Episode Transcript
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0:00
Michael Peter, what do you know
0:02
about lean in all I know is that it's
0:04
the perfect book for women who want to start
0:06
a family And also help Mark Zuckerberg
0:08
do some genocides Lean
0:23
in women work and the will
0:26
to lead we're experts on all three
0:28
People come to this podcast for a
0:30
triple expertise You know I I read
0:32
so many reviews of this book But
0:35
I think that there is one thing
0:37
that we can offer that none of
0:39
those reviews could and that's
0:41
a male perspective They said two men
0:43
couldn't have a podcast Every
0:46
day the first two guys to do it folks What
0:49
do you know about Cheryl Sandberg all
0:51
I know is always in the zinger that
0:53
she's like she's like a Facebook
0:56
lady like a sort of number two
0:58
for Mark Zuckerberg and Yeah,
1:02
we've reached I was gonna go somewhere with that sentence, but we've
1:04
reached the limits of my knowledge I don't think I'd ever heard
1:06
of her before this book came out. I think the I think that's
1:08
true of most people She's a
1:10
Harvard MBA She went to
1:12
work for a young Google and then a
1:15
young Facebook She was an
1:17
early innovator in driving ads, which is
1:19
of course how both of those companies
1:21
became Ludicrously profitable, so
1:23
she got very rich Hundreds
1:26
of millions of dollars at the time
1:28
of this publication now something just south
1:30
of two billion Oh, wow when she
1:33
wrote this book she had been Facebook's
1:35
COO for about five years So
1:37
that's sort of where she is professionally.
1:39
She was a big deal when she's
1:41
writing this I think just to contextualize
1:43
us culturally We're sort of
1:45
in the midst of or maybe even
1:47
near the end of this era of
1:49
like corporate feminism There's this sort
1:52
of like cottage industry of
1:54
books and other media targeted
1:56
towards helping women advance in
1:58
the workplace especially in
2:00
white collar jobs, right? Sandberg
2:03
rises to some mainstream acclaim when
2:05
she gives a TED Talk in
2:07
2010 titled, Why
2:09
We Have Too Few Women Leaders, which
2:12
lays out the core thesis that she
2:14
ultimately turns into this book, which she
2:17
publishes in 2013. Is
2:19
it because not enough of them can
2:21
afford constant childcare? Like a decent paying
2:23
job. So usually we talk
2:26
about books that like haven't received too
2:28
much scrutiny. But I
2:30
think the opposite is true of Lean
2:32
In. The cultural and political tide has
2:34
really turned against this book in the
2:36
past few years. When it
2:38
came out, it was broadly popular. Sandberg
2:41
was getting some good press, especially in
2:43
like the business world, doing
2:45
that talk circuit. But there
2:47
was also pretty widespread criticism, especially
2:50
from feminists, theorists, and thinkers. And
2:53
even like the favorable reviews tended to hedge
2:55
their praise a bit. And then
2:57
you get a few things happening. You
2:59
get the Me Too era, where there's
3:01
been a lot of writing and reflection
3:03
both on the book and the shortcomings
3:05
of this type of feminism generally. And
3:07
then you also get like the Cambridge
3:10
Analytica scandal. You get
3:12
the Myanmar genocide that Facebook
3:14
might've helped facilitate. All
3:16
of that sort of washes whatever residual sheen
3:18
there was off of Sheryl
3:21
Sandberg and Lean In. She lost
3:23
her title as airport royalty, parentheses
3:25
derogatory. To give you a sense
3:27
of its initial reception, when it
3:29
comes out, The Guardian called it
3:31
infantilizing. The Baffler
3:33
and Descent published like
3:35
withering reviews. But
3:37
you also had some generally favorable reviews
3:39
from the New York Times, the
3:41
New Yorker. And maybe more importantly,
3:44
from like a PR perspective, she's
3:46
partnering with a ton of big
3:48
companies and female leaders to build
3:51
this Lean In brand, which generates
3:53
a ton of press and
3:56
attention. So even though there's this sort
3:58
of backdrop of negative reviews, from
4:00
very serious thinkers, the public perception is
4:02
just like big hit book, right? I
4:05
remember the backlash to this book happening
4:07
roughly eight minutes after it came out.
4:09
I don't remember the lash. I don't
4:11
remember like people taking this up enthusiastically,
4:14
but maybe that's just like indicative of
4:16
my internet usage. You're too woke. You're
4:18
the person who reads the
4:20
Baffler and that's their first impression
4:23
of Renee. It's funny how she managed to
4:25
capture both turning of the
4:27
tide against this like white corporate feminism
4:29
and also turning of the tide against the
4:31
tech sector. The only thing that could have made
4:33
it worse is if she was somehow involved in
4:35
making season eight of Game of Thrones. Just
4:38
like the culture was not like
4:40
into this anymore. So when the
4:42
Cambridge Analytica scandal hits in 2018,
4:44
there was like this
4:46
final wave of bad press that really
4:48
seemed to just sort of be the
4:50
the nail in the coffin here. The
4:53
Washington Post publishes a piece titled The
4:55
End of Leaning In. The nation
4:57
publishes one called Lean In Has Been
4:59
Discredited for Good. Michelle Obama gave
5:01
a speech in 2018
5:04
where she said that leaning in doesn't always
5:06
work. Whoa. Yeah, when you lose Michelle Obama.
5:08
I'm trying to think of all of the
5:10
other like mainstream institutions that could have turned
5:12
against her like the Gilmore Girls did a
5:14
special episode about how much she sucks. Renee
5:16
Brown issued an emergency press release. Fuck
5:19
this lady. So given all of
5:21
that, you know, I was I was almost a
5:23
little bit wary to do this episode because a
5:25
ton of criticism has already been leveled at the book.
5:28
But then I saw a sub-stack
5:30
post by Danielle Kurtz-Lavin who's a
5:32
political reporter for NPR titled
5:34
One Cheer for Lean In where he basically makes
5:36
the argument that like every criticism
5:39
that's been leveled at Lean In is
5:41
basically right. But that she still found
5:43
value in the book as a feminist.
5:46
And I thought that was sort of
5:48
refreshing because to a lot of feminists and
5:50
people on the left, the book is almost
5:52
like a punchline at this point, right? So
5:54
I went into it with like an open
5:57
mind and after reading it
5:59
in the micro... There is a
6:01
lot of good stuff in the book.
6:03
It's relatively research-heavy. It's easy
6:05
to read. There's plenty of reasonable
6:07
advice There's also a
6:09
lot of stuff that trickled into our
6:12
public consciousness in a way
6:14
that lacks nuance But in the book
6:16
is like relatively nuanced That
6:19
said I think that after absorbing it and
6:21
thinking about it for a little bit I
6:23
do ultimately believe that this is a work
6:25
of great evil upon
6:29
reflection our podcast that dunks on books The
6:36
fraud premise of the book is very simple
6:38
She lays out a bunch of the challenges
6:40
that women face in the workplace and then
6:42
she talks about how women can address them
6:45
Right off the bat. She says that it's a book
6:47
targeting the internal obstacles that women
6:49
face hmm Which really leads to
6:51
the primary critique? Which
6:54
is that this is a set of? Individualized solutions
6:56
and structural problems. Yeah, she will set
6:58
out a bunch of very real phenomena
7:00
That appear to hold women back in
7:02
the workplace and for the most
7:05
part She actually explains those problems really well
7:07
right even though whenever the examples are personal
7:09
to her it it's not really relatable She'll
7:11
be like I was getting mentorship from Larry
7:13
Summers. Yeah One
7:16
of the ongoing motifs in the book is that
7:18
the first 90% of a
7:20
chapter will be like a relatively well-received
7:23
thorough but accessible explanation of
7:26
a problem facing women in the workplace and then
7:28
the last 10%
7:30
is just the worst prescription that you could imagine
7:34
It feels like it came from someone who didn't really
7:36
process the first 90% of the chapter right
7:38
spend a month at Costa Rica Just
7:40
unwinding Yeah, that
7:43
would probably help lots of people So
7:45
the first substantive chapter of the book
7:47
is about the ambition gap between men
7:49
and women She cites a McKinsey survey
7:51
of thousands of employees mostly at large
7:53
companies that found that 36%
7:56
of men wanted to be in the C-suite
7:58
whereas only 18 15%
8:00
of women did. There's also research showing that men
8:03
are generally more interested in management than women, and
8:05
she traces a line of research
8:07
that found similar sentiments in young
8:10
adults and children with like middle
8:12
school boys aspiring to higher powered
8:14
careers than the girls, for example.
