(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Five years ago this month, Donald Trump was planning a Miss Universe pageant in Moscow; the Weinstein Co. was riding high on three Academy Award wins for Silver Linings Playbook and Django Unchained; and Katie King was a 32-year-old attorney, all wide-eyed because she’d just read Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, by Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook Inc. Having the kind of career she wanted, King realized, was going to be a lot harder than she’d thought. “Lean In blew my mind,” she says. “Here I was, a raging feminist and a corporate lawyer for the city’s electric utility company, and I’d never asked for a raise. I couldn’t have articulated why at the time, but I just didn’t think I should. I didn’t want to be a problem.”
King worked for the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga and had long since grown accustomed to all-male meetings headed by Southern baby boomers who regarded her with befuddled amusement. But until Lean In, she didn’t know the facts: That even though women were obtaining college and graduate degrees at a higher rate than men, and even though from age 18 to 34 they were more likely to aspire to a high-paying career, they were still falling behind in the professional world. They weren’t promoted as often. The longer they stayed in the workforce, the less they were paid relative to their male colleagues. More of them were dropping out or scaling back to part time after having children instead of resuming their careers.
“This is the ultimate chicken-and-egg situation,” Sandberg wrote in Lean In’s introduction. “The chicken: Women will tear down the external barriers once we achieve leadership roles. … The egg: We need to eliminate the external barriers to get women into these roles in the first place.” Sandberg couldn’t do much about the egg, she admitted, but by publishing Lean In, she said, “I am encouraging women to address the chicken.”
Five years later, we’re in the midst of a global reckoning as women and men openly push for a more balanced and equal world. With Lean In, Sandberg was one of the earliest to champion women’s concerns, and to that end, she succeeded. In 2012, a year before the book’s release, a survey by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found that a little more than half of all U.S. companies considered it a priority to hire and retain women; today that number is 90 percent. Roughly a fifth of all major companies now teach employees about unconscious bias, or why, for example, ambitious men are said to have “leadership skills” but ambitious women are “bossy.”
Sandberg is proud of those changes. But she doesn’t look back on the past five years warmly. She, too, was moved by #MeToo. She worries about a backlash of companies avoiding women instead of preventing harassment. “We had a lot of work to do then, and we have a lot of work to do now,” she tells Bloomberg Businessweek. “Until we started talking about it, I think people didn’t quite realize how slow the progress was.”
Lean In was a success from the moment of its release on March 11, 2013. Within three months it had sold 600,000 copies, requiring 15 additional print runs. It topped the New York Times and Amazon.com best-seller lists and was the most popular book gifted to female college graduates in 2013. The book, co-written by Nell Scovell, has been translated into more than 30 languages and spawned 35,000 Lean In discussion groups, officially known as “circles,” in more than 160 countries. Women entering the workforce are now fully aware that for them, the rungs on the corporate ladder are placed slightly farther apart.
King took the book’s lessons to heart. She pushed her employer to start a leadership training program for women. She took four months off to have a baby but still answered emails during 4 a.m. feedings. Then, despite all her effort, she was denied a promotion. “I leaned in, but it didn’t work,” she says. “They did not make a seat for me at the table.”
So she went her own way. In 2016, King opened her own law practice and persuaded her former employer to become a client. She now works with utility and construction companies, regularly negotiating with “guys who look like they’re on Duck Dynasty,” as she puts it. Last year her father passed away and she inherited his small printing company, which she runs on the side. She also formed a local women’s law group and co-chaired the economic opportunity committee for the Mayor’s Council for Women in Chattanooga.
Many who spoke to Bloomberg Businessweek for this article have stories like King’s. One woman, in Boston, had dropped to part-time work to care for her young child; after reading the book, she returned full time. Another, in Atlanta, had decided not to apply for her dream job because it seemed out of reach, then remembered Sandberg’s observation that women tend not to pursue positions unless they’re completely qualified. She applied and got hired. Their stories were heartening and pointed to incremental change, but they also had a painfully obvious through line: These women were well-educated, middle-to-upper-middle-class, career-focused, and, more often than not, white.
That’s not an accident. Lean In was written as a guide for women navigating corporate America, and corporate America is still pretty racially and economically homogeneous. Most women don’t work for the kinds of companies Sandberg described. They’re clustered into lower-paying fields such as education, nursing, and social work. That’s why, at a macro level, the Lean In effect is much harder to parse.
In the past five years, the U.S. gender pay gap hasn’t budged. Other countries haven’t seen much improvement, either. Even Iceland, regularly ranked first in gender equality by the World Economic Forum, has struggled with a small but persistent gap, which it tried to close again this year by enacting a law requiring companies to explain how much they pay employees and why. The percentage of female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies has technically notched up, from 4 percent to 6 percent, although the total, 32, is so low they could theoretically be combined into one executive board. The first and only black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company, Ursula Burns of Xerox Corp., stepped down as CEO in 2016, after seven years.
Of course, most working women aren’t trying to become CEOs. If Lean In seemed not to connect with their issues, that’s in part because a billionaire wrote it. Despite Sandberg’s best efforts to strike an Everywoman tone, her advice could be difficult for the nonwealthy to relate to. After her husband, Dave Goldberg, died unexpectedly in 2015, she publicly acknowledged this shortcoming. “I did not really get how hard it is to succeed at work when you are overwhelmed at home,” she wrote in a Facebook post on Mother’s Day 2016, a year after his death. “Some people felt that I did not spend enough time writing about the difficulties women face when they have an unsupportive partner or no partner at all. They were right.”
