Laying Off "Lean In"

Did girlboss feminism have a point?

DAE women bad????

A few days ago I listened to a podcast episode reviewing Lean In, Cheryl Sandberg’s book about how women can advance in the workplace. The book became the epitome of a very maligned type of feminism (well, which type isn’t): “corporate feminism” or “girlboss feminism”, with leaning in as an expression becoming a punchline. It was also widely panned and criticized basically immediately, and by the more intersectionally minded post-BLM Me Too era it was basically dead.

The book has 11 chapters, with cutesy action-oriented titles, like “Sit At the Table”, “Seek and Speak Your Truth”, “Don’t Leave Before You Leave”. Broadly speaking, the book has three core messages: women are harmed by having to be less assertive in the workplace, women face steep tradeoffs between home and office work that men typically don’t, and even when women succeed, they face backlash. These are more or less right, and back in 2013 saying that was a pretty big deal - especially for a high-profile corporate executive (Sandberg is COO of Facebook). Another positive is that, for an airport bestseller, it’s also incredibly well researched, and contains some actual insight about the why or how of office sexism. But did Cheryl Sandberg’s book make some solid feminist points? Economics wise, of course - you can read a million more insightful feminist critiques elsewhere, after all.

Befriending the (male) boss

As I said above, let’s begin with the first of the book’s three core messages: women are harmed by having to be less assertive in the workplace. This is an alright interpretation of the facts, all things considered, and particularly all “studies published by 2013” considered. What’s going on? Well, Sandberg makes one contrarian point (“mentorship is bad”) and two pretty common ones (“women lack confidence” and “women negotiate less”).

The first point, that mentorship is bad, is less harsh than I made it sound: Sandberg merely recommends women not to seek out mentors, but rather to procure functional relationships across the workplace. Regardless of how much this was influencer by her Harvard Business School mentor having been Larry Summers, this is not particularly true. To Sandberg’s credit, many have criticized our understanding of the mentor/mentee relationship, even if experts do generally agree that mentorship is important for both men and women, and it is especially important for women particularly given how few women are in upper management. Experimental evidence from Malawi finds that, when referrals and references matter, women are disadvantaged versus men, who are overwhelmingly likelier to vouch for a man versus a woman. Similarly, there are advantages to having a positive relationship with your boss: smokers experience a 40% decline in promotions when their boss is replaced by a non-smoker, and a similar effect occurs in the converse situation, an effect that is repeated for male employees of male bosses - but curiously, neither non smoker/non smoker or female/female pairings present any advantages. In the same sense, there’s evidence pointing to teams with a more diverse gender makeup being more successful - and while in some cases women perform better in the absence of men, that is not really a relevant case for the (male-dominated) workplace. Secondly, there is research backing the idea that promoting both mentorship and cooperation as equals would be positive for women’s careers and outcomes, not just the latter.

The fact that women don’t actually promote other women is really interesting, even in spite of “girl power” and solidarity being popular rallying cries. Women who are promoted to managerial positions are less likely to promote other women because 1) their decisiosn are more closely scrutinized, and 2) there is a concern that they would unfairly prefer women over men, resulting in a weird reverse sexism. The first point is simple: people like powerful women less than similarly powerful men, which Lean In shows by explaining that students in a study respected an executive called Howard more than one called Heidi (the person’s real name, Heidi Roizin). Very hierarchical societies tend to be more sexist, mainly due to the style of leadership associated with each form of social interaction. This also accounts for some of the female performance bonus absent men: they don’t feel compelled to adhere to stereotypes as much - STEM workplaces are constantly losing women workers, which is fairly common for male-dominated industries in general, in fact. This phenomenon is so egregious, in fact, that gender non-conforming women tend to be better ranked by their coworkers, at least in the tech sector. In a related note, and linking to the “unfair preferences” point, high-level corporate teams are substantially less likely to incorporate a second woman after the first one is hired, but the likelihood increases and then plateaus after subsequent women are hired. This is especially true if the women may be perceived to be “diversity hires” or meeting some sort of quota, even if no such quota actually exists.

Let’s look at the world of academic economics. Firstly, authorship in papers is strongly sorted by gender, and if you look at publishing records, women tend to have worse matched and less prestigious coauthors compared to men (PDF download alert), mainly explained by women beginning their careers in worse departments than their male equivalents, which is associated less with personal choice and more with systematic gender bias. And while some evidence points to papers written by women being more widely cited, and that women are at a disadvantage when publishing with men, this can be attributed to the fact that peer review is harsher on female authors than male authors, resulting in more rigorous (but less abundant) output.