8:17
And from there she cites a pretty
8:19
massive body of research about how this
8:21
might stem from early childhood. She says,
8:23
from the moment we are born, boys
8:25
and girls are treated differently. Parents tend
8:27
to talk to girl babies more than
8:29
boy babies. Mothers overestimate the crawling
8:31
ability of their sons and underestimate the
8:33
crawling ability of their daughters. Reflecting
8:35
the belief that girls need to be
8:37
helped more than boys, mothers often spend
8:39
more time comforting and hugging infant girls
8:41
and more time watching infant boys play
8:43
by themselves. That sounds true. That
8:45
sounds bad. Absolutely. And again, the first 90%
8:48
of every chapter is
8:50
pretty good. I'm going to send you the
8:52
next portion of this. I feel like I
8:55
need to do my Elizabeth Holmes voice for
8:57
these, my C-suite lady voice. Not all C-suite
8:59
ladies sound like Elizabeth Holmes. Sorry, Kim. The thing is
9:01
I'm allowed to be 8% more problematic
9:03
about gender than you because I'm a homosexual and
9:05
I'm closer to women. That's true, even though I
9:08
mean, I don't really agree. I think that I choose
9:11
to live with one. I've committed my
9:13
life to one. Technically. You
9:15
were going to keep them at arm's length for the rest
9:17
of your existence. As a straight man, you are actually more
9:19
qualified to speak about the problems of women than a gay
9:21
man. Fair. Fair. All right. I just sent
9:23
you a little paragraph.
9:25
Okay. She says, other cultural messages
9:28
are more blatant. Jim Berea once
9:30
sold onesies proclaiming smart like
9:32
daddy for boys and pretty like mommy
9:34
for girls. The same year
9:36
JCPenney marketed a t-shirt to teenage girls
9:38
that bragged, I'm too pretty to do homework,
9:40
so my brother has to do it for me. These
9:42
things did not happen in 1951. They happened in 2011. Yeah,
9:47
those are horrific shirts, man. What the fuck? I
9:49
mean, Jesus Christ, right? I
9:52
Feel like we've sort of. We moved
9:54
on from this quickly enough that it's
9:56
maybe no longer part of the cultural
9:58
memory of young people. That's shit
10:00
like that. As bad as it sounds,
10:02
yeah, oh yeah, sounds very familiar to
10:04
me Before Lean in came out and
10:07
changed every thanks. These areas were very
10:09
progressive, so she built on as by
10:11
talking about stereotyping by talking about the
10:13
lack of parental leave in the United
10:15
States. Soon, all of these different factors
10:17
coming together and overall it's like a
10:19
very comprehensive, fairly compelling case that the
10:22
difference in ambition between men and women
10:24
is in some large part socially constructed
10:26
frame. But then she gets to the
10:28
end of the chapter where. She translate
10:30
this into advice for women through Amazon. Do
10:32
what she says, you're the one These you
10:35
should buy for your child says. He says
10:37
fear is the root of so many of
10:39
the barriers that women face. Fear of not
10:42
being liked, Fear of making the wrong choice,
10:44
Fear of drawing negative attention, fear of over
10:46
reaching, fear of being judged, fear of failure
10:48
and the holy trinity of the year. The.
10:51
Fear of being a bad mother? Laugh?
10:53
Why? it's flash daughter without fear. Women
10:55
can pursue professional success and personal fulfillment
10:57
and freely choose one or the other
10:59
or both at Facebook. We work hard
11:01
to create a culture where. People are
11:03
encouraged to take risks. We have posters
11:05
all around the office. It reinforces this
11:07
attitude. In bright red letters
11:10
one declares fortune favors the bold,
11:12
another insists proceed and people. My.
11:15
Favorite Reads: What would you do if
11:17
he weren't afraid? We. Also
11:19
have a kitten posters in the offseason
11:21
the same thing there. It's so she's
11:23
in the like prescriptive phase of the
11:26
chapter and all of a and it
11:28
sounds like a script for like a
11:30
Super Bowl commercial for me. look at
11:32
a Facebook frequents hard to create a
11:35
culture. it's like. okay, so she lays
11:37
out the sprawling problem. and
11:39
all of these complex cultural and
11:41
political causes and you're like nodding
11:43
along and then her solution portion
11:46
is like don't be afraid right
11:48
it feels so deeply inadequate after
11:50
you read the first ninety percent
11:52
of the chapter half even just
11:55
as like a matter of individualize
11:57
advice right there is no like
11:59
research about strike strategies for overcoming
12:01
all of these social and cultural
12:04
biases or anything. There isn't really
12:06
research about being less scared. There's
12:08
nothing practical. It's
12:11
just like, get out there. What if I'm afraid
12:13
of starting a union, Cheryl? How bold should I
12:15
be? It's
12:17
so weird when companies do this. Like Fortune favors
12:19
the bold. But like I'm at a job where
12:21
I can get fired for any reason. It's America.
12:24
We have at-will employment. So like you
12:26
can be bold under very
12:28
prescribed conditions in American
12:30
workplaces. You can imagine advice
12:32
that's just like a little more
12:35
grounded in reality, a little more
12:37
practical, right? Here are
12:39
ways that you can be unafraid,
12:41
right? But in a
12:43
vacuum, it's just not really meaningful.
12:45
Like act without fear. OK.
12:49
What am I going to yell at my boss
12:51
more? Like that's what that means to me. There's
12:53
a weird sort of chicken and egg thing too,
12:55
where like one of the reasons why women are
12:57
less likely to kind of be bold in the
12:59
workplace is mostly because when women are bold, they
13:01
get called shrill. So it's not just like,
13:03
well, women need to be bold. It's more
13:05
like people need to interpret women's boldness as
13:08
the same way they interpret men's boldness as like leadership
13:10
or whatever. Oh, we will get there, Michael. We will
13:12
get there so soon. Before we
13:14
do, I want to talk about
13:16
the imposter syndrome chapter. This
13:19
is the second chapter. It's called Sit at the Table. I
13:21
imagine you have a good sense and our listeners have
13:23
a good sense of what imposter syndrome is. Because
13:26
I'm an imposter. Is that what you mean? I imagine you know
13:28
what it's like to be an imposter, Mike. But
13:30
I want to give a quick overview of like the research, where
13:32
the research comes from. In 1978, a
13:35
pair of researchers at Oberlin, Pauline
13:37
Clance and Suzanne Imes published
13:40
a paper about high achieving
13:42
women experiencing the imposter phenomenon,
13:44
a perpetual feeling of inadequacy
13:47
that seems to persist despite
13:49
consistent success. And this
13:52
parallel feeling that your fraudulence
13:54
will soon be exposed, right? The
13:56
paper is very popular, spawns a
13:58
ton of literature. In
14:00
general, women appear to be more likely
14:02
to attribute their failures to their own
14:05
shortcomings, while men will more often attribute
14:07
their failure to external factors. And of
14:09
course, there's all sorts of theory about
14:11
what is causing this. And there appear
14:14
to be like numerous inputs, including
14:16
the fact that women are often
14:18
socially and professionally punished for expressing
14:20
confidence, right? Yeah. So Sandberg's solution
14:22
has two components, one of which
14:24
I think is reasonably good. And
14:26
it's just that there should be
14:28
more public awareness of this phenomenon,
14:30
such that bosses, hiring
14:33
managers, etc. might
14:35
have some context for these differences in
14:37
behavior. The other, the
14:39
specific advice for women is just
14:41
fake it till you make it.
