great little league coach or something.
00:43:22.620And it's like, what matters in your life is what you do with power.
00:43:25.900And the question is not whether Sheryl Sandberg is good at balancing her own career with her0.83
00:46:51.280I do think that there's like a version of these types of books that can be written responsibly.
00:46:56.540It's just like, okay, here's, here's decent advice for like 6% of American women.
00:47:00.920On one hand, I think that there is probably enough in this book that it's not a terrible introduction to certain feminist ideas for like a young woman in the white collar world.
00:47:12.800You get introduced to wage gap stuff, to concerns about child care and all these cultural norms that swirl around it.
00:47:19.840But I also think there's like a real danger that a generation of women might be viewing feminist thought through the lens of a billionaire who like when the chips are down will side with her corporation over struggling women, right?
00:47:34.940It's not just that this is an introduction necessarily to feminist thought for a lot of people.
00:47:40.740It might be the sum total of the feminist thought that they are being exposed to.
00:47:45.520There's also such a missed opportunity with these like groups, these support groups that get together.
00:47:50.180The idea of women meeting in their homes and being like, what challenges are we all facing as women this week?0.94
00:47:55.160It's actually a fucking great idea.0.85
00:48:04.360And the fact that it seems like they would be pruning those to a level where, like, you wouldn't have a broad range of people going to those things and you wouldn't have, like, a real conversation about, like, what can we actually do?0.99
00:48:18.360I want to also add before we move on, there is a common critique of this book that I just think is bad, which is that all of this has been said before and said better by other feminist theorists and thinkers, et cetera, et cetera.0.99
00:48:32.960I don't think that Sandberg views herself as someone who is introducing these ideas for the
00:48:37.840first time. She's just aggregating and popularizing, right? Which is a real role that we need.
00:48:44.480Despite the premise of this show, we both actually feel very strongly that like pop nonfiction
00:48:48.760as a project is totally fine. We need this stuff. So the fact that somebody is mainstreaming a bunch
00:48:53.080of stuff that has been around is like actually great. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and there are
00:48:57.200discrete ideas in this book that I think have resonated with the broader culture for good
00:49:02.780reason. The idea that women are more frequently interrupted in meetings, right, was something that
00:49:08.100several people I spoke to said they hadn't heard articulated before Lean In, but immediately
00:49:13.340recognized when they heard it. That sort of stuff matters. It's important. Even if it's something
00:49:17.540that's going to impact white collar women more, it's something that it's a dynamic that a huge
00:49:22.120percentage of women have been exposed to and experienced. And yeah, I just, I think it's good0.94
00:49:28.120that there is like pop nonfiction talking about that. Yeah. Yeah. And also this, this is going
00:49:34.120to sound like me being super problematic, but it's like, you also need to package these ideas
00:49:38.340in ways that men can absorb them too. Right. And being like, I'm a corporate lady telling
00:49:42.320corporate dudes that they need to stop being shitty is like actually pretty important and good.0.89
00:49:46.620Right. Although it doesn't sound like she's doing that much of that in the book, but in principle,0.73
00:49:49.680Frankly, she's not. There is sort of a – what I was hoping she would talk about a bit more is like there's cool research showing that like hedge funds run by women, for example, are more successful than hedge funds run by men.
00:50:04.120One way to think about that is that maybe women are just better at managing money.
00:50:08.140The smarter way to think about it is that women who are in those positions have done more to earn them than men and tend to just be performing better for that reason.
00:50:16.660I think that sort of stuff is important because it shows that this sort of discrimination is obviously real and also has something to say to like elites, right?
00:50:28.740Like, hey, the fact that you are allowing a culture of misogyny in your organization, that is harming your bottom line.
00:50:37.200I like that we're doing the opposite of making up a guy to be mad at.
00:50:39.920We're making up a lady who wrote a good book.
00:50:42.500In principle, a book like this could have been fine.
00:50:45.900One of our listeners who actually wrote that book is like crying right now.
00:50:51.720Talk about a good book for once, Mike and Peter.
00:50:54.080This is the most common feedback we get on our show about bad books.
00:51:00.000So to wrap this episode up, I think we should just have a big picture conversation about like the corporate feminist moment.
