Facebook's chief feminist 'leans in'

• Facebook COO offers blueprint for women climbing the career ladder
• An unabashedly feminist take on women at work
• Women%27s guide to negotiating a path to leadership

Even before her book's publication, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, has been attacked for urging women to "lean in" to their careers.

Some critics have pilloried her as a multimillionaire elitist whose perspective is irrelevant to most women. Others have pitted her against former State Department official and Princeton professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, who has pointed out the structural barriers to advancement that women still face.

In fact, the differences between the two are more a matter of emphasis than a yawning ideological divide, as Sandberg's book makes clear.

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead is a lucidly written, well-argued and unabashedly feminist take on women and work, replete with examples from the author's life. It draws on the ideas of no less an icon than Gloria Steinem, a Sandberg friend, and on recent research highlighting the double binds women face as they negotiate the corridors of power.

While Sandberg stresses what individual women should do to position themselves for leadership, she is hardly ignorant of the external obstacles they confront.

It is no accident that she begins with a personal story about having to sprint — or, lumber, as she puts it — across a parking lot to get to a client meeting while she was pregnant. Afterward, she asked her bosses at Google, where she was then working, to offer preferred parking for pregnant women. They quickly agreed. "Having one pregnant woman at the top – even one who looked like a whale — made the difference," she writes.

Sandberg's own exceptional rise within the male-dominated tech industry was facilitated by the long-term mentorship of her Harvard professor (and later Harvard president and U.S. Treasury Secretary) Larry Summers. There's some irony here, considering that Summers was labeled sexist for remarks he made as university president about women and science.

Sandberg tells a wonderful anecdote about Summers' mother, Anita, hired as an economist by Standard Oil in 1947 and then told by her boss that he was happy to be getting "the same brains for less money." Ms. Summers' reaction, Sandberg says, was to feel flattered.

Times have changed, Sandberg says — but not enough. "The blunt truth," she writes," is that men still run the world." In the workplace, women confront "blatant and subtle sexism, discrimination, and sexual harassment," as well as a lack of flexibility and difficulty finding mentors.

Sandberg cites a 2011 study by McKinsey & Co. showing that women are promoted based on past accomplishments and men often on potential.

For all this, Sandberg writes, women are complicit in holding themselves back, by internalizing negative messages, lacking self-confidence, lowering their career expectations, and doing more than their share of housework and child care.

And yet, as others — including sociolinguist Deborah Tannen — have argued, women can't simply ape typical male behavior to succeed. Sandberg is savvy about this as well. "Aggressive and hard-charging women violate unwritten rules about acceptable social conduct," she writes.

And while success and likability are linked for men, "when a woman is successful, people of both genders like her less." Hence, one suspects, some of the vitriol directed at Sandberg herself.

Women need to aim high and take risks, Sandberg says, but in a way that doesn't grate on those around them: a tough needle to thread, and perhaps impossible for most of us. Women are still penalized for being self-promotional, for negotiating hard, for being too much like men -- and being stereotypically female and self-abnegating doesn't work either.

Sandberg tries to offer solutions, but they are necessarily imperfect. In negotiations, she suggests, women need to "combine niceness with insistence," taking into account the biases they face. And when they speak out, they need to be "delicately honest," rather than brutally so. Good counsel for men as well.

In the chapter, "Don't Leave Before You Leave," Sandberg says women should avoid backing away from challenges early in their careers because of a desire to have a child in the future. "Don't enter the workforce already looking for the exit," she writes.

In the race to the top, she says, women can benefit from mentors and sponsors; other women — Sandberg is encouraging the formation of "Lean In Circles" for mutual support — and a life partner who "leans in" to home life.

When Sandberg's commuter marriage left her overburdened, her high-powered tech executive husband agreed to geographically curtail his job search in order to share more household duties. Call it luck, or a smart negotiation. In either case, it would be wrong, and antifeminist, to hate her for it.

Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review.