I read this and I thought immediately, she gets it.Ģ. She gained 70 pounds, her feet swelled two shoe sizes and she vomited every day for nine months. In the book’s opening anecdote, Sandberg describes what a tough time she had while pregnant with her first child. It’s incredibly difficult to manage both career and motherhood, even before you give birth. Here is what I think she gets exactly right about the challenge of becoming a successful female leader:ġ. Another strength of the book is her willingness to admit her own failings and self-doubt. Though she has been criticized for putting the onus on women to forge ahead on their own, I found her book full of careful research about how much sexism still pervades the workplace. The rest are about how women can take charge of their own careers and push forward at a time when gender bias is more alive and well than most of us may want to admit. Sandberg devotes only three of the book’s 11 chapters to work/family balance. On the other hand, she is sensitive to how difficult it can be to raise children while working hard and she writes about that subject with sophistication and thoughtful reflection on her first-hand experience.īut mostly Lean In is not so much about the balancing act of parenting versus working as it is about the challenges women face in trying to get ahead. And she certainly is rich (she didn’t make the 2013 Forbes Billionaires list but in October my colleague Ryan Mac pegged her net worth at $500 million, and Facebook stock has gone up since then).
To be sure, she has more than a touch of what Slaughter calls the superhuman. I couldn’t have imagined “leaning in” while my son was a baby, nor did I want to try.īut now that I’ve read Sandberg’s book, I see that she is much more sensitive to the pull of mothering and how it conflicts with the demands of work. Fortunately Forbes kept me on while I kept my hours in check.
I wanted to do it but there was no way I could work flat out and advance my career much while I was pursuing that schedule. In my own experience, carrying my son on the subway every day so that he could go to a daycare that was a half block from my office, and I could run over and nurse him when he got hungry, was both exhausting and satisfying.
“That was a low point,” she recalled to me just the other day. When Nick was just five months old, a trip abroad meant Esther’s milk dried up and she had to quit nursing long before she had planned. I thought of my friend Esther, who was working for the BBC when she had her baby, Nick, while being required to fly from New York to London every month to meet with her bosses. My assumption was that Sandberg wanted women to tough it out and push ahead with their careers while their kids were young, and to put success in the office ahead of the time-consuming, energy-sapping but ultimately deeply rewarding demands of parenting.
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