VentureBeat » Lean In

Going beyond Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’: Female founders around the world react

Christina Farr — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 15:00:05 +0000

Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In hit stands just a month ago, yet it has inspired a reaction that most authors could only dream of.

Its author is a successful technology executive in Silicon Valley. So we wondered, how are female executives in countries like India, Romania, and Chile, responding to the message?

The book itself, which reads more like the memoir of a corporate tycoon than a feminist manifesto, has been accused by book critics for being elitist. Its advice focuses on all-American, primarily white, mostly college-educated, married, wealthy women. For all its shrewd tips about handling office politics and ascending the corporate ladder, the book has its limitations.

A recent interview by VentureBeat with British entrepreneur Debbie Wosskow, who is also the mother of two kids, proved to be revealing. In the U.K., the The Independent newspaper recently estimated that working mothers spend a third of their salaries for child care. “It feels like we have to pay to work,” Wosskow quipped.

For Wosskow and many other female entrepreneurs, Sandberg’s anecdotes about her billionaire CEO friends and private jet journeys don’t reflect reality. As Jia En Teo, cofounder of a Roomorama, put it in an interview with VentureBeat, “In Asia, women’s struggles are exacerbated. Being too ambitious, too expressive, too opinionated, too individualistic: These traits are nor conventionally encouraged.”

VentureBeat gathered half a dozen women entrepreneurs around the world. For them, “leaning in” is not just a new way to approach work: It may mean breaking social norms. Here’s a sampling of views from women entrepreneurs around the world, in their own words.

(Did you read Lean In? Did you find the advice useful? Please let us know your thoughts in the comment section below!)

Debbie Wosskow, CEO of Love Home Swap (London)

“Lean In has been the topic of conversation among the female entrepreneurial community in the U.K. over the last few weeks, and that’s good, because we don’t normally talk about that stuff.

However, the U.K. has some basic structural issues that make it difficult for women to manage child care and careers, especially if they are running a startup in which earnings are low and risk is high.

Sadly, Sandberg’s solution — and that of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer (who installed a nursery next to her office at her own expense) — just aren’t realistic for most of us. It’s not about hating women who have succeeded. It’s about practical problem-solving for those on the journey.

Yes, it’s true that as a woman, no one is going to make it happen for you unless you have a seat at the table. But this book is perhaps more useful for younger twentysomethings at the start of their career then those of us who are a bit longer in the tooth.”

Jia En Teo, cofounder of Roomorama (Singapore)

“Whether we agree or disagree with Sandberg, Lean In is certainly relevant to the challenges women face in wanting, or aspiring, to have it all.

Women of our generation in Singapore, perhaps more than in the rest of Asia, have grown up alongside, and been given the same opportunities as, men. We were told that we could achieve anything we set our minds to.

However, we reach a certain age, and we come under pressure from family, society, and our physiology to get married and start a family. The widespread perception when a woman does not desire this — or delays the process by too long — is that there is something “wrong.” While we have choices, society is not yet ready to accept, and not judge, all the choices that women choose to make.

Women have not leaned back but have leaned in to achieve what they want. Yet the situation these successful women have found themselves in is that the pool of potential partners is not only small but also shrinking around them as they become more accomplished in their careers. While Sandberg speaks of juggling career and family, and how women have created glass ceilings for themselves? There is the other side of the coin.

It seems to me that women who want to have it all believed that they could — but have found the scale has tipped away from them.”

Ai Ching Goh, cofounder of Piktochart (Malaysia)

“More women in Malaysia are stepping up to become entrepreneurs and are trying to obtain a work-life balance.

Does a major revolution need to happen in order to give proper support to a career-loving parent like Sheryl Sandberg? Yes, and it’s already starting to happen. The current generation is more sensitive toward things like a female washroom in the office.

But I can’t speak for everyone. The Malaysian population is very diverse. At one end of the spectrum are Muslim men who are allowed to have four wives; at the other end, we have an urban working population that is very much similar to large cities all over the world.”