End of safety

Sandberg’s other claims kind of play into each other: that women show less confidence or ambition, in some way, and that women tend to negotiate less. Let’s start with the confidence and ambition part with a metaphor: many people I know, myself included, struggle with dating for a variety of reasons - not meeting many new people, difficulty with dating apps, being generally awkward, etc. One such example is lacking confidence to approach someone, either out of personal insecurities, lack of experience leading to inaction, not wanting to make someone uncomfortable, bad past experiences, whatever. So when people ask for advice, they’re usually told to be more confident, while not examining that actually the lack of confidence is a symptom of a deeper issue, for example, low self esteem or weird internalized issues or some other thing. Similarly, women’s lack of workplace confidence may be an obstacle to resolve, but it’s not an obstacle caused by internal, personal failings - imposter syndrome is real, but it’s not the reason why women don’t feel confident, it’s the manifestation of that lack of confidence.

One such manifestation of women’s low self confidence was the “negotiation gap”: the idea that women are less likely to negotiate (for promotions, pay raises, etc) than men. This was definitely true in the past: in an experimental setting, women were 11% less likely to negotiate pay compared to men. However, a direct test of the counterfactual (i.e., forcing women to negotiate) results in worse outcomes for women, because women tend to only negotiate when receiving unfair offers, but not when receiving fair or advantageous ones - that is, the benefits of negotiation are caused by women who would not otherwise negotiate to do so. Likewise, other studies found that a lot of the difference in negotiation is explained by personality differences and differences in expected salary for equal qualifications. However, when there is clarity about whether there is room for negotiation, there is no negotiation gap, and when the median ask is publicly known, there is no ask gap between women and men - pointing to skewed distributions of beliefs about the market value of self-perceived competence. Of course, there is also evidence not only showing that the “negotiation gap” has disappeared, but also, that believing in it as a driver of the gender pay gap is associated with generally conservative values. So whether women have less drive or act on that drive less than men is kind of a wash.

One factor that Sandberg oddly omitted from her book about workplace gender relations is sexual harassment. While its actual prevalence is a matter of debate, the cultural climate has become much less acceptable of it in the last 7 years, which is a positive development no doubt: in order to avoid missing out on positive relationships with their superiors, individuals underreport sexual misconduct. This affects both men and women: people subject to sexual harassment are disproportionately likely to quit their job and take a different one, which on average pays less and is less professionally fulfilling. When people are aware of sexual misconduct against people of their own gender, they tend to avoid working at certain firms, but do basically nothing when it affects the opposite gender; in this sense, tolerance of workplace harassment can be understood as a form of gender discrimination, particularly since the vast majority of instances are against women. Policies that incentivize reporting harassment, thus, can break the “code of silence” and promote transparency and accountability - but, under certain policy designs (usually, those that allow for highly public accusations) they may also disincentivize male-female mentorship out of fear of being falsely accused. In economics, for instance, after the MeToo movement (which was good, for what it’s worth), cooperation between male and female economists increased at the coauthor level, but decreased between senior men and junior women in ways that are associated with likelihood of being accused.

Work-life imbalance

Secondly, let’s get onto the dating advice part of the book: women face steep tradeoffs between home and office work that men typically don’t. Longtime readers of the blog know this is something that deeply interests me, and that “crisis of marriage” type content has been a constant source of annoyance.

The important thing here is that women do most of the heavy lifting around the house even if men aren’t the sole household income, and hours of domestic work are also strongly and negatively linked with wages. Relatedly, marriage is correlated with lower labor market income for women even before children, while it’s associated with an earnings boost for men (which is seen as relating to higher job stability). This can be explained by (men’s) requirements of domestic labor from women: lesbians have longer commutes than straight women and do less housework, resulting in higher earnings than for similarly qualified heterosexuals - a gap that is even greater for women who’ve never been married to a man than for women who were.

In this sense, (heterosexual) households, as a general rule, maximize not joint earnings, but the man’s earnings in particular regardless of who is the “breadwinner”, to the point where when women begin outearning their partners, satisfaction declines, likelihood of marriage for the unmarried declines, and likelihood of divorce for married couples rises. The prioritization of the man’s earnings over the family’s earnings can help explain why individual gay men earn less than equally qualified straight men, but gay male households have generally similar earnings to straight household: the reason why, considering that unmarried gay men earn 16% less than straight married men, but just 2% less than unmarried straight men, is that traditional family structures are built for the advantage of (straight) men, who benefit from it at the expense of non-men.

