Sheryl Sandberg thinks women are stupid. The former chief operating officer of Meta and the founder of the nonprofit Lean In, based on the ideas in her 2013 book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, is back in the news, this time (again) voicing her disappointment in the fairer sex’s inability to conquer corporate America.
Sandberg has pivoted from her claims that women aren’t fulfilling the DEI prophecy because of a systemic failure in American corporate culture (patriarchy!), to aiming her sites on the manosphere and pushing back on the “tradwives” movement. In a recent LinkedIn post, Sandberg writes:
The problem with the romanticized vision of the tradwife is that it signals to women that to be a good wife, partner, or mother, you have to do it full-time.
This gives working women one more burden to carry on top of everything they already manage: guilt. Arianna Huffington says it best: “As a working mother, it feels like they take the baby out and put the guilt in.” As I told People magazine last week, I’m worried that the glamorization of the tradwife trend risks putting that guilt back into women — guilt that many of us have worked long and hard to shed.
As a full-time working mom of three (4- and 2-year-olds and a one-month-old that I’m holding while writing this essay) who has never taken a maternity leave and has felt the intense pressure of being a good — or at least not so bad — mom, wife, employee, and colleague, Sandberg is partly right about the guilt; she just wants to own all of it.
Twenty-first-century feminists emphasize choice the same way Henry Ford offered color options for the Model-T: You can choose any path, as long as it’s the one prescribed by the Lean In feminists.
It’s been over a decade since Sandberg proclaimed that she does not “believe two countries run by women would go to war. Full stop,” and she’s still making the case that more women in positions of power and influence would make for a better world — especially for women. First, it’s obvious by this statement that Sandberg has never seen an episode of The View, and second, she’s denying an inherent truism of human nature: that the most cruel and unforgiving people toward women are…other women.
Note to my fellow women: Sheryl Sandberg is angry at you for taking her advice and exercising your agency just as readily as any man’s. The trouble is you chose unwisely in the eyes of the pseudo-empowering world of Lean In feminism.
Sometime after Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote her revealing 2012 Atlantic essay, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” (to which Sandberg’s book is a reply), society pivoted from the “Mommy Wars” of the 1990s to flattening the sexes into androgynous groups where there should be no differences in the types of ambitions or motivations between sexes. So, when outcomes are disparate by sex, there must be something wrong with the individual or the system. It couldn’t possibly be because women have a natural tendency to choose maternal roles or prioritize home and child care over professional advancement. Women have been duped again! Don’t you understand that deep down under all that maternal instinct is a girlboss destined for the C-Suite?
In the journal Fairer Disputations, Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes, “Modern feminists’ failure to acknowledge the well-established desire of most women to spend more time mothering and less time working involves no mystique, but an unwillingness to recognize women’s average differences with men. Declining marriage rates, a fertility crisis, and increasing rates of female anxiety and unhappiness are all perpetuated by a hegemonic bill of goods about women’s desire for a functionally androgynous identity.”
Sandberg wants to guilt women into denying their intuition, ironically, something society fully acknowledged with the oft-used phrase “women’s intuition.”
I was a Division I collegiate athlete, a U.S. Marine, and a working professional, all so-called “male-dominated” activities (one might label the “manosphere”). No one told me I was less than; no one challenged my ability based on sex. What I did hear was other women trying to convince me I would fail because the deck was stacked against me, or that if I came to the realization that being a tech overlord wasn’t my true ambition, I was a tool of a sexist system. There is nothing more toxic than a supposed feminist saying you shouldn’t try because you’re set up for failure. That’s nonsense and a lie.
In reality, women need to follow their instinct despite the upside-down, passive-aggressive, pantsuit messaging from their fellow travelers. The real threat to women carving their own paths and finding fulfillment, purpose, and happiness isn’t the patriarchy, the manosphere, or tradwives; it’s women like Sheryl Sandberg who don’t believe average American women have the capacity or mental wherewithal for making the “correct” choice for themselves, their families, or their careers, and who get angry when they don’t want to be Sheryl Sandberg.
That women are exercising real choice and have life ambitions outside the boardroom signals a shift away from the guilt-ridden Lean In feminism lie and shows that we’re not as stupid as Sheryl Sandberg wants us to be.