14:43
Okay. Just manufacture confidence, and eventually
14:45
it will generate real
14:47
confidence, which I think is okay. But
14:50
again, it does feel after,
14:53
like after going through an entire chapter
14:55
of like, here's what this imposter syndrome
14:58
is, here's what it might stem from,
15:00
there's all these cultural factors, you know,
15:02
just be confident and just like fake
15:05
confidence. It just like hits
15:07
you as like, okay, it's just very unsatisfying. I
15:09
will say after 42 years of faking it, I
15:11
don't know that it ever instills real confidence. I
15:13
don't know. I don't know if this is ever
15:15
going to go away, honestly. Although
15:17
does anybody not feel like this? So first of
15:19
all, I think the answer to that is generally
15:21
men feel this less. Okay. There's some indications that
15:23
women of color feel it less that actually they
15:26
feel like they are competent and
15:28
are not being treated as such,
15:30
right? I think we're at a point now
15:32
where one critique of this that keeps popping
15:35
up is that we're actually oversaturated with this
15:37
idea. And like, people are like over diagnosing
15:39
imposter syndrome, which of course is not an
15:41
actual syndrome. That's another problem with it. We're
15:43
at a point where like, people are using
15:46
it so much that it's no longer productive.
15:48
That like, yeah, every feeling of insecurity you
15:50
have can be described or should be described
15:52
as imposter syndrome. And also the bigger problem
15:54
is probably that the country is being run
15:57
by people who are faking imposters and who
15:59
are meeting... and shouldn't be in
16:01
their positions. That's the other side of
16:03
it. In 2021, there was a really
16:06
popular Harvard Business Review piece called Stop
16:08
Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome. The
16:10
basic premise is that the idea of
16:13
imposter syndrome has become so common that
16:15
it is now treated like women having
16:17
imposter syndrome is itself the problem rather
16:20
than what's really happening, which is this
16:22
is the output of a set of
16:24
misogynistic norms. The problem
16:26
isn't just that women lack confidence. It's also
16:28
that men are rewarded
16:31
for overconfidence. And in turn,
16:33
there is data showing that overconfidence is
16:35
a bad quality in leadership. So yes,
16:38
imposter syndrome is real in the sense
16:40
that it is describing a real phenomenon,
16:43
but it's part of a fabric
16:45
where companies are overvaluing traits displayed
16:47
by men and undervaluing traits displayed
16:49
by women. You can't just say,
16:51
oh, be more confident as an
16:54
effective solution to all this. Women
16:56
lacking confidence is a subset
16:59
of the actual problem. It's not
17:01
that confidence isn't being valued. It's
17:03
that competence isn't being valued. And
17:05
confidence is being mistaken for competence.
17:08
You don't solve an issue like this by just being
17:11
more bold in meetings. This is almost
17:13
like if someone was looking at hiring
17:15
patterns and realizing that men are
17:17
being hired way more than women, and they're looking at
17:19
all the data, and they're like, well, I think women
17:21
should be wearing more suits. No,
17:24
the fact that people wearing suits are being hired
17:26
at a higher rate is actually an output of
17:28
a much broader issue. When the real solution is
17:30
pantsuits. To be fair, there was a subset of
17:32
professional women who thought that was a solution for
17:34
a while there. All
17:38
right, so let's talk about something that we've sort of been
17:40
circling around. The third chapter is
17:42
called Success and Likeability. And the
17:44
first thing she talks about is
17:46
this famous Heidi Howard study. So
17:48
basically, in 2003, a couple
17:51
of professors, Frank Flynn and Cameron Anderson
17:53
ran a study where they told the
17:55
story of Heidi Roysen, an entrepreneur, to
17:57
a bunch of business students. Heidi
17:59
Roysen. The Real person. They described her success
18:01
and her personality a bit and they pulled
18:04
the students about their impressions of hiding and
18:06
and they do the same thing again except
18:08
the change. Hide. His name to
18:10
Howard Who lo and behold, the students
18:12
were way more likely to view Howard
18:14
as someone he'd want to work for
18:16
as a good colleagues. Yeah, So the
18:18
basic lesson of course is that yes
18:20
Sexism Is it says sexism is real?
18:23
Yes Yes yes. Up and fall of
18:25
pre existing gender stereotypes are built into
18:27
how women are perceived in the workplace.
18:29
Writer with the other famous is is
18:31
is an anecdote. There's also the thing
18:33
or two colleagues that basically the same
18:35
job switched email signatures so they were
18:37
doing the same thing. but. You know,
18:40
Tom became Jennifer or whatever. And by
18:42
Bahasa. And Tom immediately was just like
18:44
why is it when speaking to me That's why
18:46
he's like my name of the image is like
18:48
on a daily like normal ass email. Correspondence
18:50
way that the hostility just immediately ramped
18:52
up by like fifteen percent. When you
18:55
said email signatures, I initially thought that
18:57
you meant like a little quote below
18:59
your name thrown Emirates. I could live
19:01
laugh lot of myself and. I
19:04
should get off. Don't put your love letters and
19:06
years Peter That's why in your emails or office
19:08
consider him Sure Equality time. That
19:11
it's that's what I do. Instead of pronouns, I focus
19:13
on what matters. So
19:16
this leads into my discussion
19:18
of the negotiation gap Sandberg.
19:20
Sites A bunch of research showing
19:23
that women negotiate less often and
19:25
less aggressively than men. One study
19:27
of masseur students graduating from Carnegie
19:29
Mellon showed that men negotiated for
19:31
a higher starting salary fifty seven
19:33
percent of the time and women
19:35
seven percent of the time for
19:37
shit. Massive difference. Other research has
19:39
shown smaller but still very significant
19:41
gaps in. This is another area
19:43
where I think we need deserves
19:45
a lot of credit because the
19:47
idea of the negotiation gap was
19:49
a. Popular. topic in
19:51
academic circles month i don't think that
19:53
it was super well known before the
19:56
book on our other hand it's also
19:58
an area where i think the public
20:00
disk didn't quite process the point. I
20:03
think a lot of people sort of understand
20:05
the problem as just women need to negotiate
20:07
more, right? I've seen more than
20:09
one layperson basically interpret this as like,
20:11
yeah, women are just worse at this.
20:13
That's what's happening here, right? These phenomena
20:15
are very interesting as like a descriptive matter,
20:17
right? Like women are less likely to negotiate
20:19
than men. That's like really interesting, but that's
20:21
not the cause of the problem. And fixing
20:23
that will not fix the problem. I
20:26
think academics on this probably understand this in
20:28
a much more nuanced way than people who
20:30
just hear this little factoid and they're like,
20:32
oh, and that's why you gotta negotiate ladies.
