Should She Lean In or Pull Back?

Should She Lean In or Pull Back? 

-Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg on a mission to reboot feminism-

Kiyotaka ISHIKAWA

Sheryl Sandberg, leading Facebook with its famous CEO, draws the world’s attention not as the company’s COO but as a woman, wife, and mother. Her first book, Lean In, is still on the bestseller list since published in the U.S. early this year. This raises a question: why are we still arguing about women and success although gender equality in business has been advocated for a few decades? Probably, it is due to the absence of a role model who plays a successful woman both in business and home as we know few female leaders in companies, even fewer of them successful as a partner and working parents. Sandberg is taking that place and refueling feminism. Why does she try to empower business women for success, and is it worth trying?

Why women need to lean in

Statistics show tiny presence of women in executive positions. The percentage of female CEOs at Fortune 500 companies is 4.2 % in 2013, slightly improved from 1.4% in 2003, while women make up almost half the workforce and even exceed men in the rate of holding college degree over the 25-34 age group. When Sandberg refers to what or who is keeping women down from success in business, she puts emphasis on the invisible barrier in women’s minds. Females are raised from birth to have different expectations such as “Don’t be outspoken, aggressive, more powerful than men.” Women internalize these negative messages they get throughout their lives to result in wrecking women’s ability to advance into senior positions. 

How to lean in

Sandberg’s argument in the book is that how to get rid of these internal barriers is critical to gaining power. Most importantly among all tips she shows, we, both men and women, need to be aware of the penalty women pay for success. An experiment suggests that success and likability are positively correlated for men and negatively for women. The examinee students were assigned to read a female successful entrepreneur’s story. Half of them read the original one while the other half read the same story with just a difference—her name was changed to a man’s. As a result, the latter group with the alternation of her name came across as a more appealing colleague. On the other hand, she was seen as selfish and not the type of person the subjects would want to hire or work with.  

By showing both men and women how female colleagues are held to different standards, we can start changing attitudes today. Sandberg is one of such women who have been be said “too aggressive,” “not a term player,” or “a bit political” even in the current manners of gender equality. Sometimes, a manager like her at companies receives feedback that a woman who reported by her colleagues is “too aggressive,” but she asks the people who gave the feedback, “If a man had done those same things, would you have considered him too aggressive?” They always says no. She continues “we have to both fight against the barriers and get them out of our consciousness.”

Leaning in is not the option for all?

Sandberg’s argument is based on her ideal of true equality where women ran half of our countries and companies and men ran half of our home. Do women who she is trying to empower really want that kind power, even if female accomplishment comes at a cost? A lot of working women today might feel happy to lean back from their ambition to play a limited role that has been systematically told they were supposed to do, considering what they have to lose when their colleagues realized their success. It is a highly personal decision so no one should pass judgement on this. However, there’s an ambition gap between men and women because a woman is less likely to have an environment where she can pursuit her ambition than a man is, not because women genetically tend to be not as ambitions as men. Sandberg is just trying to see where boys and girls end up if they get equal encouragement, and she is sure about that we might have some differences in how leadership is done but no difference in its quality. 

Comments

A woman does not necessarily need to be as aggressive as a man at her leading position in companies, but, instead, she would be required to have irreplaceable qualities in order to compete with male rivals, just as Sandberg does. The CEO Zuckerberg admits her unique abilities as the only female top executive in Facebook, especially her high emotional quotient (EQ) as well as efficiency. In a meeting to discuss the purchase of a Web-design company, Sandberg reminded her team that the firm’s founder was about to have a birthday and wanted to get the deal done before the big day. That consideration turned out to be very effective in the company acquisition.

Her episodes support that women can lead companies quite successfully but in different way male leaders do. According to data from McKinsey’s company survey, businesses with more women on their boards are more profitable. It is a benefit of companies for women to come over the internal barriers in their mind, and, of course, it is also the true accomplishment of their ambitions, offsetting what they have to pay for the success and even paying off. So, it’s worth trying. 

*Belinda Luscombe, Confidence Woman, TIME, March 18 issue, 2013, pp.22-31.

**Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, Knopf, 2013.