Generation X, Sandberg was born in 1969 and, like many others of her generational cohort, she describes
being “raised to believe that girls could do anything boys could do and all career paths were open to
me.”^67 Yet after achieving great success in her own field—first at Google, later at Facebook—she was
surprised to see how few women there were with her “at the top.” For example, in 2013 just twenty-one
of the Fortune 500 CEOs were women. Sandberg wanted to understand why women raised to believe that
they were just as smart and competent as men were not achieving the same level of professional success
as their male peers. (It is worth noting that Facebook’s board of directors was all male until 2012.)
What Sandberg ultimately decided is that women are often their own worst enemy—choosing to
decline greater professional opportunities because of their own timidity, their desire to have children, or
their lack of supportive partners. Rather than “lean out” by choosing to step back when faced with risk
and challenge, she argues, women must “lean in” to the leadership opportunities of the corporate world,
just as men have historically done. They should be present “at the table” when big decisions are made, put
themselves forward for advanced job opportunities, and demand the salaries that they deserve. For
Sandberg, “leaning is” is decidedly a feminist project. “I believe that if more women lean in,” she writes,
“we can change the power structure of our world and expand opportunities for all.”^68 The high-paying
jobs are there for women, according to Sandberg; women just need to lean in and grab them. She believes
that as women gain access to the highest levels of power in the corporate world—and with it “the power
structure of our world” generally—this world will inevitably be transformed by the increased presence of
women within it.
Sandberg’s argument isn’t new; indeed, some of Lean In’s ideas about how women’s entry into male-
dominated spheres of employment will liberate them can be traced back to Betty Friedan’s 1963 The
Feminine Mystique, in which Friedan described the world of work as women’s escape route from a life
of gendered oppression. What is new is the extreme economic disparity between the world that Sheryl
Sandberg lives in and the one inhabited by the average woman in the United States. As one commentator
noted, “while we all worry about the glass ceiling,” the invisible barrier that prevents women from rising
to the top, “there are millions of women standing in the basement—and the basement is flooding.”^69
Sandberg encourages women to lean in to the jobs that await them at the very, very top of the corporate
structure, but the reality is that 62 percent of working women in the United States make an hourly wage of
less than fifteen dollars an hour, and most work in female-dominated sectors, like service and clerical
work, which offer few opportunities to “lean in.”^70 The majority of women in the United States do not
have the college and graduate degrees needed to enter into the high-powered corporate world described
by Sandberg. And even when women work in high-wage professions, they still get paid less than their
male colleagues doing the same work. In short, it is highly unlikely that the lives of most women in the
United States will be changed as more women make it into the ranks of the elite group of Fortune 500
CEOs. The economic successes of women like Sheryl Sandberg and Oprah Winfrey are symbolically
important of women’s increasing power in the twenty-first century, but they do little to change the day-to-
day realities of most women’s lives in a country in which one in seven people lives in poverty.
Sandberg’s “trickle-down feminist” approach assumes that as the lives of elite, educated (usually
white) women in high-paying jobs get better, their increased economic prosperity and power in the male-
dominated workplaces of high finance, government, and Silicon Valley will eventually lead to gains for
the average working women in the United States.^71 Yet history suggests that this is not the case. Income
equality is unlikely to trickle down to those at every level of the economic structure without substantial
changes to that structure. While progressive groups like MomsRising understand that it is the workplace
—and governmental policies that govern the workplace—that needs to change, people like Sandberg