52 pages • 1 hour read
Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
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Chapters 8–9 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Make Your Partner a Real Partner”
Sandberg explains how her own medical issues forced her husband Dave to be the primary caregiver in the days immediately following their son's birth. This proved to be fortuitous, since Dave had no choice but to immediately learn many skills other fathers forgo. In the following months, however, Sandberg and her husband found themselves "fall[ing] into traditional, lopsided gender roles" as a result of the pressures of Dave's work and commuting schedule (106). This is fairly typical: Sandberg cites statistics suggesting that women do about 40 percent more childrearing and 30 percent more housework than their husbands, even when both partners are working full-time jobs.
Sandberg acknowledges that women may be more naturally "nurturing" than men, but argues that that alone does not justify this unequal division of labor (108). Just as we overcome instinctive drives in other areas of our lives, Sandberg suggests, we can learn to share the job of parenting. Unfortunately, there is currently little incentive for couples to work out alternative arrangements; in fact, many women "inadvertently discourage their husbands from doing their share by being too controlling or critical" (108). Public policy further exacerbates the situation by treating mothers as the "designated parent" (107).
As a result, women often end up leaving the workforce simply because they are overwhelmed. Sandberg therefore advises women first to think carefully about their choice of partner and then to actively recruit that partner's help. This can be difficult to do, however, since society tends to punish men who deviate from conventional gender roles. Few men, for instance, have the option of taking paternity leave, and those who do often worry that it may hurt their image at work: "We judge men primarily by their professional success and send them a clear message that personal achievements are insufficient for them to be valued or feel fulfilled" (114–115). As a result, fathers who do choose to stay at home full-time often find themselves without a network of social support.
For Sandberg, these pitfalls make it all the more necessary to start relationships off on the right foot: in Sandberg's words, "If a relationship begins in an unequal place, it is likely to get more unbalanced when and if children are added to the equation" (116). Striking the right balance ultimately benefits everyone involved: couples that split work evenly are happier, and they model what a healthy partnership looks like for their children. According to Sandberg, we are already seeing the benefits of the latter, since younger men are increasingly committed to spending time with their families. Still, she says, there is more work to be done: "As more women lean in to their careers, more men need to lean in to their families. We need to encourage men to be more ambitious in their homes" (120).
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Myth of Doing It All”
The idea of "having it all," according to Sandberg, is "perhaps the greatest trap ever set for women " (121). Since time and resources are finite, every person has to make difficult decisions about where to devote their energy. In fact, having options is itself a luxury, since many mothers have no choice but to work full-time for financial reasons.
For Sandberg, this makes it all the worse that we so often view working mothers with suspicion:
Employed mothers and fathers both struggle with multiple responsibilities, but mothers also have to endure the rude questions and accusatory looks that remind us that we're shortchanging both our jobs and our children. As if we needed reminding. Like me, most of the women I know do a great job worrying that we don't measure up(122–123).
Rather than striving for perfection, then, working mothers should embrace opportunities to cut corners where they can; Sandberg recounts, for instance, how one female executive puts her children to bed in their school clothes to save time the next morning. She urges women to compromise at work as well, describing how one of her former employers noticed that employees who burned out had often never taken vacation time. In her own life, then, Sandberg cut back her twelve-hour workdays at Google to a more traditional schedule after having a child, even though she worried that doing so would cause her to "lose credibility, or even [her] entire job" (128).
Although Google turned out to be accommodating of this decision, Sandberg acknowledges that not all workplaces are and argues that more employers need to shift their focus from "face time" to "results" (130).Telecommuting is one possible solution, but the internet is also a double-edged sword, because it makes working longer hours than ever before possible. Ultimately, however, Sandberg suggests that telecommuting makes the need to set boundaries even more pressing. After starting her job at Facebook, for instance, Sandberg realized she simply couldn't juggle the late hours at work with her responsibilities as a mother: "I started forcing myself to leave the office at five thirty. Every competitive, type-A fiber of my being was screaming at me to stay, but unless I had a critical meeting, I walked out that door" (133).
Nevertheless, Sandberg says, most working mothers are likely to feel some form of inadequacy; she admits, for instance, that she worries sometimes about not providing her children with the same intensive, detail-oriented parenting that stay-at-home mothers do: "I dropped my son off at school on St. Patrick's Day. As he got out of the car wearing his favorite blue T-shirt, [a] mother pointed out, 'He's supposed to be wearing green today.' I simultaneously thought, Oh, who the hell can remember that it's St. Patrick's Day? and I'm a bad mom" (137). Sandberg therefore recommends that women learn "guilt management" as well as time-management: the key, she says, is for women to accept that perfection is impossible and that the decisions they make are the right ones for them (137).
Chapters 8–9 Analysis
Chapter Eight's discussion of childrearing and housework arises naturally out of Chapter Seven's recommendations on family planning, expanding in particular on the idea that the divide between the personal and the professional is largely artificial. Sandberg's claim that choosing whether and whom to marry is the most important career decision a woman can make is startling at first glance, but makes sense in light of the on-the-ground conditions working wives and mothers face; because so many workplaces lack policies that would ease the burdens placed on women trying to balance their careers and family, choosing a partner who is able and willing to split housework evenly can be crucial to women's success. Although Sandberg makes it clear that she would like to see these policies change, she urges women to make savvy relationship decisions in the meantime.
Much more than previous chapters, however, Chapter Eight makes the case that feminism should be of interest to men, too, and not simply as a way of supporting women. Sandberg argues that while gender norms tend to hurt women in professional settings, they tend to hurt men in domestic ones. More specifically, the idea that men are less nurturing than women exposes fathers who want to take an active role in parenting to criticism and shame; former coworkers may see a stay-at-home father as less masculine, while other stay-at-home parents (who are overwhelmingly female) may view full-time fathers with suspicion. In fact, Sandberg argues that women often help perpetuate these ideas by micromanaging their partners' interactions with children: "I have seen so many women inadvertently discourage their husbands from doing their share by being too controlling or critical. Social scientists call this 'maternal gate keeping,' which is a fancy term for 'Ohmigod, that's not the way you do it! Just move aside and let me!'" (108).
This critique is in keeping with the importance Sandberg places on individual choice, but feminists who are more interested in systemic sexism might object that she is flattening out the broader dynamics at play—for instance, the fact that society tends to reward men who display conventionally "masculine" traits like ambition, while simultaneously devaluing traditionally "feminine" caretaking activities. Men, in other words, arguably have less incentive to step outside their gender roles than women do, which is likely why Sandberg argues that we need to change the way we think about child care and housework; if these domestic tasks were as prestigious as working outside the home, men might be more inclined to share in them.
Chapter Nine, meanwhile, marks a different kind of shift in tone, as Sandberg goes from encouraging women to "lean in" to warning them of the dangers of trying to do too much. In part, this sets the stage for Lean In's closing chapters: having laid out most of her argument, Sandberg here devotes a chapter to the limitations of it. In another sense, however, Chapter Nine builds off of everything Sandberg has previously said, because the pressure on women to "have it all" is itself a kind of gender norm. By reminding women that it is not only acceptable but necessary to set limits on their personal and professional lives, Sandberg is advising them to subvert another gender norm: the expectation that women be perfect.
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