Having read “Lean In” by Sheryl Sandberg, I can testify
that it addresses internalized oppression, opposes the
external barriers that create it, and urges women to
support each other to fight both. It argues not only for
women’s equality in the workplace, but men’s equality in
home-care and child-rearing.
Even its critics are making a deep if inadvertent point:
Only in women is success viewed as a barrier to
giving advice.
It's always fun to read Joan Walsh, "Editor at large" for Salon, a for profit company that does not pay its interns, complain about wage disparities she perceives at other companies.
Charity begins at home, Joan.
Pay your damn interns, then complain that men who you admit ask for more money than women and ask for raises more frequently than women are given more money than women and given raises more frequently than women.
The criticism isn't out of place, and frankly, I think the author of the article is a little short sighted in her dismissal.
Sandberg is writing an article about the modern "problem that has no name" in business today...isn't it fair to say that if she's writing a book, she thinks her analysis has a fairly broad application? Her analysis of this "problem" must apply to women in business, and it's a little presumptive to assume that "women in business" means white, wealthy, and "afraid to ask for more money." How can she assume to speak for a group without consulting its members? The author of the article says sarcastically that Sandberg should just write a book that includes and pleases everyone including the black working class women. The book, she states, is applicable to women at the top of the workforce and that's useful. In my opinion, that's overly simplistic. The issues that Sandberg is trying to address are not simple, and can't be addressed via the "women at the top" without actually distorting the entire analysis. It's like running a study with 18 different confounding variables and ignoring them for simplicity's sake. If you're attempting to make any type of statement or analysis, why don't you allow your analysis to approach the complexity of the real problem?
Additionally, the "problem that has no name," in Betty Friedan's historical coinage, means a problem that is inside women. Sandberg apparently implies that these factors; the social, political, and psychological, can be isolated and analyzed as disparate elements. It's ridiculous to assume that societal barriers play a role that's different from the psychological or even political: the entire point is that these forces are subtle and interrelated-- like a birdcage.
And to close, Sandberg wants to make women more ambitious, more "out of the home" and into the office, less likely to stay at home and "leave before you leave" oriented. She's essentially saying "I want women to be as ambitious and work oriented as their male counterparts so they can see the same benefit." My argument is that she's essentially using a "white male" yardstick to measure female values and achievement, and that in and of itself is oppression. Why the "manstandard" of obsession and aggression? Why not throw out that system and create one anew? Because Sheryl, let's be frank here: even if men are in fact asking for more money, and you get some women to do it too, is anyone going to be "happier?" Does the extra money really make life 100x more worthwhile? No. Striving for the equal paycheck is a dumb thing to strive for, it's not worth it. As PG had said in one of his essays, this is but a subset of a greater problem-- that "superset" problem is that what we're striving for actually sucks.
