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Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
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Chapters 6–7 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Seek and Speak Your Truth”
Listing some of the problems that can arise from a lack of communication (e.g. undeserved promotions), Sandberg claims that openness and honesty are essential to work environments. They're also difficult, however, because the hierarchical organization of most companies can discourage lower-level employees from speaking up. Women in these positions, meanwhile, face the additional hurdle of gender norms that prioritize being nice and easygoing.
With that in mind, Sandberg discusses how she personally learned to "combine appropriateness with authenticity, finding that sweet spot where opinions are not brutally honest but delicately honest" (78). She draws particular attention to Fred Kofman's idea that everyone involved in a discussion has his or her own "truth," and suggests starting statements with "I" rather than "you" to frame them as matters of perspective rather than as accusations (79). She also cautions against couching criticism in wordy or vague phrasing, as it can lead to confusion.
Sandberg then moves on to the flipside of speaking honestly: being receptive to others' opinions. This means not only acknowledging their feelings, but also actively seeking their feedback. She talks, for instance, about soliciting Tom Brokaw's opinion on an interview with him that she felt she had botched. Sandberg admits that asking for and receiving a critique can be painful, but assures her readers that it's crucial to personal development. At the same time, she suggests that it is equally important for superiors to check in with their subordinates, both to make sure that employees understand the instructions they're receiving and to hear those employees' own viewpoints.
To help encourage their coworkers and subordinates to speak up, Sandberg suggests that women be upfront about their own weaknesses and shortcomings. In addition, she says, humor can help soften feedback that might otherwise seem harsh. Finally, she encourages women not to feel ashamed if they let their feelings show at work, recounting a story about breaking down in tears in front of Mark Zuckerberg. The incident actually strengthened their relationship, and Sandberg reports that other women have had similarly positive experiences; being open about difficulties at home, for instance, can lead to more flexible accommodations at work. Ultimately, Sandberg hopes to see the "line between personal and professional" blur as workplaces move to prioritize "authenticity over perfection" (90, 91).
Chapter 7 Summary: “Don't Leave Before You Leave”
Sandberg suggests that the well-intentioned advice young women frequently receive on managing a career and family life can actually be counterproductive. Women hear so much about striking the right balance that they often begin their planning well in advance of actually having children; in fact, Sandberg begins the chapter with the story of a woman who didn't even have a partner when she started thinking about how to accommodate a family. The result is what Sandberg calls "leaving before you leave"—backing away from opportunities out of fear that the work might one day conflict with raising children. As a result, the woman misses out on months or even years of professional progress, so that when she does have a child, she may already be working at a job she finds unfulfilling. Since people are less likely to stick with work they dislike, the net result is that "women wind up leaving the workforce precisely because of things they did to stay in the workforce" (94).
Sandberg therefore advises women to postpone decisions about child care for as long as possible while "leaning in" even more in the meantime. Of course, there are also times when it's appropriate to compromise; Sandberg's first pregnancy, for instance, was too physically difficult for her to feel comfortable taking on a new job during her second. Because parenthood changes people in "fundamental ways," there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and Sandberg supports mothers (and fathers) who choose to devote themselves to childrearing full-time (98).
Nevertheless, Sandberg says, the fact that so many more women than men leave the workforce after having children reveals the influence of "social conventions, peer pressure, and familial expectations" on personal decision-making (100). Citing Princeton studies spanning multiple decades, Sandberg argues that women expect work and family to conflict in ways that men typically do not, largely because it is women who do the most child care. High-income and low-income women are particularly likely to leave their jobs after having children—the latter because they cannot afford child care, and the former because their husbands tend to work such long hours. Unfortunately, exiting the workforce for even a relatively brief period of time can have long-term negative consequences for women, since their salaries drop by around 30 percent after just two or three years.
Ultimately, Sandberg argues, society needs to do more to support working parents of both genders by adopting policies like paid parental leave. Until those policies become a reality, however, Sandberg advises women who would like to keep working to power through the difficult first few years of having children in the hope that their salaries and job hours will improve down the road.
Chapters 6–7 Analysis
As we have seen, Lean In places a great deal of emphasis on women asserting themselves and pursuing their own interests as individuals. One potential problem with this kind of individualism, however, is that people's ideas and actions may come into conflict with one another. Sandberg is presumably aware of this and offers a potential solution in Chapter Six: although she encourages women not to back down in voicing their own "truths," she also suggests that these truths are relative to each person: "Rarely is there one absolute truth, so people who believe that they speak the truth are very silencing of others" (79). Instead, Sandberg urges women (and men) to work to understand the validity of others' points of view, and to communicate with that validity in mind—for instance, by couching statements in terms of their own experience (e.g. "I feel like") rather than as cut-and-dry facts.
Arguably, then, communication is one area in which Sandberg feels the norms governing corporate culture require tweaking to reflect the more stereotypically-feminine values of empathy and patience. This idea culminates toward the end of Chapter Six, where Sandberg suggests that the conventional distinction between personal and professional life is eroding. This, she says, is a good thing for women, "who often feel obliged to suppress their emotions in the workplace in an attempt to come across as more stereotypically male" (91). Sandberg's argument recalls the feminist adage that "the personal is political": because so much of gender inequality (domestic violence, sexual double standards, the division of child care) takes place in the private sphere, many feminists argue that it does not make sense to think of rights only in terms of the public realm of laws and business. Sandberg likewise seems to view the public-versus-private distinction as one that places women at a disadvantage by failing to take into account the "personal," gender-based struggles that may impede women in the workplace; it is telling, for instance, that these comments on breaking down the personal vs. professional divide immediately precede the Chapter Seven discussion of family planning.
Interestingly, however, Sandberg suggests that the main obstacle to balancing work and family life is not the demands of child care per se, but rather the societal attitudes surrounding working mothers. Although Sandberg will go on to discuss the need to share housework (including childrearing) more evenly between the genders, her focus in Chapter Seven is on women overcorrecting for the problem by holding themselves back early in their career. According to Sandberg, women so routinely hear about the difficulties working mothers face that the fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is similar to the idea of "stereotype threat" that Sandberg mentioned in Chapter One, as well as a good example of how gender roles impact women's careers in both direct and indirect ways.
