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Please watch:
Then, please read these short articles:
https://www.facebook.com/sheryl/posts/10156819553860177 (Links to an external site.)
https://time.com/sheryl-sandberg-option-b/ (Links to an external site.)
Then answer these questions:
Considering what you read for today: Paula England’s arguments in “The Gender Revolution: Uneven and Stalled” and Williams’s arguments in Chapter 3 that the workplace is inherently “gendered” with the “masculine workplace culture” being the norm. Do you think that Sheryl Sandberg adequately addresses the challenges for most women workers, and aspiring women leaders, in her TED Talk “Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders”? What are some factors or variables about the modern workplace that she does not address? Who bears the burden of fixing the problem of there being too few women leaders?
Considering Sandber’g Facebook post 3 years after Lean In and her book Option B (as profiled in the Time article) after her husband’s sudden death, how did those events change her thinking about the material and structural inequalities that exist for many women (that she “got wrong” with Lean In)?
In Lean In, Sandberg’s rhetoric advocated that women do more for themselves to get ahead (e.g. make better individual choices for themselves), and she argued that the problem of women’s lack of leadership was their “lack of ambition” (or their tendencies to not sit at the table, leaving before they leave, and taking their foot off the gas pedal of their careers). How in later writings (Facebook posts, Option B, New York Times article) did she begin to consider the need for public policy solutions and changes to a masculine workplace culture? How do her new solutions address some of what Williams called “our family-hostile public policy?” and how are they different from her perspective in Lean In?
What are your thoughts on the workplace “catty woman” or the “Queen Bee”? Do you think that these “myths” are still perpetuated in the modern workplace? How are they detrimental to women? How do they work toward ensuring that the gender revolution in the workplace remains “uneven and stalled”? How do these stereotypes about women lead to women feeling “pushed” out of the workplace (rather than truly “opting out”?)