There is a lot of discussion of the new book
by the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandbergh. Lean In
is a brief and breezy book that gives advice about leadership and negotiation.
My only comment on the recent discussion is the emphasis on gender at the
expense of everything else. Sandbergh writes from a position at the top of the corporate
hierarchy. Fine. But a woman, or a man, making millions of dollars in
compensation giving us advice while most people are struggling to get by has
its limitations. As a guide to the corporate elite it is useful but since most
of us do not inhabit this rarefied world the advice is limited. As an early
memoir by a successful executive, no doubt with excellent editorial help as
befits a corporate titan, it is acceptable. A guide for other woman, I think
not. And yet much of the discussion is about the book as if it was a guide for
women in the plural, as if the gender category can paper over a variety of
experiences. Gender is entwined with race and class and age and sexual
orientation. In terms of life chances a rich woman is different from a poor
woman, their shared gender separated by a chasm of economic, political and
social difference. The single category of woman is just too broad a
term to stretch over the vast and often deepening fissures of social
difference. Sandberg is a rich white women, not just a woman and while she
shares the same gender as a maid working for minimum wages, their differences
outweigh the singular similarity of gender. And any argument to the contrary is
blather.
There is lot of this type of blather about
single categories, such as race, as if the intersection and combination with
other categories of social difference, such as class and gender and sexual
orientation, are unimportant. The single categories, such as gender or race, do
not trump other forms of difference despite the tendency for movements to
settle on these single issues. The world is more complex and we are more
diverse. Consider Oprah Winfrey, a very, very rich black woman. She is as
similar to Warren Buffet, a very, very rich old white man as she is to someone
who only shares her ethnicity.The blather has a purpose. It is the meat
and drink of aspirational societies because its delusional assumption is that
with hard work, a few tweaks, or perhaps the advice from someone successful, we
could all make it to the very top. Hearing from a rich white women is thus
supposed to give nurture to all women. This aspirational tosh allows an easy
focus on single issues such a gender or race, without locating them in a wider
socio-economic context or inserting them into broader and deeper issues of
power and its distribution. And it has the underlying anti-progressive
assumption that if we have more women as CEOs or more blacks or more gays then
that is social advancement for all women, blacks and gays.
The real issue facing us
is not about the gender of the elite or the race composition of power brokers;
it is about how we transform the very relationship of power. The real struggle
is about extending the rights of full citizenship to as many people, as
possible and extending the limits of this citizenship. It is not about changing
the composition of the boardrooms, it is about making the boardrooms less
powerful.