20:34
Exactly. And I wanna be clear, Sandberg actually
20:36
sort of lays this out in much more
20:38
detail. She says, look, there
20:40
are real drawbacks for women who negotiate
20:42
because like, for example, women who take
20:45
credit for their successes are often viewed
20:47
less favorably. So the point isn't that
20:49
women are responsible for not negotiating more,
20:52
it's that this is all a minefield
20:54
for women, right? And now what's really
20:56
interesting about this is that the
20:58
latest research actually shows that the negotiation gap may
21:00
not really exist anymore, or at least is much smaller
21:02
than it used to be. There was
21:05
research published last year by Laura Cray, Jessica
21:08
Kennedy and Margaret Lee, where they
21:10
found that basically over the last
21:12
several decades, the negotiation gap has
21:14
significantly waned and has now possibly
21:17
reversed. Is that the influence of this
21:19
book or are there like other reasons for this? Like
21:21
what explains that? So the trend predates the book. They
21:24
surveyed business school graduates and they found that
21:26
more women said that they negotiated their salary
21:28
than men. And yet the gender
21:31
pay gap in that population was still 22%
21:33
in favor of men. This
21:36
also builds on some research from 2016 that
21:38
found that while there are situations where it's
21:41
productive for women to negotiate more,
21:43
negotiating more across the board actually
21:45
decreases average salary for women. So
21:48
the research from last year also
21:50
included studies that showed that the
21:53
more someone attributes gender pay disparities
21:55
to the negotiation gap, The
21:57
more likely they are to oppose pay
21:59
equity. The I I make sense.
22:02
Yeah, And moreover, People. Who
22:04
are exposed to the idea of
22:06
the negotiation gap are actually more
22:08
likely to believe certain gender stereotypes,
22:10
right? because as they the a
22:12
proxy for conservative beliefs about absolutely
22:14
absolutely. So there's like a real
22:16
concern that the proliferation of this
22:18
negotiation gap idea has been to
22:21
some degree counterproductive. rains. I just
22:23
think that the way that this
22:25
was digested by the public is
22:27
very clearly women negotiate less and
22:29
should negotiate more. Yeah, yeah. Lacking
22:31
a killer instinct right? when in.
22:33
Reality, The problem is that there
22:35
are downsides for women who try
22:37
to negotiate aggressively. Brand women respond
22:40
rationally to that by negotiating less
22:42
than men do like many situations,
22:44
right? Whereas I have always taken
22:46
the tactic of just not negotiating.
22:48
And ah, being underpaid. As
22:51
matter that Iowa I always say what's the
22:53
most you're going to pay me. That's because.
22:57
They ethical my weaknesses. I say I
22:59
work too hard and ever thought of
23:01
that before? This is did this is
23:04
that The truth that we don't tell
23:06
women amount of So you know this
23:08
reflects hapless three of the negotiation gap
23:10
issues actually really complex and interesting since
23:13
is also another area where Sandberg practical
23:15
advice really falls flat given the scope
23:17
of the problem that she has outlined.
23:19
Some tips she. Gets she says use
23:21
we instead of I when negotiate on. Now
23:24
it's word tips to provide justifications for negotiation
23:26
when you do it, because that tends to
23:28
work for women even though it doesn't actually
23:30
help met. This is like that shit from
23:33
four hour workweek ways. I don't say I
23:35
have to get up early, say I get
23:37
to get up early. I don't think words
23:39
have this magical power. What's your alarm going
23:42
off at five and you're like hell yeah.
23:44
Was that where it was? As I think
23:46
I might have an atomic habits I don't
23:48
even know anymore. One book. Michael. It doesn't
23:51
matter, I don't censor books that we had
23:53
talked about on the show. Yes, has. earned
23:56
helmets some negotiating tips for
23:59
women from Sheryl Sandberg. She
24:01
says, just being nice is not a winning
24:03
strategy. Nice sends a message that the woman
24:05
is willing to sacrifice pay to be liked
24:07
by others. This is why a woman needs
24:09
to combine niceness with insistence, a style
24:12
that Mary Sue Coleman, president of
24:14
the University of Michigan, calls relentlessly
24:16
pleasant. This method requires smiling frequently,
24:18
expressing appreciation and concern, invoking common
24:21
interests, emphasizing larger goals, and approaching
24:23
the negotiation as solving a problem
24:25
as opposed to taking a critical
24:27
stance. Most negotiations involve drawn out,
24:29
successive moves. So women need to
24:32
stay focused and smile. Dude,
24:35
I feel like this is so much advice
24:37
to women where it's like that thing in
24:39
Ocean's Eleven, where they're like, you have to
24:41
go in there and be friendly, but not
24:43
memorable. You have to tell jokes, but don't
24:45
be funny. It's like this very, very, very
24:47
narrow band of acceptable
24:50
behavior. That's the thing, is like, these
24:52
aren't, I guess, bad pieces of advice
24:54
in a vacuum. It just seems like
24:56
her advice adds up to like, pain
24:58
negotiations are a minefield for women.
25:01
So my advice is to
25:03
navigate that minefield perfectly. It's
25:05
just sort of, it's not
25:07
super productive because there are
25:09
just too many obstacles here
25:12
to dodge around. Not to mention,
25:14
it sort of feels a little bit gross
25:16
to have the advice from someone very powerful, basically
25:19
be to like, deal with sexist
25:21
tropes, like smile. Well, don't forget to
25:23
smile. This is always, I think, just
25:25
like an inherent limitation of these books, because
25:28
oftentimes what they're doing, they're giving advice about
25:30
how to thrive in an unjust society, right?
25:32
In a society where like homophobia is rampant,
25:34
here's how to be a gay person in
25:36
the workplace and like not have like slurs
25:38
thrown at you. That's super fucked up, but
25:40
also people do need advice like this, right?
25:43
Like it feels fucked up to say
25:45
like, women should smile during pain negotiations,
25:47
but we do live in an extremely
25:49
sexist society where like, some of this
25:51
fake fucking femininity that you have to
25:53
perform at work will actually help you
25:55
rise up the ladder. But then the obvious
25:57
critique to advice like this is like, fuck you.
26:00
You're not giving as he advised to play
26:02
a fucking larger problem you can use you
26:04
can't. Thread. The needle in
26:06
these books. Rights, I mean, and
26:08
there's like a rich tradition in
26:11
marginalized communities of like sharing this
26:13
type of advice, right? Yes, a
26:15
lot of like black writers and
26:17
thinkers have talked about teaching their
26:20
kids how to behave around police.
26:22
Get the i endorsing the fact
26:24
that they are disproportionately affected by
26:26
police violence. They're just trying to
26:28
guide their child's through. It's getting
26:31
sort of see Sandberg advice in
26:33
that vein yet. But what sort
26:35
of notably odd about Sandberg. Advice
26:37
is that. Not. Only is
26:40
the advice itself just not very
26:42
practical, but Sandberg is a very
26:44
powerful person who is in a
26:46
position to do more than just
26:48
give women helpful tips right? Because in
26:50
in the police brutality. Metaphor sees the
26:52
top sufficient of the one with
26:54
power in the situation seat on
26:56
the other side of the negotiating
26:58
table. There's a glaring omission. In.
27:00
The negotiation get prescription.
27:03
Which. Is that if the problem we're trying
27:05
to overcome. His the stereotyping
27:07
and bias that appear in individualized
27:10
negotiations. One pretty potent solution would
27:12
be to rely on collective negotiations.
27:14
Right, right? right? The gender pay
27:16
gap there among unionized workers still
27:19
exists, but is considerably smaller, and
27:21
women in unions are in higher
27:23
wages and better benefits almost across
27:25
the board. There is not a
27:27
single mention of unions in his
27:30
entire book when surprise any war
27:32
sad, but just sort of speaks
27:34
to. The. Walls that
27:36
you run up against here because
27:38
Sheryl Sandberg. Is. Worth hundreds
27:40
of millions of dollars. That's the she smiles
27:43
So much in the inner stop smiling my
27:45
way to the top of the Sheryl Sandberg
27:47
story says, this discussion said was pretty nicely
27:50
into what might be the second most prominent
27:52
criticism of Lane, In which is that. Sheryl.
