I devoured the book “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead” by Sheryl Sandberg as soon as it came out in 2013. As a woman in the tail end of Gen x, my childhood environment was one in which I felt utterly free to do, be, or pursue whatever I chose. Permitted I was capable and worked hard I never felt I’d be less able to succeed than a man, as there was a sort of empowering androgyny in the air growing up in the 80s. Of course I didn’t see this as having always been the case, and I felt so thankful. I read extensively and learned about the various women’s movements over history and had a sense of incredible good fortune at living in a world where their achievements granted me such opportunity. For a year after watching the moving HBO film “Iron Jawed Angels” about the women’s’ suffrage movement I teared up every time I thought about the women who marched, who were imprisoned and terrorized in their fight to gain women’s rights. I thought I wasn’t naive, I was well aware that women’s legal right to vote had come as recently as 1920 and that would suggest that equality of opportunity for women was not a long held norm in this country nor had the suffrage movement or 2nd wave feminism fixed all possible challenges that face women in the U.S. But I felt empowered and optimistic.
It was with this sense that I read and adored Lean In. I pursued my goals with hard work a great deal of good fortune and circumstances I was able to advance, to gain amazing and challenging experiences, and to obtain a PhD and in good time a tenure track job in academia in the sciences. I leaned in hard to my career pursuits, and chose a demanding field and job. Then I had my first son in 2016. I leaned in and worked until the day before his birth. After multiple miscarriages and a harrowing emergency C-section and a stint in NICU, we were so incredibly lucky to have a healthy baby boy. I leaned in and did what I thought was needed to keep up even while I was technically cashing out my very few accrued sick days on sick leave, our institution’s simulacrum of a maternity leave. I leaned in and wrote grant proposals at a standing desk with my little guy strapped in to a an ergo baby type carrier as I rocked him to sleep.I taught my classes online in my “absence”. I went back sooner than I should’ve because the recovery time for my emergency C-section was more than the paid sick leave I had. When I went back to work I tried to do all the things I did before while also raising an infant, doing all the scheduling gymnastics necessary to be able to pump every 2-3 hours so he could have breastmilk while at daycare. I pumped at my standing desk while I worked. I did all this while my little guy struggled with GI issues no doctor managed to help us with and thus rarely slept more than 60-90 minutes at a stretch at night and often only slept when he was laying on me. I leaned in despite extreme postpartum anxiety that I could not find help for. Note: someday I want to talk more about this challenging experience with my 1st son and the lack of help we got from medical practitioners. I leaned in to a more than full load of teaching, cranking out grant proposals and planning research projects, mentoring a large roster of grad students, working on all of the things that one accumulate, all of the things that would be tallied and assessed when seeking tenure. And of course I leaned in to things I cared deeply about like advising and mentoring students to help them find and navigate a path for their future.
I leaned in…until I fell. I mean I actually fell. When my son was about 6 months old, at the peak of his GI issues and sleeplessness, I was walking out of my building with my laptop briefcase in hand, on my way to the car to go pick up my son from daycare when I passed out and fell down a full flight of stone stairs at the entrance to our building. Some students ran over to check on me and I quickly assured them I was fine and rushed to the car. Luckily, my laptop was dented but functional; I was also dented but functional, with several baseball size bruises developing on my shins and forearms several hours later. I was physically fine, but I was not, really, fine.
This was just the first 6 months of my first sons life. I have leaned in and fallen hard many times since, after my second son was born. I am well aware that I could be reckoning with much more serious and straining challenges than I did. There are moms out there with impossible situations to reckon with, with health challenges, financial challenges, workplace challenges that I can’t fathom. There are women who have not had the good fortune to have such an opportunity to even lean into! But I can speak best to what I know and perhaps begin to try to help fix what I know and then grow out from there to expand the circle of stories and support. For now, I know, I can see, that something is wrong with just giving women this advice to lean in.
I’ve been pondering this for a while, and I’m sure there is more to it than I have considered and that I can put out there in my “last minute Friday afternoon before i pick up the kiddos” writing session. Here’s what I think might be going wrong, why I and it seems many other women who have tried to lean in have fallen down so hard. I don’t disagree that there is value in the idea of leaning in. I think that the cultural conversation that was prompted by Sandberg’s TED talk and subsequent book was a good and inspiring one. However, at no point in tandem or there after was there a corresponding cultural conversation about what we do to fill the void left when women lean in to their careers. Time, effort, mere presence is a zero sum game. You can only be in one place at a time. You can only spend 24 hours each day. When women lean toward their careers- in the form of more time spent, more cognitive energy, more presence, or whatever the resource may be- they are leaning away from something else. Less time, effort, energy, or presence in another sphere of their life. There was never a cultural conversation about how that void gets filled. There was never a cultural conversation about how men need to lean in to parenting and family management to support women leaning in to careers. There was never a cultural conversation about how institutions could support women leaning in by improving support systems, structure, policies that limited the costs of leaning in to work on other aspects of family life. As as such, I think many women, like me, handled this zero sum dilemma by not sleeping enough, not taking breaks, not taking care of themselves. We leaned in to career AND then, in the absence of any assurance that the void left behind us as we leaned would be filled, we scrambled to also do virtually all the things that women who were stay-at-home moms 50 years ago did, if not more. We leaned in, and exhausted we could not longer hold ourselves up.
I think we need to talk about this openly and realistically not just with women but with all people. I think we need to make an effort to figure out how we can support women who want to lean in to their careers, and how to uplift and respect women who don’t. I think we need to stop selling women advice that doesn’t tell the whole story and stop convincing women to do more, always more and never acknowledging the reality of limited resources like time and attention. I think we need to have more candid, real, cultural conversations about women, parenthood, family and career. What do you think?