00:51:06.480It does feel like Lean In was sort of the peak of this movement.
00:51:09.040And now we've seen a pretty widespread backlash against it from the left, but also, of course, from the right.
00:51:16.340I feel like it gets so much flack, the idea of like white corporate feminism, because the way that a lot of people see it is that rich white women are like in second place.0.98
00:51:30.400Above them is wealthy white men, below them, everyone else.
00:51:33.620And so to build a political movement around their advancement is like very literally the shallowest form of liberation that you can imagine.0.83
00:51:43.280But the thing is, is that you can't fully disentangle corporate feminism from feminism
00:52:23.780I gave them a list of the jokes I planned to make and they returned them to me all crossed out.
00:52:29.860the one of the common threads i got was like all of them were hyper skeptical of lean in and like
00:52:39.940lean in style corporate feminism but they all had like some concern that sort of circled around
00:52:46.720this idea that like you know we live in a world where this type of feminism is heavily criticized
00:52:52.600But if it is not replaced with an affirmative feminism, something that does work for a broad swath of women, then what we're left with is just the critique.
00:53:06.680And if all that remains in our cultural memory is just this critique of corporate feminism, then it's hard to imagine a positive outcome.
00:53:16.640It feels like maybe this just manifests in a critique of feminism itself or a world where like feminism is perceived to have produced a failed movement of some kind.
00:53:28.700Do you have a narrative, Peter, like what explains the rise and fall of corporate feminism?
00:53:32.540I've now read a lot about it. And the only thing that I can say with confidence is that there's like this broader narrative where women enter the workforce and we sort of reach a point where there are a few senior women, but clearly not enough. Right.
00:53:48.400And as a society, we're telling ourselves that a lot of the problems with women's rights are in the rearview mirror.
00:53:57.120And yet we are all staring at a leadership class that is clearly dominated by men.0.61
00:54:04.740And invested in the interests of men, even though it is more female than it used to be.0.98
00:54:08.660Right. I think that that's what sort of spurs this moment.0.97
00:54:11.560We have like there's a narrative that society is telling itself about how far we've come.0.98
00:54:15.760And then there's the fact that you can like look out at the Senate and be like, okay, well, what the fuck are we even talking about here?0.98
00:54:22.820I mean, one of the things I always think about is that at the moment of, you know, the Google memo, he wrote that whole thing of like, oh, women, their brains can't do math or whatever at a time when Google was 80% men.0.81
00:54:34.400It's like the sense of threat among men at, like, these extremely male-dominated workplaces becoming, like, slightly less male-dominated is, like, a very, very powerful force.
00:54:47.280To sort of, like, process the scope of, like, male backlash against feminist progress, there's evidence that opposition to feminism has risen among young liberal men in the last, like, three years.
00:55:02.460In 2020, there was a Pew study that said 60 percent of men across parties agreed that feminism was empowering and 34 percent said it was outdated.0.94
00:55:13.720In 2022, Southern Poverty Law Center did a poll where they found that 62 percent of young Republican men said feminism is a net negative for society.0.99
00:55:26.40046 percent of young Democratic men also said it was a negative.
00:55:31.920Oh, so we're reaching the point where young democratic men are almost as a general matter opposed to feminism.0.51
00:55:41.140Right. What do you make of that? Like, what do you think explains it?
00:55:43.860Their explanation was that this is reaction to me, too.
00:55:46.420Yeah. This is sort of like overcorrection for what people perceive of as the excesses of me, too.
00:55:52.980You mean like two famous rapists went to jail?0.98
00:55:55.100I love we're in this moment where the fucking backlash to progress is always so much bigger than the fucking alleged progress itself.0.99
00:56:01.440You're thinking about it pretty narrowly, but this is a time when we need the Cosby show more than ever.0.98
00:56:24.260The sense of threat among dudes to, like, trans people and, like, feminism and stuff is, like, genuinely the thing that I cannot, like, get my head around and feels so dangerous and scary.0.90
00:56:35.440Some men hate women so much that they choose to have sex with men.
00:56:41.800You're going to bring this back to how I'm problematic.0.95