Check out more interviews with the CEOs of Mydala, iSTARStories and ShareYourCart on the next page.

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Why ‘Lean In’ irks successful women — and why you should still read it

Young Entrepreneur Council — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 18:00:35 +0000

I know many women who are irked by Sheryl Sandberg’s dictum to “lean in,” the subject of her new book. Sheryl’s basic premise is that women don’t reach the top of corporate and political ladders because we stop trying at the most critical time in our careers and instead start preparing to raise families. In other words, we lean back — rather than lean in and pursue professional success with the same hunger as our male counterparts.

This idea pisses off a lot of women. Not just women who have sacrificed their careers to raise families, but also those of us who are charging forward with them. There are a couple of reasons why Sheryl’s message gets women so riled up.

The first is that most us are jealous of Sheryl. She is one of few women in a prominent leadership position who have somehow managed to achieve everything – wealth, power, respect, marriage, family, intelligence, beauty, and the list goes on. It’s hard to not feel jealous of all that. So when someone like her tells us it’s our own fault we’re not succeeding, it’s only natural to get defensive. “Who are you to tell me to ‘lean in’ when you have two nannies raising your kids?” we think to ourselves. “Take your advice to someone who has been blessed with the same privilege as you have.”

Indeed, the fact that you are most to blame for your own failure is hard to face.

Yet even if you take all that away, a doubt still lingers. Because underneath the sage advice to sweat like a man if we expect to play a man’s game lies hidden another message that is harder to swallow – that we must accept the rules as they have been presented to us, and play them well.

What if we’d rather change the rules instead? Those unspoken rules of workplace engagement, which developed at a time when men worked only with other men, continue to dictate the professional world today — even though men are no longer the only players in it. Both the obvious rules, like those that tell us the more time you spend at the office, the better an employee you are, and the subtler ones, like the idea that crying in front of a colleague is a sign of weakness, are still in play. Norms like these have shaped a working culture, over the years, which is often hostile to women in both big ways and small.

I remember the first time I cried at work. It was during a tense one-on-one conversation with a male colleague. I felt foolish after leaving the meeting, disappointed that I had demeaned myself in that way. But as I reflected later about what had transpired during the heated debate, I realized that my crying had actually been a helpful response in that particular situation. It had deescalated the tension and caused my colleague to be more empathetic towards me, paving the way for an amicable outcome. I obviously didn’t cry on purpose. It was a natural response, dictated by my evolutionary impulses, which led to a better outcome than if I had simply kept posturing like a man. So why did I feel like I had done something wrong? The “no crying” rule was clearly written by a man.

This may seem like a minor, perhaps even petty, example to some of you, but I believe it is in these subtle day-to-day interactions that women slowly lose the motivation to fight for their careers, and turn instead to that other form of work that more closely aligns with their evolutionary impulses.

I see so many capable women struggling to reconcile their career ambitions with that relentlessly ticking biological clock. Unwilling to compromise on the professional success we have been sweating over for three decades, we lean back instead on our personal lives. We delay childbirth so long that it takes a full medical team just to help us conceive, and when we do finally get pregnant we lean into our work to the point of exhaustion, squeezing out every last ounce of productivity until the baby arrives. We then proudly trumpet a brief two weeks of maternity leave (a la Marissa Mayer) and bounce right back to work, breast pump in tow. Did a man invent the breast pump too?

Truth be told, I think many of us would happily trade that innovation for more flexible work-from-home policies. Some women have a superhuman reserve of energy and chutzpah, and can withstand the exhaustion of early motherhood while steaming full speed ahead with their careers. Props to them. Seriously. But for most of us, the decision to go back to the office immediately after birth is often a choice between the lesser of evils, and some of us choose to lean the other way.

