52 pages • 1 hour read
Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4–5 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “It's a Jungle Gym, Not a Ladder”
Citing a friend who took a job at Facebook that was technically a demotion, Sandberg argues that we need to revise our ideas about what constitutes a career path. Since it's increasingly common for employees to move from one company to another (or even from one field to another), it's unhelpful to think of careers as ladders to the top. Instead, Sandberg suggests using Pattie Sellers' metaphor of a jungle gym, which "offer[s] more creative exploration" and may be especially useful to women juggling additional challenges like discrimination and pregnancy (53).
Sandberg offers her own career as an example of the importance of flexibility. In school, Sandberg lacked not only a definite interest in technology, but also a definite interest in anything beyond "chang[ing] the world" (55).This non-specific "long-term dream," however, carried Sandberg to her first job as an assistant to Larry Summers at the World Bank (55). From there, she decided to go to business school, before eventually ending up back with Summers—this time at the Treasury Department. After seeing the tech industry begin to boom, Sandberg decided to gamble on moving to Silicon Valley, where she eventually accepted a job at Google despite the fact that other offers looked better on paper. Explaining her decision, Sandberg says that "Google was tiny and disorganized, but it was a rocket ship" (58).
Later on, Sandberg would make a similar decision to join Facebook as COO rather than a different company as CEO. She therefore advises women—who tend to be more risk-averse than men—to think about this kind of "potential for growth" when making career decisions (58).Nevertheless, Sandberg also suggests having a short-term, eighteen-month plan alongside broader ambitions and aspirations. Ideally, these short and long-term goals will complement one another; Sandberg notes, for instance, that while she generally likes to play it safe, she has set goals challenging herself to take risks in professional life, and it has paid off over time. She closes the chapter by again urging women to be proactive and inventive in creating their own opportunities, whether that means applying for a promotion or accepting a job that requires learning new skills.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Are You My Mentor?”
Sandberg notes that talk about mentors has become increasingly common in corporate culture. Unfortunately, she says, women tend to place too much emphasis on finding this kind of relationship: "Young women are told that if they can just find the right mentor, they will be pushed up the ladder and whisked away to the corner office to live happily ever after" (66).
Sandberg agrees that mentors and sponsors can be crucial to professional success, and acknowledges that men typically have an easier time finding them. She discourages women, however, from awkward attempts to force a relationship with the few women who do hold senior positions. Instead, she uses examples from her own life to illustrate how helpful interactions can arise naturally out of working relationships; she describes, for instance, how she later introduced a man who had worked for her at Google to his current business partners at Sequoia Capital. In addition, Sandberg reminds women that many successful mentoring relationships are two-way streets, with the protégé having skills or knowledge the mentor lacks. It's even possible to reap the benefits of mentorship without having any sort of formal relationship at all, though Sandberg advises her readers to keep even casual interactions professional: "Using a mentor's time to validate feelings may help psychologically, but it's better to focus on specific problems with real solutions. Most people in the position to mentor are quite adept at problem solving. Give them a problem to solve" (71).
Sandberg argues that senior men also need to work harder to mentor female employees, but suggests that there are some constraints on their ability to do so—most notably, the "perceived sexual context of male-female relationships" (72).
Sandberg challenges us to reframe the way we think of mixed-gender relationships, but also highlights ways to work around the problem; while working at Goldman Sachs, for instance, Bob Steele adopted a "breakfast or lunch only policy" for all employees, ensuring "equal access" without the appearance of impropriety (73). Sandberg also speaks approvingly of formal mentorship programs, although she cautions that these are not a cure-all. In some cases, she says, it may even be more helpful to seek advice from a peer rather than a superior. To illustrate this final point, Sandberg recounts the story of a manager at McKinsey & Company who said Sandberg must have been sending "signals" to a client who tried to set her up with his son (75). Sandberg's coworkers urged her to explain the problem to her manager's boss, which ultimately had positive results.
Chapters 4–5 Analysis
Part of what makes Lean In effective as a persuasive text is Sandberg's ability to quickly sum up core ideas with a catchy image or phrase. We've seen, for instance, how Sandberg uses short anecdotes to set the agenda for each chapter. In Chapter Four, Sandberg achieves a similar effect by introducing the "jungle gym" as a symbol for career trajectory; though Sandberg didn't come up with the metaphor herself, it still captures her basic point about approaching career-building in a way that's creative and potentially non-linear. Relatedly, Sandberg often tweaks imagery associated with conventional femininity as a way of warning women against passivity at work. Clinging to the hope of finding a mentor might seem harmless at first glance, but Sandberg suggests it is similarly rooted in female helplessness.
On the face of it, however, Sandberg's advice about mentorship actually seems to contradict her overall point about the importance of assertiveness; young women, she suggests, are being so proactive about trying to secure a mentor that they're actually turning potential mentors off. Sandberg argues that this is because women's attempts to establish a relationship are often strained or overly direct, but her cautionary note likely also speaks to her vision of what constitutes feminism. Although Sandberg says that mentors and sponsors are important, her emphasis is first and foremost on self-reliance and independence; she speaks somewhat disparagingly, for instance, of "excessive hand-holding," suggesting that women would be better off resolving complex, emotional problems on their own time (71).It's significant, moreover, that Sandberg highlights so many examples of two-way mentorships—that is, mentorships where each person involved learns something from the other. Here and elsewhere, Sandberg's perspectives on feminism are shaped by corporate culture: mentorship is a transactional relationship that involves exchanging something (knowledge, professional contacts and/or recommendations, for example).
All in all, then, Chapters Four and Five affirm Sandberg's stance as a liberal feminist: she thinks about equality mostly in terms of individuals, and their right to associate with one another in pursuit of their own interests. In the introduction, of course, Sandberg suggests that this view of feminism can go hand in hand with one focused on changing broader societal structures: "My argument is that getting rid of these internal barriers is critical to gaining power. Others have argued that women can get to the top only when the institutional barriers are gone. This is the ultimate chicken-and-egg situation…Both sides are right" (8–9).
Sandberg's discussion of mentorship is a good test case for whether readers find this argument plausible, particularly when she broaches the "tricky" topic of senior men mentoring female employees (72). On the one hand, Sandberg suggests that personal responsibility has a role to play in this area, arguing that "any male leader who is serious about moving toward a more equal world can make [mentoring women] a priority" (71). As Sandberg herself notes, however, the "perceived sexual context of male-female relationships" can make these relationships problematic (72). While Sandberg ultimately urges women to overcome their misgivings and seek out productive relationships with male employers, other feminists might object that the risks entailed by those relationships—in particular, the threat of sexual harassment, which Sandberg does not directly address here—make it impractical to pursue change on an individual, case-by-case basis.
