Originally published on Medium on August 18, 2018.
I read Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In at the start of my second year as a technical lead and people manager. I thought it was a great, practical guide about how to succeed as a woman leader in business. I knew it was somewhat controversial, but it was not until I was looking at other reviews before writing my own that I realized that many feminists hate Sandberg’s message. This example from the Wikipedia article about the book is representative:
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Susan Faludi argues that self-described feminist Sandberg’s message of women’s workplace empowerment is actually a corporate-backed campaign that encourages women to promote themselves individually as “marketable consumer object[s]” for professional advancement, while discouraging solidarity and downplaying the damaging effects of systemic gender bias felt collectively by women in the workplace.
This is the first time that I experienced the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” standard that successful women — and minorities of all kinds — experience.
To be successful in an area that has traditionally been hostile to a minority often requires working within the dominant culture. Often this means working twice as hard for half the credit. It means ignoring the slights (and often worse) that “everyone” has to put up with and yet somehow come more often to those of us that do not look the part. It means dealing with the fact that leaders are expected to be assertive but assertive women are considered bitches; women must be nice, and nice for a woman means passive. For me — and I have had a thankfully easy time compared to many women — it has meant developing the ability to be what I naturally consider blunt or even brusque to be heard equally. Some people come to believe — incorrectly in my experience — that success requires being to be willing to throw others of your group under the bus as quickly as the dominant culture would be willing to throw them under. Those in the last category are rightly criticized. (Since I opened the post with it, I will note that Lean In does not at all advocate throwing anyone under the bus. Its tone — the tone that made me appreciate the book — is “Yes, the world is going to be against you. Here’s how to succeed despite that.”)
As a consequence of their working within the dominant culture, when someone does experience success they often have it held against them by members of their group. They have betrayed that group because their success required being agreeable to the group in power rather than destroying the very real systemic inequalities which make bowing down before a narrow dominant culture a necessity for success in some environments. Yet at the same time, the lack of representation of the minority in the field which the dominant culture acts as a gatekeeper for is decried.
What this does not recognize is that members of minorities have not thrown off injustice by achieving success. To shift from gender, the domain of my experience, to race, Colin Kaepernick illustrates that speaking as a black athlete puts him back in a position of subordination with threats from on high. Criticisms of Marissa Mayer’s decisions as an executive can be fairly discussed, but she receives much more vocal criticism than comparable male executives, especially for her parenting choices. Minorities who achieve success in dominant cultures which do not value their identity achieve that success only as long as they are willing to leave their identity at the door.
Let me be clear: I want to live in a world where no one has to bow to the dominant paradigm to be successful — or even just get by. I want to do what I can to get us there. And I believe that having some people reach success in today’s world is a necessary (but far far from sufficient) precondition to this happening. Massive culture change is needed, but that change will not happen if the only pressures are from the outside. Inside pressure needs to complement it.
To end on a personal note, I have seen things changing for women in tech and I have hope for the future. When I graduated from college in 2004, women in tech wanted to live in a world where being a woman in tech did not require pushing through artificial barriers that were not put up in front of our male colleagues, but that world seemed remote. Today, there is a sense that we can achieve equity. Because of this, the sense of frustration is more palpable; it is sometimes easier to reconcile yourself to a lack of progress (at least, if you were one of the few who survived) than it is to reconcile yourself to change that seems to move backwards as often as it moves forward. Yet coupled with that sense of frustration is a greater sense of hope. Change is happening, however slowly, however incrementally. Perhaps, maybe, no guarantees we can eventually get there.