27:54
Sandberg is an exceedingly wealthy human being.
27:57
Yeah, and the book reflects that. And
27:59
there. Therefore, it's not super
28:01
useful for the median woman. Now,
28:04
I think this critique is more or
28:06
less right. The entire book is geared
28:08
toward white collar professional women who make
28:10
a lot of money. Nearly
28:12
every anecdote is about upper class
28:14
professionals. The research is disproportionately about
28:16
upper class professionals, both in the
28:18
book and generally. There's a
28:20
ton of focus on elite jobs at big prestigious
28:23
companies. McKinsey does an annual report
28:25
on the state of women in the workplace,
28:28
but the focus is specifically the corporate
28:30
workplace. And the data is based on a
28:32
survey of employees and companies where in
28:34
2023, the most common industry is
28:36
asset management and investment. That's
28:38
not a survey on women in the workplace. That's
28:41
a survey on corporations. One
28:44
example of how this manifests in the
28:46
book is when Sandberg is talking about
28:48
childcare and the burdens that are placed
28:50
on working women by simultaneously
28:53
needing to work and having the
28:55
social obligation to care for the kids. Which is
28:57
a real thing because of course there's still all
28:59
these bullshit gendered expectations about women having to stay
29:01
home and fucking do everything too. It's like
29:04
there's two toxic set of
29:06
gendered expectations going on at the same
29:08
time. So she speaks about this problem
29:10
relatively eloquently, but I'm going to send
29:12
you a bit of her advice. She
29:14
says, one miscalculation that some women make
29:16
is to drop out early in their
29:18
careers because their salary barely covers the
29:20
cost of childcare. Childcare is
29:22
a huge expense, and it's frustrating to work
29:24
hard just to break even. But professional
29:26
women need to measure the cost of
29:28
childcare against their future salary rather than
29:30
their current salary. Anna Fiele describes becoming
29:32
a mom at 32 as the time
29:34
when the rubber hits the road. A
29:37
rising star in marketing, Anna was concerned
29:39
that her after-tax salary barely covered her
29:41
childcare expenses. With husbands often making more
29:43
than wives, it just seems like hire
29:45
ROI to invest in his career she
29:47
told me. But she thought about all the time
29:49
and money she had already invested in her career
29:51
and didn't see how walking away made economic sense
29:53
either. So she made what she called a leap
29:55
of blind faith and stayed in the workforce. Years
29:58
later, her income is many times greater than the average. than
30:00
what she almost withdrew. Must be nice.
30:03
Must be nice. So to be
30:05
clear, the advice is basically when
30:07
you pull out of the workforce,
30:10
you're hurting your future earnings. So
30:13
even though you're just breaking even with child care
30:15
now, it'll pay off
30:17
in the future. And that's a
30:19
really solid piece of advice for
30:21
wealthy white-collar professional women who either
30:23
have significant savings or a spouse
30:25
that makes good money. But
30:28
this is a complete non-starter
30:30
for almost everyone in the
30:32
country. Normal human beings cannot
30:34
just absorb the cost of
30:36
nearly your entire salary as
30:39
an investment that'll pay off in seven
30:41
years or something. Right, because the ultimate
30:44
resolution to this story is this woman
30:46
kept her job and paid a good chunk of
30:48
her salary to someone to look after her kids
30:50
or daycare or whatever. But that's not
30:53
an option that a lot of people have. A lot of
30:55
people just simply can't afford it. This feels so out of
30:57
touch that I was just waiting for her to be like,
30:59
yeah, well, obviously, no one can
31:01
do this. But you need food and shelter. I
31:03
mean, does she even make, I guess, perfunctory mention
31:05
of like, well, not everybody can afford to do
31:07
this? I don't remember if she does it in
31:10
this part of the book, but there are several
31:12
parts of the book where she sort of gives
31:14
these little asides. Not everyone can do this. This
31:16
won't work for everybody. This is easier for certain
31:18
people. She has this sort of flickering
31:21
awareness that this is unusual
31:24
and that most people can't live like this. But
31:26
she is never able to actually provide advice
31:29
to people who can't do this stuff.
31:31
One of the best portions of the
31:33
book is when she is talking about
31:35
what women should demand of their partners. Essentially
31:37
saying that men need to be responsible
31:39
in the home if women are going
31:41
to succeed in the workplace. There needs
31:43
to be division of labor at home. This
31:46
makes perfect sense. You read this as a
31:48
personal attack. What about the shelves? What about
31:50
the nation's shelves? I
31:52
think this stands out because it's one of
31:54
the few times that she seems to be
31:56
asking something of men in the book. Okay.
31:59
But something interesting. that Bell Hooks
32:01
pointed out in her critique. Bell Hooks,
32:03
of course, the late
32:05
great feminist theorist, is
32:07
that Sandberg admits offhand that
32:09
her husband handles their finances.
32:12
Now I don't entirely know what it means to handle
32:15
the finances when you're worth hundreds of
32:17
millions of dollars. Yeah, he has two calls a
32:19
year with their finance guy. Right, just like shooting
32:21
emails to the accountant or whatever. But
32:24
what Hooks says is that this is actually
32:26
a dangerous message to send to people who
32:28
aren't rich because what Hooks and other feminist
32:30
theorists and activists have been saying for a long time
32:33
is that independence for women requires
32:35
control of money. There's been a
32:37
ton written about this, but in
32:39
short, part of what perpetuates the
32:41
subjugation of women is that within
32:43
family units, men control the money,
32:46
which helps them dictate how families operate,
32:49
can pressure women to remain in bad
32:51
and abusive relationships, et cetera, et cetera.
32:54
So this is sort of like a niche critique, but
32:56
I found it very telling because not
32:59
only is Sandberg just a little too
33:01
rich to give practical advice about this,
33:03
but it feels like she hasn't engaged
33:05
with the literature quite to the degree
33:07
that you would want from someone who
33:09
is giving, who's on
33:12
a stage talking to all women in her
33:14
own mind. The thing, the only response to
33:16
rich people giving financial advice like this is
33:18
to just be like, how much does a
33:20
banana cost? When rich people
33:22
talk about financial management, dealing with
33:24
our personal finances, it's a totally
33:27
different experience than poor
33:29
people dealing with their finances. It's
33:31
like one of them is like, should we do like
33:33
an index fund or like a target date mutual fund?
