“ Lean In blew my mind,” said Katie King, a Chattanooga attorney. When Bloomberg Businessweek revisited Lean In on its fifth-year anniversary, one woman told us she’d never asked for a raise before reading Sandberg.

Bossy, aggressive, intimidatingįrom the beginning Lean In had its critics, but it also resonated with millions of women. All they had to do to succeed was “lean in”: speak up, ask for things, sit at the table – literally, take a seat at the conference table. They needed to ask for raises, try for promotions, and stop “baby-tracking” their careers. The book, co-written by Nell Scovell, had a simple message: working women needed to stop holding themselves back. Lean In was a sensation when it came out, selling 600,000 copies in three months. “There is structural sexism built into the system.” “I don’t subscribe to the ethos that women simply need to work harder to be successful,” says Natasha Lamb, a managing partner at Arjuna Capital, an activist investment firm based in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, who successfully pushed Facebook to release pay gap stats.

In fact, some believe that by focusing on self-empowerment she completely overlooked the forces that continue to keep women from equal pay, reaching positions of power, and equality writ large. Bloombergīut her decade-long track record doesn’t suggest she’s had a meaningful impact on the plight of working women. Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean In, which sold 600,000 copies in three months, resonated with millions of women but also had its critics. “It really feels like a very, very important moment, when I think more focus there would be important to me, personally,” Sandberg told Bloomberg News. Now, as she steps down from a 14-year run as chief operating officer of Facebook, now known as Meta Platforms, Sandberg has said she wants to shift her focus even more toward women’s issues.

Instantly, she became the face of 2010s-era corporate feminism. Sheryl Sandberg gladly embraced that role when she published her 2013 bestseller, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, and founded its eponymous foundation,. High-ranking women in business – because there are so few of them – are often saddled with the unfair expectation that their mere presence in the C-suite will benefit other working women.

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