Before we leave Women’s History Month, I’d like to deal with Sheryl Sandberg and her two books, “Lean In” and “Option B.”
I’ve waited several years to write about “Lean In” — because, to be honest, I had very little patience for either Ms. Sandberg or her book, and couldn’t figure out how to stay polite about either one.
Never mind Sandberg’s perfect hair, perfect teeth, perfect job (perfect career, really, from Radcliffe and Harvard Business School to Google and Facebook)…or her perfect family.
My biggest problem was her message, which seemed to be that, sure, there’s a lot of sexism in the working world, but we women should just buckle down and behave more like men, to overcome it all.
The problem with that advice is that, if we were truly going to behave like men, we would simply assume that what we’re doing is fine. We’d never take advice from somebody’s book — especially not a book that presumes to tell us that we are the ones who must change!
In short — like a certain trick question I once encountered on the logic portion of the Philosophy Graduate Record Exam — the book seemed completely self-invalidating.
Then, something horrible happened. Sandberg’s husband dropped dead of a massive heart attack while the two of them were vacationing in Mexico, and Sheryl had to fly home alone to break the news to her two young children that their father was gone.
Complaining at that point about either Sandberg or her writing felt, to me, like piling on.
But soon enough she published “Option B,” about what she learned from her grief.
One of the first things I heard Sandberg say, in a radio interview about “Option B,” was how important it became to spend more time with her family. At which point I rolled my eyes and said, “Instead of rushing to write and market this book, perhaps?”
The second thing I heard her say was a confession of how little she had appreciated the difficulties of single-parenting until she’d had to do it herself; and how facile and clueless her earlier advice to “make your partner a real partner” must have seemed.
Yes, indeedy. But so now, must we be treated to a new book for every step in Sheryl Sandberg’s life? If so, watch out for such soon-to-be-published masterpieces as “How hard it is to write a book about how hard it is to write a book,” “How hard it is to keep your teens off Facebook when the job that puts food on your table is getting everyone else in the world addicted to Facebook,” and “Gosh, I never realized just how hard it is to make a chunky peanut butter and jelly sandwich when the bread is too soft”?
In fairness, “Option B” is actually a decent book, especially if you want strategies to get yourself or someone you love through a trauma; it contains many helpful suggestions. (For example, try adding just one word when greeting someone in distress. It is apparently much easier to answer the question, “How are you doing today?”)
But even Sandberg’s epiphanies in “Option B” lead me back to my biggest problem with her work.
In her very first story in “Lean In,” Sandberg tells how she didn’t realize Google should set aside parking near the building for pregnant women until she was one, herself. And all through both books, she remains oblivious to problems until she experiences them, herself.
The trouble is, her only solution is just that more women should reach the top — so that, eventually, “half our institutions are run by women and half our homes are run by men.”
She doesn’t seem to see that, even if that unlikely world should arrive, it would still be oblivious to the needs of other, minority men and women; anyone gay, lesbian, transsexual, or otherwise gender “non-conforming”; immigrants; people with various handicaps; and on and on.
We can’t leave things to the empathy of strangers. We need laws that can really stop sexual harassment. We need regulations about equal representation in every workplace. And yes, we need to finish passing that Equal Rights Amendment.
Sheryl, you are one of the most powerful people on the planet; people clamor for your Ted Talks; and you’re worth, by some estimates, more than a billion dollars. You need to do better than this. You should put your weight behind something much stronger.
If not you, who? If not now, when?