33:35
It's though it's like dealing with structuring
33:37
of excess. There's a disconnect with
33:40
the ultra rich that like
33:42
no amount of thoughtfulness is ever
33:44
going to bridge. The way that
33:46
Sheryl Sandberg exists day to day
33:49
is so different from a working
33:51
class woman. She can't
33:53
process what their lives are like
33:55
in any meaningful way. As opposed
33:57
to male podcasters. I
34:01
I did the work of talking to several
34:04
women. Okay, I talked I talked to like
34:06
seven women about this book Okay, that's more
34:08
than you've talked to in years I'm
34:11
just saying this for an iron why I'm being mean I'm
34:16
giving you shit about this as if as if
34:18
as if gay men are better than straight
34:20
men on this But gay men are misogynistic
34:22
as fuck like it's so they think that
34:24
it's like funny to be misogynistic and they're so
34:26
fucking gross So like I am NOT
34:29
speaking from a group with like a
34:31
great track record on this No, like
34:33
I like I said earlier you are
34:35
inherently more problematic in that you chose
34:37
to abandon the
34:41
Traditional male-female dynamic and
34:43
just have gay sex for the rest of your
34:45
life I like that we're fighting over which one
34:47
of us is like slightly less problematic for talking
34:49
about this Like are we level 9 or level
34:51
10 bad right doing this episode? That's the key
34:54
to winning the trust of our audience It's
34:57
fighting over who's less qualified Demographically
35:00
so Sandberg does seem to be somewhat
35:02
aware that this is all really for
35:04
rich women But she never fully admits
35:07
it and she uses a ton of
35:09
rhetoric that makes it seem like her
35:11
concern is all women But then when
35:13
she like really zones in it's about
35:15
white-collar professionals, right? Right her introductory chapter
35:17
has a bunch of stats about the
35:19
wage gap and she says quote My
35:21
intention is to offer advice that will
35:23
resonate with women in a broad range
35:25
of circumstances But in the
35:28
same paragraph she says I believe that
35:30
female leaders are key to the solution
35:32
If you recall that was also like
35:34
the focus of her TED talk. Why
35:37
aren't there more female leaders? It's all
35:39
leadership oriented more than one reviewer has
35:41
called this trickle-down feminism Which
35:43
I wrote down I wrote down I thought of that I was
35:45
like Oh trickle-down feminism and I thought I was the most clever
35:48
person in the world I'm the I'm
35:50
the thousandth person to describe
35:52
it that way We just did the episode
35:54
on the Claudine gay plagiarism scandal. It
35:56
sounds like you plagiarized someone else Peter
36:00
post. One of the core problems with
36:02
this book is that it's
36:04
not entirely clear that this actually works,
36:06
that the presence of women in leadership
36:09
results in better results for women
36:11
like across an organization. The
36:13
research on this is really interesting. For
36:15
example, there's recent research showing that
36:17
a female CEO is actually less
36:20
likely to promote women into senior
36:22
management. Yeah. There's a study
36:24
from a few years back showing that there's an
36:26
implicit quota for women in senior management, meaning that,
36:28
and I'm quoting them, the presence of
36:30
a woman on a top management
36:32
team reduces the likelihood that another woman
36:34
occupies a position on that team. I've
36:37
heard enough. We need more male CEOs in this country. You
36:41
can also see this implied a bit by
36:43
the McKinsey Women in the Workplace data, because
36:45
since 2015, there has been a 65% increase
36:47
in the number of women in the C-suite
36:49
at the surveyed
36:54
companies, but 7% to
36:57
8% increases in the number of
36:59
women in entry-level and managerial positions. This
37:01
is something we've talked about for various
37:03
other topics too, that representation is obviously
37:05
a necessary condition, but it's not a sufficient
37:08
condition. I think it's also important that maybe
37:10
what's happening is that companies know that it
37:12
looks good to have a higher percentage of
37:14
women in the C-suite, so they pluck some
37:17
out of senior leadership, and then they're like,
37:19
all right, job's done. Some
37:21
interesting qualifiers here. There's a good
37:23
amount of evidence that a lot
37:26
of these patterns change
37:28
based on circumstance. Women
37:30
aren't just like innately opposed to hiring
37:32
other women, right? One study
37:34
found that women in prestigious positions are
37:36
much less likely to hire other
37:38
women, but women in less prestigious
37:41
positions are actually more likely to
37:43
hire women than men. That
37:46
same study found that on teams
37:48
that are majority female, the bias
37:50
functionally drops away, and they
37:52
just hire other women at about a 50% rate,
37:55
which indicates that what's happening is
37:57
possibly that women in leadership positions
37:59
often avoid. avoid hiring other women
38:01
because they perceive an implied quota
38:03
for women in leadership, right? And
38:06
they don't want to hire their own direct competition. But once
38:08
there are more women on the team, they
38:10
get more comfortable, that perception goes away, and
38:13
their bias falls off completely and they just
38:15
start hiring women at a normal rate. So
38:18
Sandberg is sort of like half right here
38:20
maybe. The presence of women in leadership, once
38:22
it reaches a critical mass, might get more
38:24
women in leadership. There's not a
38:26
ton of evidence that it will just naturally
38:28
trickle down the ladder to more junior roles
38:30
either. There's also companies where the few
38:32
women who are in management positions, there's
38:34
so much friction and so much bullshit
38:36
that you have to deal with as
38:38
like one of the few women in
38:40
the C-suite that those women get driven
38:43
out. One
38:45
of my best friends in Seattle is like a
38:47
middle manager at a large tech company and she
38:49
is always the only woman in the room. And
38:52
having like having to be the one who
38:54
raises her hand and says like, I don't
38:56
think this is addressing like female users every
38:59
fucking meeting. And then she has all these like
39:01
phone calls of people being like, we need a woman's perspective,
39:03
can you be in this meeting? And she's like, I have to
39:05
do my actual job too. So like,
39:07
yeah, reaching that saturation point can take
39:09
an extremely long time and kind of goes and
39:12
fits and starts and can be really hard on
39:14
the women who have to actually do it. There's
39:17
also an argument that this is just
39:19
too far downstream of the real problem,
39:21
which is that women are getting pushed
39:23
out in the middle because they're being
39:25
forced to choose between their families and
39:28
a job, right? Because we are
39:30
not facilitating a world where women
39:32
can have a child
39:34
and maintain their position at work.
39:37
That pushes women in their like 20s and
39:39
30s especially down the ladder a bit.
39:42
And then 20 years later, there aren't
39:44
going to be as many women in
39:46
senior management. The men
39:48
are sort of just at this advantage that
39:51
is the result of all these cultural and
39:53
political norms. And well,
39:55
how do you address that? A,
39:57
by shifting those cultural norms, which I think
39:59
Sandburg probably recognizes and doesn't
40:01
recognize, B, extensive
40:04
family leave policies perhaps, right?
40:07
Yeah. And Sandberg does, I mean,
40:09
she talks about family leave and the importance of
40:11
it. The policies at Facebook were sort of industry
40:13
leading for a bit. So I
40:15
don't want to say that she deserves no credit
40:17
there, but I do think that the
40:20
actual solution from a policy perspective
40:22
is much more comprehensive than someone
40:24
like Sandberg is willing to
40:26
accept. There's a related
40:28
criticism of the book related
40:30
to Sandberg's elitism that
40:33
was made really forcefully by
40:35
Susan Faludi, famous author
40:38
wrote Backlash. She
40:41
wrote this review for The Baffler right after the book came
40:43
out. And the idea is
40:45
that this book is in effect an
40:47
act of corporate PR and
40:49
one that mirrors a long history
40:52
of efforts to co-opt the aesthetics
40:54
and rhetoric of feminism and liberation
40:56
in the service of consumerism and
40:58
capitalism. Yeah, here at Facebook, here's
41:01
our posters. Absolutely. That one line
41:03
like took me out of a
41:05
stupor when I was reading it. All right,
41:08
I'm going to send you a quote. She
41:10
is talking here about how in the 1920s
41:13
when there were these nascent women's
41:15
movements, they were undermined
41:17
by consumerism. The rising new forces
41:19
of consumer manipulation, mass media,
41:22
mass entertainment, national advertising, the
41:24
fashion and beauty industries, popular psychology,
41:26
all seized on women's yearning for
41:28
independence and equality and redirected them
41:30
to the marketplace. Over and
41:33
over, mass merchandisers promised women an
41:35
air-sats version of emancipation, the fulfillment
41:37
of individual and aspirational desire. Wime
41:39
out a collective protest against the
41:41
exploitations of the workplace when it was so
41:44
much more gratifying, not to mention easier, to advance
41:46
yourself and only yourself by shopping
41:48
for liberating products that express your
41:50
individuality and signaled your seemingly elevated
41:53
class status. So she's making the
41:55
case that Lean In fits into
41:57
this mold, right? Substituting solid air.
42:00
clarity with this individualized
42:02
pursuit of corporate success.