Consequently, there is still a pay gap between the genders, which is largely explained, not by career choice or skill at negotiation (more on this later), but by an unequal burden of household chores: there is a lifelong earnings penalty for women after they have children, to the point where motherhood and its implications account for most of the gender wage gap. This penalty is present in all industries and occupations, and even if it has decreased lately, it still presents a major challenge. There is basically no wage gap between women with no children and men, with or without children, and this occurs even in societies as progressive as Denmark. And, as seen in both the Danish and Chilean labor markets, women with children work less both in terms of hour worked and int terms of SAHM-ism soaring. In Mexico, women whose mothers die drop out of the labor force both in number of hours and in rate of employment, unless they have a public or affordable childcare option, and Mexican households pawn off care work to any and all women in the household in any sort of family disruption. For American MBAs, there is a massive pay divergence between women and men that is mainly accounted for by number of hours worked and career interruptions. In French firms, women have different career paths than not just men, but other women, after childbirth - a “mommy track”. And this is heavily influenced by culture - Germanic nations, which heavily sanction women who work instead of raising their children (the much dreaded Rabenmütter status, the raven-mother) have larger pay gaps.

Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss

I headed into college believing that the feminists of the sixties and seventies had done the hard work of achieving equality for my generations.  And yet, if anyone had called me a feminist I would have quickly corrected that notion…. On one hand, I started a group to encourage more women to major in economics and government. On the other hand, I would have denied being in any way, shape, or form a feminist. None of my college friends thought of themselves as feminists either. It saddens me to admit that we did not see the backlash against women around us…. In our defense, my friends and I truly, if naively, believed that the world did not need feminists anymore.

Now the boring part: is it feminist? Is Mastercard a queer ally? Is this TV show my friend? Obviously, this question of whether the book is feminist is a whole other thing. For some, that the book doesn’t fundamentally challenge the patriarchy as a system, white supremacy, or even capitalism itself may be disqualifying. I would think it’s a fairly banal observation that a billionaire corporate executive might not be too interested in ending capitalism, or that a white woman may not really care about racism. The book also has no advice for men, or a critique thereof, even though men make up aroundy half of the corporate workforce, a percentage that grows as you get higher up the ranks. Still, that Lean In doesn’t really question why or how certain things that affect women disproportionately are that way is an interesting thing to ponder, particularly when the woman writing it is extremely powerful and could, in fact, do something about those (she didn’t).

One initial feminist-adjacent criticism of the Lean In “project” is that it mostly constitutes advice for higher income women in corporate jobs and not for working class women. While this is a valid point to make, it would also be seen as incredibly inappropriate for Sandberg, a white collar professional, to dispense advice for these women. Similarly, Sandberg’s book does not really mention race as a relevant category, which is definitely a more questionable omission considering how women of color’s careers would certainly be affected by misogynistic tropes differently in the very workplaces Sandberg knows so well. And the book delves into relationships and partnership, which again is odd, especially because “partnership with a man” and “partnership with a woman” are definitely different vis a vis the workplace. The obvious counter here is that Sandberg, a straight white woman, may have received backlash for (clumsily, probably) trying to broach the experiences of these communities in between anecdotes of hanging out with Larry Summers. Either way, there definitely was a big blind spot in high profile “feminist” discourse about working class women or women of color or gay women back in 2013 (and still now, too), but the aim should have been to seek out voices and studies about this group, not to cram in a “poor and Black” chapter to a book about rich white women.

The book’s feminist credentials aren’t really all that important to me, not going to lie, since whether or not Sandberg believes in ending sexism across society in the same way as me isn’t really my concern here. The book’s aim, fundamentally, is asking how women can take a bigger share of the corporate pie, and while there obviously is a valid critique of that mentality, it’s also worth thinking about why it is that women can’t ask for more until all those other things are addressed. Addressing the fundamental causes of sexism is, of course, a valid and worthwhile endeavor, but in between now and whenever that’s accomplished, receiving advice about how to navigate the worplace is, obviously, very useful. “Workplaces shouldn’t be sexist” is a no-brainer, but “how can you get work done in a sexist workplace” is still actionable, useful advice for women.

This all leads us for the third message: when women succeed, they face backlash. There obviously is a backlash to feminism, as there is to female ambition as a whole, and the attacks on “girlbossism” are part of that. For many, pointing out that women asking for half of the corporate pie doesn’t challenge that there is a pie to be won isn’t a way to look at the bigger picture, but just a sneaky way of sidelining feminist demands altogether.

Conclusion

Women, amirite? All in all, I don’t really think that Lean In was that good OR that bad. It’s got some useful ideas and an interesting approach and, once again, seems to be actually researched and written by a subject matter expert who is not a complete sociopath, all of which are rare for airport nonfiction bestsellers. But it’s also not especially comprehensive of even its own subject matter, which is more due to the limitations of its author and of the time.