Sandberg also acknowledged the book’s racial naiveté. Black and Hispanic women in the U.S., for example, earn 63 percent and 57 percent, respectively, of what white men do, compared with 80 percent for white women. In her Mother’s Day post, she noted that 46 percent of families headed by a single black or Hispanic woman lived in poverty. Many are less worried about reaching upper management than they are about, say, making sure they won’t be fired for leaving work to care for a sick kid because they can’t afford a babysitter.
The issue keeping many women back remains less one of work-life balance than one of work-life load. In most heterosexual couples, the woman is still the primary housekeeper and parent. Women in the U.S. do about one-third more housework and twice as much child care as men. (That’s better than in Europe, where, according to a recent study of seven countries conducted by Germany’s Leibniz Institute, women do three times the housework.) Despite broader awareness of the double demands placed on working women, few companies offer the flexibility they need to pull everything off. Most major corporations provide some paid maternity leave for salaried employees. But contract and hourly workers and those who work for small businesses often don’t get anything at all. Only 14 percent of all U.S. workers have an employer that offers paid family leave—up from 11 percent when Lean In was published. And as rare as it is for new mothers to get time off, it’s rarer for fathers, who frequently can’t stay at home to help even when they want to. Sabrina Parsons, CEO of Palo Alto Software Inc., admits she hadn’t considered the need for paternity leave until three years ago when her employees asked for it. “Several of our male developers had wives who were pregnant. They said, ‘How come we don’t have paternity leave? You have maternity leave,’ ” she says. “Honestly, it was a little embarrassing for me. Here I am, very outspoken about women in the workplace and women in tech, and I don’t offer paternity leave?”
Four years ago, Lean In—a nonprofit founded in conjunction with the book’s release—and McKinsey began collecting annual data on hundreds of U.S. organizations, representing about 12 million employees, in hopes of tracking women’s progress. So far, they haven’t found much. “We’re roughly at the same place,” says Lareina Yee, senior partner at McKinsey. “From a statistical perspective, I don’t think you can read improvement.”
One change the data do reveal relates to how women act at work. Among Sandberg’s original theories was the idea that women’s professional stagnation was partly because they didn’t ask for promotions or negotiate salaries as often—or as effectively—as men. At the time, dozens of studies backed her up. Now, Lean In and McKinsey found, men and women ask at comparable rates. Yet even among entry-level workers, women are 18 percent less likely to get a promotion than men.
Instead of urging women to lean harder, Sandberg has shifted her attention to the people in charge of promoting them: In February, a Lean In survey found that half of all male managers were uncomfortable working alone or closely with a woman. On its face, that might seem like an abundance of caution. But for the women in question it can be isolating, or worse. It’s tough to get ahead when no one sees your work.
Sandberg’s goal now is to raise the standards of good workplace behavior across the board. “Not harassing us is not sufficient,” she says. “We need to step up and mentor women.” She feels so strongly about this that last month, at the end of a Morgan Stanley investor meeting, she turned to a room of senior executives and told them as much. “I hesitated because no one asked me that question,” she says of the other leaders at the meeting. Even for Sheryl Sandberg, “sexism is a hard thing to bring up.”
Five years isn’t a long time, but it can feel that way. Lean In came out before Gamergate, an internet movement in which male gamers threatened female developers simply because they made and talked about video games. It came out before a male Google engineer argued that women were biologically ill-suited for careers in tech; before Bill Cosby was publicly accused of rape and abuse by 50 women, many of whom had considered him a professional mentor; before the head of Fox News was sued for allegedly sexually propositioning female employees; before the future president of the U.S. was caught on tape saying he liked to grab and kiss women whether they wanted him to or not; before hundreds of women came forward with stories of harassment and assault by respected actors, producers, politicians, journalists, and chefs. These days, telling a woman to just “lean in” feels a bit like reminding someone with cancer to brush her teeth.
Lean In didn’t gloss over systematic inequities that make it more difficult for women to succeed, but it was a little too optimistic about what it would take to change them. Women still face obstacles such as arbitration agreements, which essentially bar employees from suing over sexual harassment or pay discrimination, making it that much harder to take collective action or prove a pattern of behavior. (Facebook uses them, too. Sandberg defends the practice, saying arbitration is cheaper than going to court, and the company doesn’t prevent employees from talking about their claims publicly.) At the end of last year, a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers introduced a bill that would eliminate such agreements, but it’s yet to be considered in committee.
In 2018 the idea that women seeking career advancement should simply speak up more, stop doubting their own abilities, and start asking for what they deserve seems quaint. But maybe women needed to lean in to find out what they were up against. Now that they know, they’re determined to keep leaning. You can see it in the marches, in the push for companies to release their salary data, in the record-setting 79 women running to be state governors this fall.
Sandberg, too, has seen these things. “We’re going to have to change company policy, change public policy, and our culture is going to have to change,” she says. “We need women in half the leadership. We need men to do half the work at home.” It’s time to address the egg.—With assistance from Suzi Ring, Olga Kharif, and Dexter Roberts
Read more: Women—and Men—Tell Their Stories of Leaning In.
To contact the authors of this story: Claire Suddath in New York at csuddath@bloomberg.net, Rebecca Greenfield in New York at rgreenfield@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jillian Goodman at jgoodman74@bloomberg.net.
©2018 Bloomberg L.P.