42:04
I went into this being aware that there was
42:07
like this wave of criticism for Lean In. I
42:09
wanted to sort of go into it with an open
42:11
mind and I read it and I was sort of
42:13
giving it a ton of credit in my brain until
42:16
this review like shook
42:19
me out of it. It was so good.
42:21
This is like, I mean, it's a review
42:23
that everyone who wants to understand this book
42:25
should read. She reaches out to Facebook to
42:27
ask for data on their
42:30
demographics, which Facebook declines to
42:32
provide. And what she focuses on
42:35
is that Lean In is not just
42:37
a book, it is also a nonprofit,
42:40
leanin.org, that operates as an initiative of
42:42
Sandberg's Foundation. And it has
42:44
like community groups that you can
42:47
join as well as literally hundreds
42:49
of corporate and celebrity sponsors from
42:51
Chevron to Amazon to Oprah, obviously
42:54
Facebook, right? To be a partner
42:57
requires no material commitment of any
42:59
kind. All of these
43:01
power players very quickly signed
43:03
onto the brand, which really makes it
43:06
seem like the whole apparatus is essentially
43:08
serving a PR function, right? Because you're
43:10
not trying to hold companies accountable if
43:12
you're just letting them latch on to
43:14
your little feminist brand and declare themselves
43:16
allies, right? We see this too, but
43:18
like John Roberts is a great little
43:20
lead coach or something. And it's
43:23
like, what matters in your life is what you do
43:25
with power. And the question is not whether
43:27
Sheryl Sandberg is good at balancing her own
43:29
career with her own personal life. It's like,
43:31
what has she done with the immense
43:34
power that she has? And like, has
43:36
Facebook been a force for
43:38
gender equality on the world writ large?
43:40
The sort of like sum total of
43:43
Facebook's contribution to material feminism
43:46
is a slightly more generous
43:48
leave policy than most
43:50
of their tech counterparts. That's it.
43:53
When Chevron can very
43:55
safely align themselves with Lean In,
43:57
what's happening is that Lean In,
43:59
it's asking very little of Chevron
44:01
because it's placing the burden on
44:04
women themselves, right? You
44:06
know, recall the annual McKinsey Women in
44:08
the Workplace report. That report
44:10
is now done in partnership with
44:12
leanin.org. Oh, nice. I didn't
44:14
know it was still around. Oh, yeah, it's around.
44:16
Okay. To sort of give some color to
44:18
this. In 2019, a
44:21
Facebook employee, a mother who had just
44:23
had her third child, asked Facebook if
44:25
she could work part-time from home while
44:27
her baby was still young. They
44:29
said no. She said, okay,
44:31
what about unpaid leave? They
44:34
said no again. So she
44:36
resigned and she left a very
44:38
public post on the internal Facebook
44:40
page voicing her displeasure, which
44:43
got so much attention that Sheryl Sandberg
44:45
herself responded to say that this is
44:47
all stuff they want to do but
44:49
can't do right now. This is a
44:51
company that, of course, the very next
44:53
year when COVID hit, successfully went fully
44:56
remote, just like everyone else. It
44:58
also has invested $50 billion
45:00
in the metaverse since this all
45:03
went down. I was wondering if you were going
45:05
to bring that up. You're like, this
45:07
motherfucker doesn't have legs. Right. The
45:10
idea that they couldn't have done part-time
45:12
remote work for a limited time for
45:14
new mothers. Come the fuck on. Yeah.
45:17
Right. Give me a fucking break. Yeah.
45:20
It's just not true. It's a choice that
45:22
they're making. They're choosing to light billions of
45:24
dollars on fire on the dumbest idea in
45:27
human history instead of doing this. Right? This
45:29
is like the bare minimum if you care
45:31
about this issue. But the
45:33
good news, ladies, you can get
45:35
unpaid leave in the metaverse. There
45:38
will be a virtual job with all
45:40
the benefits that you dream of. I
45:45
will say the later chapters of this book
45:47
where Sandberg opens up, usually the later chapters
45:49
of our books are the worst because it's
45:51
just the shit that gets shuffled to
45:54
the later chapters. In
45:56
Sandberg's case, I would say they're like
45:59
the least researched. heavy, they haven't resonated
46:01
as much in the public consciousness, but
46:03
they contain a lot of like the
46:05
sort of personal anecdotes that make her
46:07
seem a little more likable, stories of
46:09
her navigating through the business world in
46:11
different ways. Again, there's a little too
46:13
much Larry Summers for my taste, but
46:15
when she's speaking a little more openly
46:17
about just like, you know, how it
46:19
felt to be a woman in the
46:21
workplace, this is something I heard from
46:23
a couple of women I talked to,
46:25
that there are more points of friction for
46:28
women than men in the workplace. And that steadily
46:30
drags on them over the course of their lives.
46:32
And it's sort of proof to all
46:35
women that like, this is a
46:37
rot that stretches all the way up
46:39
into the upper classes, right? Right, right.
46:41
If a woman who is worth hundreds
46:43
of millions of dollars is
46:45
still like, damn, this is the shit is
46:47
sexist, then it really does never end. There's
46:50
no escape. Right. I
46:52
do think that there's like a version of these
46:54
types of books that can be written responsibly. It's
46:57
just like, okay, here's decent advice for like 6%
46:59
of American women. On
47:01
one hand, I think that there is probably
47:03
enough in this book that it's not a
47:06
terrible introduction to certain feminist ideas
47:08
for like a young woman in
47:10
the white collar world. You get
47:13
introduced to wage gap stuff, to
47:15
concerns about childcare and all these
47:17
cultural norms that swirl around it.
47:21
I also think there's like a real
47:23
danger that a generation of women might
47:26
be viewing feminist thought through the
47:28
lens of a billionaire who like,
47:30
when the chips are down, will
47:32
side with her corporation over struggling
47:34
women, right? It's not just that
47:36
this is an introduction necessarily to
47:39
feminist thought for a lot of people. It
47:41
might be the sum total of the feminist thought that they are
47:43
being exposed to. Yeah.
47:46
There's also such a missed opportunity with these like
47:48
groups, these support groups that get together. The
47:50
idea of women meeting in their homes, I mean like
47:52
what challenges are we all facing as women this week?
47:55
It's actually a fucking great idea. That's awesome.
47:57
But it's like, oh, sponsored, like Chevron
47:59
presents. Wednesday meetings at
48:01
Marlene's house, it's like super
48:03
fucked up. And the fact that it seems like
48:06
they would be pruning those to a
48:08
level where like you wouldn't have
48:10
a broad range of people going to those
48:12
things and you wouldn't have like a
48:14
real conversation about like what can we
48:16
actually do. Right. I
48:18
want to also add before we move on,
48:20
there is a common critique of this book
48:23
that I just think is bad, which is
48:25
that all of this has been said before
48:27
and said better by other feminist thinkers,
48:30
etc, etc. That's definitely true.