The rules that govern our workplace were not created to be unfair to women, and the men who continue to live by them do not, for the most part, do so maliciously. They are simply rules from an older time. So the message that we should continue operating within them even as we tout the progress of women at work can sometimes seem like a copout. We’re fighters after all, those of us still left standing. Do you really expect us to just shut up and play along?

Perhaps that is in fact the real wisdom in Sheryl’s message: Only those with power can change the rules, and the best way to gain power is to win the game.

Regardless of how we perceive her message, I believe we owe Sheryl a thank you for showing us that it can be done, no matter what the rules say.

Prerna is Chief Product Officer at Smule. She is also an investor and mentor at 500 Startups. You can follow her @prernagupta.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

Image via ►Pensiero via Compfight cc

Filed under: Business, Entrepreneur, Lifestyle

Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, CEO of LinkedIn? Almost

John Koetsier — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 21:44:22 +0000

Facebook’s chief operating officer was almost LinkedIn’s chief executive officer.

Sheryl Sandberg’s new book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead has a lot of advice for working women, which we’ve previously covered. But according to an excerpt given to the Wall Street Journal, it also reveals some juicy tidbits about her life and career, including that LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman asked her to become LinkedIn’s CEO in 2006.

She passed on the offer:

“In the summer of 2006, a tiny startup called LinkedIn was looking for a new CEO, and Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s founder, reached out to me. I thought it was a great opportunity, and after five years in the same position at Google, I was ready for a new challenge. But the timing was tricky. I was 37 years old and wanted to have a second child. I told Reid the truth: Regrettably, I had to pass. …”

I think we can all agree, however, that given Sandberg’s career at Google and now Facebook, she made the right call. And while LinkedIn is clearly super-successful, very few companies on the planet — IPO or no IPO — are more important, more relevant, and more central to the emerging digital economy than Facebook.

Sandberg is only one of many super-successful women who have started or grown careers at Google only to jump to other Silicon Valley companies. An obvious example is Yahoo CEO and president Marissa Mayer, but a more recent example is Jennifer Dulski, who recently left Google to become president of Change.org.

Sandberg’s book is about women leaning into their careers to be successful, and features advice similar to what she talked about in a TED talk, including:

Sit at the table (Be present and don’t accept subordinate roles.)
Make your partner a real partner (Have or get a husband who helps out a home equally)
Don’t leave until you leave (Don’t emotionally prepare for maternity or other job interruptions by mentally leaving before leaving.)

Image credit: Hubert Burda Media/Flickr

Filed under: Business, Enterprise, Social

Sheryl Sandberg, superhero (and now, author)

John Koetsier — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 21:59:10 +0000

Should we all just bow down to Sheryl Sandberg now? What can this woman not do?

Smart, technical, superrich, twice-successful entrepreneur, powerful, beautiful (fine, call me sexist in the comments), a successful public speaker, a smart dresser: Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg is now, apparently, also an author.

Sandberg has written a book called Lean In, as Kara Swisher reported today, to encourage women to double down on work and career.

She is already one of the most powerful women in technology, having held key roles at Google before joining Facebook to lead monetization efforts. Sandberg currently sits on the board of Facebook — its only female member — and other boards, and she has shown concern in the past over women’s lack of advancement in business.

In a 2010 TED talk, Sandberg talked about three things women need to do to succeed in business:

Sit at the table
(Be present, and don’t accept subordinate roles.)
Make your partner a real partner
(Have or get a husband who helps out at home equally.)
Don’t leave until you leave
(Don’t emotionally prepare for maternity or other job interruptions by mentally leaving before leaving.)

Sandberg has had her own challenges with motherhood and career, as she’s talked about, and the book will presumably deal with some of that in addition to advice for women who want to sit in the corner office.

All of the profits, Sandberg says, will go to women’s charities, and the book will be published in 2013.

And for those who think that she must be busy enough with Facebook’s current monetization and stock value issues, the book was finished before the IPO.

Image credit: Hubert Burda Media/Flickr

Filed under: Business, Media, Social