48:33
I don't think that Sandberg views herself
48:35
as someone who is introducing these ideas
48:37
for the first time. He's just aggregating
48:40
and popularizing, right, which is a real
48:42
role that we need. Despite the premise
48:44
of this show, we both actually feel
48:46
very strongly that like pop nonfiction as a project
48:49
is totally fine. We need this stuff. So the
48:51
fact that somebody is mainstreaming a bunch of stuff
48:53
that has been around is like actually great. Yeah,
48:55
absolutely. I mean, and there are
48:57
discrete ideas in this book that I
48:59
think have resonated with the broader culture
49:01
for good reason. The idea that women
49:04
are more frequently interrupted in meetings, right,
49:06
was something that several people I spoke
49:08
to said they hadn't heard
49:10
articulated before lean in, but immediately recognized
49:12
when they heard it. Yeah, that sort
49:15
of stuff matters. It's important, even
49:17
if it's something that's going to impact white collar
49:19
women more, it's something that it's a dynamic that
49:21
a huge percentage of women have
49:24
been exposed to and experienced. And yeah,
49:26
I just, I think it's good that there
49:29
is like pop nonfiction talking about
49:31
that. Yeah, yeah. And also, this
49:34
sounds like me being super problematic, but it's like, you
49:36
also need to package these ideas in ways that
49:38
men can absorb them to, right, and being like,
49:41
I'm a corporate lady telling corporate dudes that
49:43
they need to stop being shitty is like
49:45
actually pretty important and good, right? Although it doesn't sound
49:47
like she's doing that much of that in the book, but
49:49
in principle, frankly, she's not there. There is something there is
49:51
sort of a, what I was hoping she would
49:53
talk about a bit more is like, there's
49:55
cool research showing that like hedge
49:58
funds run by women, for example. are
50:00
more successful than hedge funds run
50:02
by men. One way to think
50:05
about that is that maybe women are just better at managing
50:07
money. The smarter way to think
50:09
about it is that women who are in
50:11
those positions have done more to earn them
50:13
than men and tend to just be performing
50:16
better for that reason. I think that sort
50:18
of stuff is important because it shows
50:21
that this sort of discrimination
50:23
is obviously real and also
50:25
has something to say to
50:27
like elites, right? Like, hey, the fact that
50:29
you are allowing a culture of misogyny in
50:32
your organization, that is harming your bottom line.
50:34
I like that we're doing the opposite of
50:36
making up a guy to be mad at.
50:38
We're making up a lady who wrote a
50:40
good book. In
50:43
principle, a book like this could have
50:45
been fine. One of our listeners
50:47
who actually wrote that book is like crying right now. Talk
50:52
about a good book for once, Mike and Peter.
50:54
This is the most common feedback we get on
50:56
our show about bad books. I think
50:58
we should do a good book. To
51:00
wrap this episode up, I think we should
51:02
just have a big picture conversation about the
51:04
corporate feminist moment. It does feel like Lean
51:06
In was sort of the peak of this
51:08
movement. Now we've seen a
51:11
pretty widespread backlash against it
51:13
from the left, but also, of course, from
51:16
the right. I feel like it gets so
51:18
much flack, the idea of
51:20
white corporate feminism, because the
51:22
way that a lot of people see it
51:25
is that rich white women are
51:28
like in second place. Above them
51:30
is wealthy white men, below them,
51:32
everyone else. To
51:34
build a political movement around
51:37
their advancement is like
51:39
very literally the shallowest form of
51:41
liberation that you can imagine. The
51:44
thing is that you can't fully
51:47
disentangle corporate feminism from feminism
51:49
itself. Now, despite
51:52
cultivating straight guy vibes
51:54
on this show, I do have like
51:57
a weirdly large number of...
51:59
friends and acquaintances who are
52:02
like feminist scholars or academics of some type.
52:04
I could tell from the whiff of soy
52:06
when we met in person. Like
52:08
a fucking tofu aisle at the grocery store. And
52:11
yeah, I was able, like, you know, I sort
52:13
of picked a lot of their brains very informally
52:15
on this stuff. You said, how do I not
52:17
get yelled at doing an episode as a man
52:19
about lean in? This is a conversation I've
52:22
had with my friends too. It's fun. I
52:24
gave them a list of the jokes
52:26
I plan to make and they returned them
52:28
to me all crossed out. One
52:33
of the common threads I got was like, all
52:35
of them were hyper skeptical of
52:38
lean in and like lean
52:40
in style corporate feminism. But
52:43
they all had like some concern
52:45
that sort of circled around this
52:47
idea that like, you know, we live
52:49
in a world where this type of feminism
52:52
is heavily criticized. But
52:54
if it is not replaced
52:56
with an affirmative feminism, something
52:59
that does work for
53:01
a broad swath of women, then
53:03
what we're left with is just
53:05
the critique. And if all
53:07
that remains in our cultural memory is
53:10
just this critique of corporate feminism,
53:12
then it's hard to imagine a
53:15
positive outcome. It feels like maybe
53:18
this just manifests in
53:20
a critique of feminism itself, a world
53:22
where it like feminism is perceived to
53:24
have produced a failed movement of some
53:27
kind. Do you have a narrative, Peter,
53:29
like what explains the rise and fall
53:31
of corporate feminism? I've now read a lot
53:33
about it. And the only thing that I
53:35
can say with confidence is that there's like
53:38
this broader narrative where women enter
53:40
the workforce. And
53:42
we sort of reach a point where there are a
53:44
few senior women, but
53:46
clearly not enough. And
53:49
as a society, we're telling ourselves
53:51
that a lot of the problems
53:54
with women's rights are in the rearview
53:56
mirror. And yet we are all staring
53:58
at a leader's face. class
54:01
that is clearly dominated by men. And
54:03
invested in the interests of men, even
54:05
though it is more female than it
54:07
used to be. Right. I
54:09
think that that's what sort of spurs this moment.
54:12
We have like, there's a narrative that society is
54:14
telling itself about how far we've come. And
54:16
then there's the fact that you can like look out at the Senate.
54:18
Right. And be like, okay, what the fuck
54:20
are we even talking about here? Yeah. I
54:23
mean, one of the things I always think about is that at the
54:25
moment of, you know, the Google memo, he wrote
54:27
that whole thing of like, oh, women, their brains, kids, kids, kids,
54:29
kids, can't do math or whatever at a time when Google was
54:31
80% men. Right. Right.
54:35
It's like the sense of threat among men
54:37
at like these, these extremely
54:40
male dominated workplaces becoming like
54:42
slightly less male dominated. Yeah.
54:45
It's like a very, very powerful force. Yeah.
54:47
To sort of like process the scope of like
54:50
male backlash against feminist
54:53
progress. It's evidence
54:55
that opposition to feminism has risen
54:57
about among young liberal men in
54:59
the last like three years. Oh,
55:02
wow. In 2020, there was a
55:04
Pew study that said 60% of
55:06
men across parties agreed
55:09
that feminism was empowering and 34% said
55:11
it was outdated. In
55:15
2022, Southern Poverty Law
55:17
Center did a poll where
55:19
they found that 62% of young Republican men
55:23
said feminism is a net negative for
55:25
society. 46%
55:28
of young Democratic men also
55:30
said it was a negative. So
55:33
we're reaching the point where young
55:35
Democratic men are almost
55:37
as a general matter opposed
55:40
to feminism. Right. What
55:42
do you make of that? Like, what do you think explains it?
55:44
Their explanation was that this is reaction to me too. Yeah. This
55:47
is sort of like over correction for what
55:49
people perceive of as the excesses of me
55:51
too. You mean like two famous rapists went
55:54
to jail? In
55:56
this moment where the fucking backlash to progress is
55:58
always so much bigger than the fucking alleged progress
56:00
itself. You're thinking about it pretty narrowly, but this is
56:02
a time when we need the Cosby show more than
56:04
ever. You
56:10
know, there's also questions about like social
56:12
media echo chambers where other
56:14
than ours, every podcast that involves two
56:16
men, men, I know,
56:19
it's basically just two guys complaining
56:21
about women. Maybe that's, maybe that's a
56:23
problem. There's a sense of threat among
56:25
dudes to like trans people and like
56:28
feminism and stuff. It's like, genuinely the
56:30
thing that I cannot like get my
56:32
head around and feels so dangerous and
56:34
scary. Some men hate women so much
56:36
that they choose to have sex with
56:38
men. You're
56:42
going to bring this back to how I'm problematic. I'm
56:44
never letting, never letting up.
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